ERNEST ' 
 RE NAN 
 
 WILLIAM-BARRY'
 
 
 II. 11. lil..\(.KWlil.L.

 
 LITERARY 
 LIVES 
 
 RDITED BY 
 
 W. ROBERTSON 
 NICOLL 
 
 ERNEST 
 RENAN
 
 AN immense river of oblivion sweeps us onward into a 
 gulf without a name. O abyss, thou art the only 
 God ! The tears of all peoples are tears indeed ; the dreams 
 of all wise men have in them a parcel of the truth. All here 
 below is but symbol and dream. The gods pass away like 
 men ; it would not be well did they last for ever. The faith 
 which we have held ought never to be a chain. We have 
 done our duty by it when we have carefully wrapped it 
 round in the purple shroud wherein the dead gods sleep. 
 
 My life has been such as I desired, such as I conceived to 
 be the best. Had I to live it over again, I should make very 
 little change. On the other hand, I am not much afraid of 
 the future. I shall have my biography and my legend. 
 
 Ernest Renan.
 
 KHNKSr RKNAN. 
 
 ,% 
 
 
 tZ&OV.
 
 ERNEST 
 
 BY WILLIAM 
 
 UN 
 
 BARRY, 
 
 D.D. 
 
 
 LITERARY LIVES 
 
 LONDON: HODDER AND 
 
 STOUGHTON 
 
 MCMV
 
 £r THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN 
 HERALDS OF REVOLT 
 THE PAPAL MONARCHY 
 THE DAYSPRING 
 THE WIZARD'S KNOT 
 ARDEN MASSITER 
 THE TWO STANDARDS 
 THE PLACE OF DREAMS 
 THE NEW ANTIGONE
 
 Contents 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PACE 
 
 The Breton Pe^vsant ...... i 
 
 CHAPTER TI 
 Eclipse of Faith ...... 28 
 
 CHAPTER HI 
 
 The Scholar in Paris . . . • . 65 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 Galilee and Afterwards ..... 98 
 
 •v h
 
 vi Contents 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 PAGE 
 
 In St. Paul's Footsteps . . . . .129 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 Paris and Jerusalem . . . . . .161 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 ECCLESIASTES, OR THE PrEACHER .... 204 
 
 CHAPTER VITI 
 Last Days, Death, and Epitaph . . . 241
 
 Some Leading Dates 
 
 Ernest Renan — 
 
 Born at Treguier ...... 1823 
 
 Student in Paris 1838-1845 
 
 Leaves St. Sulpice ...... 1845 
 
 Mission to Italy 1 849 
 
 Succeeds Augustin Thierry ..... 1856 
 
 Mission to Syria ...... i860 
 
 Chair of Hebrew ...... 1861 
 
 Publishes Life 0/ Jesus 1863 
 
 vii
 
 viii So7ne Leacli?ig Dates 
 
 Travels in Asia Minor and Greece . . . 1865 
 
 St. Paul published 1869 
 
 Resumes Chair of Hebrew ..... 1870 
 
 Antichrist published ...... 1873 
 
 Elected to French Academy .... 1879 
 
 Reminiscences of Touth . . . . .1883 
 
 Philosophic Dramas ...... 1 886 
 
 History of Israel ...... 1888 
 
 Dies 1892 
 
 Monument at Treguier ..... 1903
 
 List of Illustrations 
 
 Ernest Renan, i860, from a Painting by Henry 
 
 Scheffer ..... Front is. 
 
 FACING PAGE 
 
 Treguier . . ... . . . 24 
 
 Ernest Renan's Birthplace at Treguier . . 60 
 
 Portion of a Letter written by Renan in 1838 , 92 
 
 Madame Ernest Renan . . . . .120 
 
 Ernest Renan in his Study . . . -152 
 
 Rosmapamon . . . . . .192 
 
 Ernest Renan, 1892, from a Painting by Bonnat . 232 
 
 The Statue of Ernest Renan at Treguier . . 270
 
 The Publishers zvish to acknowledge their indebted- 
 ness to Madame Psichari and M. Armand-Dayot for 
 kind -permission to include some of the illustrations.
 
 Chapter I 
 
 THE BRETON PEASANT 
 
 BRITTANY, the green and grey land 
 where, according to legend, Merlin 
 the enchanter lies in a magic sleep 
 under the white thorn near Paimpol — this 
 rock-bound, sea-beaten-coast, famous for its 
 storms and its disasters — has given birth to 
 men who, while in language they were French 
 or Latin, kept the Celtic heart, and charmed 
 the world with Celtic eloquence. In the early 
 Middle Ages, Abelard, born at Palais near 
 Nantes in 1079, lived out his romance amid 
 the battle-cries that ushered in, on the site of 
 the Latin Quarter at Paris, a great secular 
 period, the term of which none may foresee. 
 Abelard is the first of modern thinkers, pointing 
 the way through scholastic mazes to Renais- 
 sance and Revolution. He is Yea and Nay, 
 *' Sic et non," alive to both sides of an argu- 
 
 I
 
 R 
 
 enan 
 
 ment, subtle, proud, self-determined, unhappy, 
 and he stores up an inheritance which others 
 turn to better account. He is the most 
 illustrious of Bretons, yet a rebel against Church 
 authority, a strange complex creature, a lover 
 and a penitent, condemned yet devout. He 
 has left a name over which disputes never 
 have ceased, nor will cease. We admire, dis- 
 trust, and pity Abelard. But singular as he 
 remains in his greatness, he has had no successor 
 more closely akin to him than Ernest Renan. 
 
 Passing over seven hundred years we come to 
 the melancholy and splendid Chateaubriand, 
 who first saw the light at St. Malo, created in 
 his Rene the latest type of Hamlet, which 
 Byron reproduced in Childe Harold, and 
 dazzled the opening nineteenth century with 
 a Genius of Christianity, framed in rhetoric 
 of a high order but in somewhat fading colours. 
 To him we may oppose the figure of Lamen- 
 nais, priest, republican, apostate, revolutionary, 
 whose tragic fortunes, gleams of inspiration, 
 and unmanageable temper, set him apart from 
 friends and foes, and whose ideas have won 
 their triumphs while he rests at P^re la Chaise
 
 The Breton Peasant 
 
 in an unknown grave. Had Lamennais not 
 fallen away from Rome, he would have shared 
 with Newman the foremost honours among 
 Churchmen of his day. But, like Abelard, he 
 went down in a crusade on behalf of the fresh 
 thought which was effacing ancient landmarks, 
 confusing minds, and troubling Israel. 
 
 Those who are acquainted with no more 
 than the outlines of Renan's life, will yet be 
 feeling, in what has just been said, how much 
 he owes to Brittany ; how he recalls Abelard 
 by his perpetual balancing of Yea and Nay ; 
 how he manipulates a style as creative as 
 Chateaubriand's, though less brilliant and, in 
 its shades, more exquisite ; how he is, like 
 Lamennais, " un pretre manque " ; and how 
 striking is the parallel which may be drawn by 
 way of contrast between himself and Newman. 
 
 In all these dramas, reaching over hundreds 
 of years, the protagonist, ever in the arena, is 
 the Catholic Church. Loved or hated, that 
 Church, as if it were the Fate in old Greek 
 stories, furnishes the matter, interposes at a 
 given moment, and unbinds the issue which at 
 last it decides. What interest can equal this,
 
 4 Renan 
 
 whether we seek pathos or sublime effects, or 
 the complication of moods and action, or the 
 human touch, transfiguring to lucid and beau- 
 tiful imagery motives, conceptions, resolves, 
 otherwise hidden from our eyes ? From Abe- 
 lard, dying in 1142, down to Renan, whose 
 funeral date is 1892, we reckon seven hundred 
 and fifty years, during which the world's de- 
 bate has gone on without intermission ; and 
 philosophy, science, dogma, have ever met 
 in conflict, while ever aiming at friendship. 
 Who can pretend to be impartial, that is to 
 say, coldly indifferent, when he looks on these 
 things ? Certainly not the present writer. 
 Nevertheless, in describing that career which 
 Renan did not hesitate to qualify as his " charm- 
 ing promenade through the nineteenth cen- 
 tury," I hope not to indulge in caricature, and 
 I shall spare invective. The tale may often 
 be told in its hero's own wcrds, choice and 
 discreetly sarcastic ; sometimes, but rarely, 
 touching ; and if we do not deny ourselves the 
 grain of salt which is to season his Dichtung 
 unci Wahrheity we have his leave in the preface 
 to the Reminiscences^ where he warns us frankly
 
 The Breto7i Peasafit 
 
 that no man is ever quite candid about him- 
 self. 
 
 Ernest Renan was born at Treguier, on Feb- 
 ruary 27, 1823. Treguier is an old decaying 
 town, looking out toward the broad English 
 Channel from its high hill, crowned with a 
 soaring Gothic cathedral of the fourteenth 
 century ; a town of long silent streets bordered 
 with convent walls over which, in summer, the 
 foliage hangs abundantly. Many churches 
 and chapels, each with its legend, give the 
 place, which was long a bishop's See, the air, 
 says Renan, of Benares and Jagatnata. Reli- 
 gion has ever been to the Bretons home and 
 country ; as heathen they believed in Fairy- 
 land ; when they were made Christian, they 
 worshipped their innumerable saints. Tre- 
 guier had its chapel of Saint Yves, the father 
 of orphans, to whom Rcnan's widowed mother 
 dedicated her child ; it had a holy well near 
 Notre Dame du Tromeur ; and a Madonna in 
 painted wood to which the people came on 
 pilgrimage. These memories and customs 
 lasted on, all through the Terror, the wars of 
 Napoleon, the Bourbon Restoration. Such
 
 R 
 
 enan 
 
 dates were accidents in the life of Treguier, 
 which went on dreaming of the fifth century, 
 when its first inhabitants passed over sea from 
 Wales. Its patron was St. Tudwal, whom it 
 inserted in the list of Popes ; was not his real 
 name Pabu Tual ? The Cathedral marked an- 
 other stage. This Breton bishopric was made 
 subject to Tours, not willingly, for it cherished 
 its immemorial freedom. Then, in the seven- 
 teenth century, the bishop's house and the 
 convents were founded. At the Revolution 
 the last bishop fled to England. Napoleon 
 suppressed the See. But when the Bourbons 
 came back, an ecclesiastical school was set up 
 in the old seminary : the convents flourished 
 again ; and in this atmosphere, pious and 
 medieval, but more profoundly Celtic, Renan 
 drew his first breath. 
 
 Looking back over the past at Athens in 
 1865, when the Lije of Jesus had brought him 
 a reputation beyond all he could ever have 
 anticipated, he delights to dwell on his descent 
 from sailors and adventurers in the misty seas 
 of the West. The good old clan which came 
 from Cardigan to Goelo, and still abounds there,
 
 The Bret07i Peasa?2t 
 
 was called after St. Renan or Ronan, a very 
 singular hermit, equally obstinate alive or dead. 
 But he was also proud of his mother's Gascon wit 
 and humour, as accounting for his own. This 
 admirable woman was a small bright figure, 
 speaking Breton excellently well, and her chil- 
 dren — an elder son, Alain, her daughter Hen- 
 riette, and Ernest — learned it in their young 
 days. All Madame Renan's influence made 
 for piety and a loyal attachment to the House 
 of France ; by no means to Louis Philippe, 
 whom she and her friends despised as a traitor 
 that had filched the crown and put it in his 
 pocket. Her kindred were of the middle class, 
 moderately well to do, and Ernest paid them 
 visits in Lannion, which struck him as a very 
 worldly and frivolous place, compared with 
 meditative Treguier. But on the father's side 
 traditions and principles were altogether dif- 
 ferent, and in fact revolutionary. 
 
 Ernest was only five when that father's dead 
 body was found on the sands of Erquy, in 
 August 1828, under circumstances that pointed 
 to suicide. A month earlier the boat of which 
 he was master had come into port at Treguier
 
 8 Renan 
 
 without him. Dreamy and never sanguine, he 
 could make nothing of business, any more than 
 the other Renans, all of whom, said their most 
 famous descendant gaily, were as poor as Job, 
 except one, who accumulated a fortune and got 
 a bad name by trading in negroes. But Cap- 
 tain Renan had seen service under Villaret 
 Joyeuse ; he had fallen into the hands of the 
 English and been compelled to work several 
 years " sur les pontons," an indefinite phrase, 
 which may signify hard labour at Portsmouth 
 or some naval station. Ernest's grandfather, 
 too, was an ardent patriot ; his uncles on that 
 side were even Jacobins. But the patriot 
 grandfather would not buy any of the so-called 
 " national estates," the proceeds of a ruthless 
 confiscation, which were put up for sale in the 
 open market. 
 
 Such conduct implies a rare degree of gener- 
 osity. Whether Catholics or Republicans, his 
 kindred were teaching the lad to sacrifice 
 worldly advantages for the sake of a cause, be 
 it the " Kingdom of God " or the " principles 
 of humanity." That he learned the lesson is 
 undoubted ; we cannot, however, follow his
 
 The Breton Peasant 
 
 course through life without observing in him 
 a sense of the practical and a sagacity in making 
 the most of his opportunities, which he can 
 hardly have derived from his Breton ancestors. 
 His training was to be wholly clerical. In 
 the long silent streets this ugly little lad, square 
 built, with a head too large for his frail body, 
 and with grave dreamy eyes which took in more 
 than they expressed, went to and fro, between 
 the quaint old house where he was born and 
 the college where he learnt his lessons. As a 
 child he was very delicate. His life had hung 
 on a thread, and he tells how the witch-wife 
 Gode — that is to say, Kate — had taken one of 
 his little shirts when he was two months old, 
 gone down to the "sacred spring," and con- 
 jured with it by flinging it out on the waters. 
 If it sank, he would soon die ; if it floated, he 
 was saved. She came back triumphant. " He 
 means to live ! He means to live ! " she 
 cried in ecstasy. The white garment had 
 spread its arms and liown over the wavelets. 
 " From that hour," says Renan, smiling, " I 
 was a favourite with the fairies, and I loved 
 them in turn." We Celts, he goes on to ob-
 
 I o Renan 
 
 serve, shall never build the Parthenon, we 
 have no marble ; but we know how to lay hold 
 of the heart and the soul ; we dip our hands 
 into the very inmost of man, "and we draw them 
 forth, as did the witches in Macbeth^ full 
 of the secrets of infinitude. The old religion, 
 which in the twelfth century came under 
 Norman and Medieval-Roman usages, as in 
 the seventeenth it was guided by the Jesuits, 
 had never lost its more primitive colour among 
 the Bretons, 
 
 These things gave to the incomparable child 
 of genius a rich dim background whereon to 
 embroider his early ambitions and fantasies, and 
 afterwards the whole world, Parisian, Greek, 
 Oriental, which he conquered in thought and 
 travelling. Very poor, cut off apparently from 
 the best of education, he gained in secluded Tre- 
 guier the one thing which our schools cannot 
 yield — a perfect detachment from "das Gemeine 
 was uns alle bandigt." That is ever the condi- 
 tion of poetry and the ideal. In a crowd what 
 room is there for distinction ? But Ernest 
 Renan kept aloof at all times from the crowd, 
 even when as a too indulgent sceptic in his last
 
 The Breton Peasant 1 1 
 
 days he flattered many a national weakness. 
 The Church brought him up. Her serious 
 and disinterested clergy — M. Pasco, M. Du- 
 chene, M. Auffret, and others whom he names 
 affectionately — taught him all they knew. They 
 were scarcely advanced beyond the year 1630 
 in their methods ; to their feeling no 
 religious verse had been written since the 
 younger Racine laid down his pen. They 
 could not bear Lamartine's hymns and 
 elegies, though he too had been moulded by 
 clerics. Victor Hugo was to them unknown, 
 as much as the French of Paris to Chaucer's 
 Prioress in Stratford-atte-Bowe. History they 
 learned in RoUin. On verse-making they 
 looked as a dangerous excitement, not to be 
 encouraged. Hence Renan, like some other 
 great masters of prose — Balzac, George Sand, 
 Pierre Loti — could not manage the French 
 Alexandrine couplet, whereby the world has 
 had no loss that we need lament. Natural 
 science was neglected ; yet we should bear in 
 mind that other ecclesiastics outside Treguier 
 had taken an honourable share in the develop- 
 ment of physics and biology. But these good
 
 1 2 Renan 
 
 Bretons taught mathematics well, and Renan 
 felt a passionate drawing to that discipline, as 
 Newman also did. His comrade, Guyomar, kept 
 pace with him in all his lessons ; and the 
 two boys chalked up problems as they went 
 home, on the great closed gates of the old 
 mansions which they passed by. 
 
 Renan's father had left nothing but debts. 
 His brave mother found it hard to get food and 
 fuel in the winter. His clothes were often 
 patched, his shoes clouted. For the kindest 
 things in life he was indebted to his sister Hen- 
 riette, twelve years older than himself — the 
 real good fairy whose plain features hid an ex- 
 quisite soul, and whose devotion to him knew 
 no bounds. Yet he does not ascribe even to 
 his beloved nurse and playmate the best that 
 was in him. It is of the clergy at Treguier that 
 he writes : " They were my first spiritual 
 teachers, and I owe to them whatever of good 
 there may be in me. ... I have had since 
 masters more brilliant and sagacious ; I have 
 never had any more venerable ; and that 
 accounts for my frequent differences with some 
 of my friends. I have had the happiness of
 
 The Breton Peasant i 3 
 
 knowing absolute virtue ; I understand what 
 faith is ... I feel that my life is always con- 
 trolled by a faith which I possess no longer." 
 
 He calls that old time at college a " precious 
 experience," though he read into it afterwards 
 " saintly illusions " and held it to be a divine 
 deception; He became, as it were, the Or- 
 pheus of a lost Eurydice, the white sea- 
 mew flying round about the ruined church 
 of Saint Michael, which had been struck by 
 lightning, and which the bird strives to enter, 
 while the peasant that goes by murmurs 
 on seeing it, " That is the soul of a priest 
 who wants to say Mass." In vain for him to 
 begin, " I will go unto the altar of God " ; 
 there is no server who may reply, " Unto God 
 that giveth joy to my youth." Pretty enough, 
 and true, and sad ! Yet still more astonishing 
 that Renan, in his thrice-fortunate old age, felt 
 these regrets thus keenly. 
 
 Soldier or sailor, as his father was, he could 
 not be. His shy reserve, his want of physical 
 vigour, his growing thoughtfulness, and, above 
 all, his absorption in books, predestined him for 
 the sanctuary. He spent delightful hours in
 
 1 4 Renan 
 
 the Cathedral ; he loved to fancy himself a 
 priest. Nevertheless, Renan was neither then 
 nor afterwards exactly devout. A pattern 
 scholar, he took prizes and kept the top of his 
 form. But he came late to Mass ; he offered 
 none of those tokens by which the youthful 
 saint is recognizable. His vocation — a solemn 
 word among Catholics, who liken every true 
 priest to the young Samuel — grew out of his 
 love for learning. He did not look forward to 
 missionary or parochial duties ; and when he 
 lightly sketches what his career might have 
 been in the diocese of St. Brieuc, it is as a 
 professor, a vicar-general, and a canon lawyer 
 that he sees himself enjoying an excellent 
 reputation. 
 
 From the first he wanted to know all things. 
 But he was very innocent. The other boys 
 called him " Mademoiselle," and played tricks 
 on him. The girls, he says, found him " quiet 
 and reasonable." He tells the story of one, 
 Noemi, for whom he had a liking, which naturally 
 faded away as he turned towards his predes- 
 tined noviciate. He was learning the classics — 
 a bad sign his uncle Renan, the watchmaker.
 
 The Breton Peasant i 5 
 
 thought it, and warned him not to become 
 what La Fontaine called in the fable an 
 " ass, burdened with Latin." For this proto- 
 type of M. Homais, the bourgeois Voltairian 
 whom we have all laughed over in Madame 
 Bovary, desired Ernest to succeed him at 
 the shop. That, indeed, might have come to 
 pass, had not the good fairy, Henriette, written 
 from Paris in a decisive moment, which brought 
 in its wake the most astonishing change of 
 fortune. 
 
 Henriette, too, was highly endowed. She 
 had learned Latin from an old Ursuline nun ; 
 but her special gift was teaching, and her 
 French in time acquired a purity, strength, 
 and clearness which would have charmed 
 the grand siecle. Her character was cast on 
 antique lines. Resolved to pay her father's 
 debts, she had gone up to Paris in 1835, and 
 endured the solitary griefs and harsh treatment 
 of a governess in fashionable schools. But she 
 made friends, studied sixteen hours a day, and 
 would not despair. At home she had refused 
 an offer of marriage, honourable in itself, but 
 which would have separated her from her
 
 1 6 Renan 
 
 family. Alain, it appears, was settled in Paris. 
 Henriette spoke of her brother Ernest, who 
 had taken all the first prizes in his school at 
 Treguier, to a zealous Catholic physician, M. 
 Descuret ; and he, in turn, brought the list of 
 distinctions (a striking document which is still 
 in existence) under the notice of M. Dupan- 
 loup. 
 
 That celebrated man had achieved fame by 
 securing the reconciliation to the Church — or, 
 as it was termed, the repentance — on his death- 
 bed, of M. le Prince de Talleyrand, formerly 
 Bishop of Autun. As a reward, M. Dupanloup 
 was set over the junior seminary, called St. 
 Nicolas du Chardonnet, in the Rue St. Victor 
 at Paris, which he speedily raised to the first 
 rank in point of numbers and renown. His cry 
 was " Give me scholars " ; rich or poor, it did 
 not matter ; he asked only for talent which 
 he might educate. This Breton peasant's 
 unusual record won his favour immediately. 
 Dupanloup offered him on behalf of M. de 
 Quelen, the archbishop, a clerical scholarship, 
 tenable until Ernest should be twenty-five, on 
 condition that it was accepted without delay.
 
 The Breton Peasant i 7 
 
 Henriette's letter, dated August 31, 1838, told 
 the good news in fervent accents. Her bro- 
 ther must pack up at once, catch the diligence 
 at Guingamp, borrow the necessary funds in 
 her name from his uncle Forestier, and be in 
 Paris on Wednesday evening or Thursday 
 morning. " Tell mother that her boy's future 
 is decided," Henriette wrote exultingly. 
 
 Far more, indeed, was at stake than she or 
 anyone could imagine. This awkward, shy lad, 
 a rustic in manners, poor and proud, was destined 
 to become 'the supreme French writer of his 
 century. He would not be a priest, but an artist 
 of the Renaissance, exercising in all directions an 
 influence which no other man has wielded. 
 The Church was giving every advantage to a 
 son who would turn out her resolute enemy, 
 marked for ever in the legend of his day as 
 having attempted to rewrite the Gospel in 
 secular and dilettante colours. It was the 
 strangest of dramatic sequences in the nine- 
 teenth century which M. Dupanloup had, 
 after this surprising fashion, inaugurated. 
 
 The lad, now in his sixteenth year, was stay- 
 ing at a place near Treguier, when a messenger 
 
 2
 
 1 8 Renan 
 
 brought the happy news. Renan never forgot 
 his walk home across country, under the setting 
 sun, while village sent on to village the chimes 
 of the Angelus, a symbol of that tranquil faith 
 and life from which he was turning to plunge 
 into our modern world. On September 7, 
 1838, he arrived in Paris ; next day the kindly 
 physician who had procured his scholarship 
 took him to St. Nicolas, and on the day after 
 begins his " correspondence while at the semi- 
 nary," by means of which we may fill up and 
 now and then rectify the memories long after- 
 wards written down at Ischia of Renan's 
 critical period. 
 
 Those seven years which followed gave tone 
 and meaning to his whole existence. They ran 
 parallel, we must remember, to a movement at 
 Oxford precisely the reverse of that whereby 
 this lonely French student, sacrificing tradition 
 to what he deemed scientific reason, was to ex- 
 change the Catholic creed for a Pantheism as 
 vague as it was fascinating. Newman ended 
 his seven years of argument and agony by 
 submitting to the ancient Church. Renan, 
 twenty-two years his junior, in contact with
 
 The Breton Peasa7it 19 
 
 a literature and philosophy — the German — 
 which Herder, Kant, Hegel, displayed to 
 his admiring view, but which Oxford had 
 not begun to study, took up the problem 
 at a stage further on. Church and Bible 
 were thrown into the furnace of criticism. 
 They came out wondrously transfigured, 
 no longer supernatural, but mere episodes 
 in a process to be measured by millions 
 of years, during which the blind impulse 
 that Schopenhauer defined as " the v/ill to 
 live " moved hither and thither in quest of 
 satisfaction. Our interest in Renan will al- 
 ways be centred round this time. We know it 
 intimately, thanks to his own letters and to 
 Henriette's replies, every page on both sides 
 remarkable for a choice of words which is en- 
 hanced by elevation of sentiment. Not in any 
 degree picturesque, they are finely drawn, 
 subtle, impassioned, at high moments pathetic. 
 And through them all Madame Veuve Renan 
 appears, a touching figure in her lonesome 
 room at Treguier — the pattern of a devout 
 French mother who, in giving her son to God, 
 had left her home desolate.
 
 2 R 
 
 enan 
 
 Mother and son felt it grievously. Ernest 
 underwent, in his first months at St. Nicolas, 
 a struggle with home-sickness which told upon 
 his lessons. It was a gay and lively house, 
 pervaded by the energy of M. Dupanloup, who, 
 though himself no deeply read classic, proved 
 to be an " incomparable awakener." He spoke 
 to the lads every evening in chapel, set them 
 to strive one against another in themes and 
 declamations, infected them with his own taste 
 for rhetoric, and, on the whole, bore a singular 
 likeness to Victor Cousin, at that time the most 
 brilliant professor in Europe. But to a self- 
 conscious little Breton, with manners no less 
 timid than his appearance was ungainly, St. 
 Nicolas seemed cold and sad. He was always 
 writing home. One of his letters fell under 
 Dupanloup's observation on a day when the 
 places were to be read out. The young recruit 
 was only fifth or sixth in French composition. 
 " Ah," said Dupanloup, who loved his own 
 mother fervently, despite his irregular birth, 
 " if the subject had been that of a letter which 
 I read this morning, Ernest Renan would have 
 been first." From that time he took notice of
 
 T'he Bret07i Peasa^it 2 i 
 
 the lad, and eclipsing his earlier masters b/ 
 talents to which they could never have pre- 
 tended, won his grateful and lasting attach- 
 ment. 
 
 St. Nicolas, founded in the seventeenth 
 century by Adrien de Bourdoise, had been, like 
 the more celebrated St. Sulpice, a training- 
 school for priests. It went down at the Revo- 
 lution, and rose again in a very different form. 
 M. de Quelen, Archbishop of Paris under 
 Louis Philippe until 1840, was a prelate of the 
 ancien regime^ well descended, delicately femi- 
 nine in his looks, who wore diamonds on 
 great days, but was edifying after his manner. 
 He believed in the tone of good society, and 
 Dupanloup had that tone, as well as rarer 
 gifts. Neither the Archbishop nor his -protege 
 was much acquainted with divinity ; the Fa- 
 thers were to them venerable names, the School- 
 men not readable. And Dupanloup, gather- 
 ing his two hundred pupils, lay and clerical, 
 from all sides, while he made the wealthy 
 pay for the destitute in a way that spared the 
 most sensitive feelings, was intent on bringing 
 out poets, literary men, and public speakers.
 
 2 2 R 
 
 enan 
 
 He set little store by erudition. But, 
 observes Renan, the seminary has in France 
 one advantage over the university : it does 
 not burden the aspiring lad with classic 
 dogmas and cast-iron programmes. None 
 who are strangers to modern French life will 
 understand how much is contained in this 
 single sentence. M. Taine has denounced the 
 Chinese inefficiency of a central Board, always 
 behind the times, pedantic and absolute, which 
 sacrifices original genius to red tape, and 
 which creates not inventors or explorers but 
 functionaries. At St. Nicolas the Romantic 
 literature had fair play ; Lamartine and Hugo 
 were subjects of everlasting discussion. The 
 Abbe Richard taught history on the newest 
 principles ; and his successor, though in- 
 capable as a master, read to his class extracts 
 from Michelet, which intoxicated Renan, 
 making him dream at night of that most 
 musical prose. 
 
 Yet we remark two things, not without sig- 
 nificance. The young scholar often failed in 
 his French essay ; and when writing home he 
 kept to the simple, unaffected style which he
 
 The Bretofi Peasant 23 
 
 had brought from Treguier. His own ex- 
 planation of our first point reveals the man ; 
 he " could not feel an interest in what he had 
 not thought out for himself." The second is 
 a mere but striking consequence of the first. 
 Rhetoric seldom thinks for itself : it loves an 
 argument ready made. It flourishes among 
 Southerners ; and though Renan boasted occa- 
 sionally of his Gascon blood, he distrusted 
 the loud, empty eloquence which, in Barere for 
 example, could serve any cause at a moment's 
 warning. For one who, in his finest pages, was 
 hardly ever to be rhetorical, it was a sign of 
 character that he refused to imitate Dupan- 
 loup. Not without meaning, also, does he 
 observe, " At no time in my life was I obedi- 
 ent ; I have been docile and submissive, but 
 always to a spiritual principle, never to co- 
 ercion." There speaks the Celt and the 
 idealist. 
 
 He won no prizes at St. Nicolas for French 
 or Latin verse. But all knowledge came easy 
 to him ; the delicate Breton was never ill, and 
 he showed not the least symptom, then or 
 afterwards, of that French ailment, la nevrose.
 
 2 4 Rena?t 
 
 He had, in fact, a splendid constitution, which 
 long resisted the want of exercise, mental 
 vicissitudes, travels in Eastern climates, and 
 the strain of work that paused for no consider- 
 ation down to his dying day. 
 
 From his correspondence a pleasing yet often 
 melancholy picture might be sketched of the 
 poor clerical student and his widowed mother, 
 while Henriette, earning her bread in Paris on 
 such hard terms, is always the good angel of 
 the story. She went to see him whenever it 
 was allowed. Ernest is full of anxiety about 
 the winter at home ; wood is dear, and a cup 
 of warm coffee, his mother's only gratification, 
 costs money ; but she ought to indulge her- 
 self; His own bourse did not provide him with 
 clothes. There was trouble in getting an 
 overcoat ; and if Henriette were not there to 
 mend his linen, he would have been put to 
 shame, like many another famous youngster 
 in the world's unfeeling annals. He had per- 
 suaded two of his comrades at home to follow 
 his example and enter St. Nicolas. They 
 arrived ; but after a while Guyomar, his best 
 friend, went back to Brittany, and died there
 
 
 F3 
 
 X
 
 The Breton Peasant 25 
 
 of consumption ; Liart could not live in the 
 Parisian air, and he, too, gave up the chances 
 of metropolitan success. Renan held out, won 
 distinctions, was " crowned " in public five 
 times on the same prize day, Henriette looking 
 on, and already cherished in a stubborn silent 
 fashion the resolve to make his way in Paris. 
 Others might serve the Church elsewhere ; he 
 would devote himself to the saving of souls in 
 that fierce Babylon. A sure instinct led him, 
 even so young, towards the path of success and 
 fame. 
 
 He was now seeing history as on an illumi- 
 nated page. He heard the sound of Blanqui's 
 insurrection, May 12, 1839; attended the 
 Archbishop's requiem ; listened to Lacordaire 
 and Ravignan, the first of French pulpit 
 orators ; saw Napoleon's second funeral, on 
 that bleak day in 1840 ; and found a place in 
 Notre Dame, when the Comte de Paris was 
 baptized, May 2, 1841. In the autumn of 
 that year he went home, at the charge of Hen- 
 riette, who was always finding money for every 
 one's wants but her own. In January 1842, 
 he had left St. Nicolas, M. Dupanloup, the
 
 26 R 
 
 enan 
 
 writing of Latin verse and French rhetoric. 
 He was transferred to Issy, the country house 
 where young ecclesiastics learnt logic and 
 metaphysics, took their minor orders, and were 
 prepared to enter the " great seminary " of 
 St. Sulpice. 
 
 An entirely new chapter was opening for 
 him. Henriette, in January 1841, had quitted 
 her ungrateful task of teaching in Paris, and 
 had accepted a position as governess in the 
 household of Count Andrew Zamoyski, a Polish 
 noble. Traversing the Black Forest in deep 
 snow, she had met her new friends at Vienna 
 and gone with them over the Carpathians, to 
 their great house at Clemensoff, where she 
 remained, except when the family was moving 
 about, during the next ten years. Her suffer- 
 ings and solitude had imprinted a stern char- 
 acter on the mind which was from early days 
 disposed to severe thoughts. She was always, 
 perhaps, inclined towards Jansenism. Little by 
 little she had lost confidence in her Church 
 altogether ; but of that momentous change 
 not a syllable had been whispered in her 
 brother's hearing. If he was to go the same
 
 The Breton Peasant 27 
 
 way, he must find it out for himself. So far, 
 caught up in the literary tournaments of his 
 class and in superficial studies, he had taken his 
 vocation more or less for granted. He did not 
 know his own mind. A few months of reading 
 in philosophy were to teach him things he had 
 never contemplated and to bring home to 
 him the full extent of the sacrifice, or the con- 
 secration, demanded of a Catholic priest, once 
 his engagement was taken. The decisive hours 
 of his life were now to follow. What would be 
 the result ?
 
 chapter II 
 
 ECLIPSE OF FAITH 
 
 A LITTLE beyond the last houses of 
 Vaugirard stands, in its own vast and 
 agreeable park, the mansion of Issy, 
 which serves as a preparatory school to St. 
 Sulpice for clerics who are studying their 
 *' philosophy," The building is not remark- 
 able, but its central feature is a pavilion, light 
 and elegant in style, profusely painted inside 
 with Renaissance emblems, which are due to 
 Queen Margot, otherwise Marguerite de Valois, 
 first wife of Henry IV, who resided here from 
 1606 till her death in 1616. After many 
 changes the place was given in 1655 ^^ •'^• 
 Olier, who founded the Sulpician order. This 
 eminent man has never been canonized. He 
 displayed in his own person an austere piety, 
 mingled with raptures and revelations on which 
 he set no great value. The group to which he 
 
 38
 
 Eclipse of Faith 29 
 
 belonged had little in common with St. Francis 
 de Sales or the Company of Jesus ; but in many- 
 ways it reminds us of the early medieval monks, 
 especially by a certain spirit of quietness and 
 freedom which left room for individuals to 
 shape their own course. 
 
 The Sulpicians are not, strictly speaking, a 
 religious order ; they form a congregation of 
 secular priests. That ill-natured historian, the 
 Due de Saint Simon, despised them as much 
 as he hated the Jesuits ; he mocks at their 
 " extreme platitude," their cowardice, and 
 their servile fear of the great Society in its 
 palmy days. He could not understand the 
 motives on which they shrank from the world's 
 notice ; why they dwelt in humble retirement, 
 satisfied to train the clergy who were entrusted 
 to them by the bishops from every part of 
 France. But in Canada they acquired autho- 
 rity and large possessions, which they still 
 retain ; while in the United States they have 
 won a reputation by their success in managing 
 the diocesan seminaries. 
 
 Their fame is, however, collective ; and 
 their publications are, by preference, unsigned.
 
 3 o Renan 
 
 Literature has always been to them the 
 impersonal undertaking which it was to the 
 Benedictines of St. Maur. They looked with 
 apprehension upon the aspiring Dupanloup, 
 whom their silence appeared to censure. 
 It must, indeed, be admitted that from the 
 mixed school of St. Nicolas, despite its attrac- 
 tions, not a candidate was gained for holy 
 orders outside the clerical bourses. St. Sul- 
 pice received students from every French 
 diocese ; it brought them up on a system 
 which had not changed since the days of 
 Bossuet and Olier, and which was as unlike as 
 it well could be to Dupanloup's literary forcing- 
 house. In metaphysics St. Sulpice was Car- 
 tesian ; in Christian evidences it would take 
 no account of Chateaubriand or De Maistre ; 
 it became almost passionate in its opposition 
 to Lamennais, whose apologetics frankly gave 
 up the argument from reason to seek refuge 
 in the " universal testimony " of mankind. 
 But it would not have refused to join hands 
 with Paley, Thomas Reid, and the moderate 
 orthodox, to whom was owing the so-called 
 philosophy of common sense.
 
 Eclipse of Faith 3 i 
 
 The park at Issy, with its painted chapels and 
 images of saints, had already witnessed a dis- 
 cussion of first principles inside that historic 
 arbour in which Bossuet, Fenelon, and the 
 Abbe Tronson drew up their thirty-four 
 articles on " true and false Mysticism " in 1694. 
 It contained several fine pieces of water, which 
 froze in January on the high ground open to- 
 wards the north. Long lines of hornbeam 
 made in it pleasant alleys, under the shade of 
 which young Renan passed his hours, reading, 
 debating with his own mind, drinking deep 
 draughts of philosophic doubt. He was not 
 like Sainte Beuve, tormented by a thirst after 
 the divine life ; but his dawning instinct for 
 art and letters enabled him to find satisfaction 
 in the exercises of the chapel. No sooner did 
 he grasp the import of logic, with its immedi- 
 ate application to problems that he had never 
 before dreamt of, than his whole being under- 
 went a crisis. He had hitherto believed in his 
 teachers as if they were the oracles of God. 
 Now he resolved, in accordance with the 
 maxims of Descartes, to take nothing for cer- 
 tain that was not clear and evident to himself.
 
 32 R 
 
 enan 
 
 Writing to his mother, he describes the place 
 in charming though not vivid colours. He 
 was learning from TeUmaque how to paint 
 landscapes and persons by " moral touches " ; 
 for apart from this human aspect they left him 
 unmoved. Turgenieff, the admirable Russian, 
 whose power was of a different kind, has cen- 
 sured the indefinite outlines which he marked 
 in Kenan's autobiography. But we cannot 
 complain that their disciple fails in sketching 
 his Sulpician masters — M. Gosselin, the polite 
 and learned superior of Issy, who became 
 his spiritual director ; M. Gottofrey, who 
 taught metaphysics while utterly scorning 
 them ; and M. Pinault, professor of mathe- 
 matics, who despised science altogether. M. 
 Pinault led on a band of mystical scholars to 
 high devotion ; he was a sort of Catholic M. 
 Littre, too original for the society into which 
 he had passed from the University. A char- 
 acter yet more strange was Hanique, the lay 
 hall-porter, saintly and simple, recognized as a 
 light in things of the spirit, and consulted by 
 the ardent youths who exalted holiness above 
 knowledge.
 
 Eclipse of Faith 3 3 
 
 Renan took his own way, as he did at all 
 times. He was not a favourite with his 
 companions. M. I'Abbe Cognat, who knew 
 him well at the seminary, and others not 
 unqualified to judge, have recognized his 
 own somewhat too flattering portrait of the 
 reserved and silent rustic — his manners had 
 still much to gain — who would not follow 
 M. Pinault's direction, nor lose faith in rea- 
 son though it confounded him, and whose 
 verdict on the professor of philosophy was the 
 ironical but just remark that in metaphysics 
 you cannot have a master. 
 
 His solitude was unbroken. For two years he 
 never went into Paris. For months he did not 
 stir beyond the park at Issy. Reading grew to 
 be a devouring passion, which absorbed the 
 hours he should have given to exercise. It was 
 the freshman's year with him, full of excitement, 
 unsettling and feverish like any other initiation 
 into the realities of life. Young men commonly 
 pass out of this green sickness to find themselves 
 acquiescing in the beliefs which they were 
 taught as children. With Ernest Renan it 
 was not to be thus. Long before he had taken 
 
 3
 
 3 4 Renan 
 
 up Hebrew or could tell what the critics be- 
 yond Rhine were making of the Bible, he had 
 quitted his hereditary moorings and was drift- 
 ing out to sea. 
 
 From his letters this important conclusion, 
 which seems to be denied in his Reminiscences, 
 may be safely drawn. To his mother, of 
 course, he gives no hint of the doubts that 
 assail him. But they find expression in care- 
 fully chosen language when he is talking on 
 paper with Henriette. In a year, he tells 
 her, (Sept. 15, 1842,) he had learnt as 
 much as the human race learns in a century. 
 The result is chiefly negative, indeed ; but 
 philosophy, as the Germans handle it, com- 
 pels men to see the great problems if it does 
 not answer them ; it teaches us to reason 
 inflexibly and to look at all things without 
 veils. He is enamoured of Kant. If Hen-, 
 riette goes to Konigsberg, let her make a 
 pilgrimage to the old philosopher's tomb. 
 Such was the outcome of Kenan's first year 
 at Issy. 
 
 While he was losing his way in this dark 
 forest of speculation, poverty kept close at his
 
 Eclipse of Faith 3 5 
 
 heels. He had no^money to buy German 
 grammars ; he could win acquaintance with 
 Goethe and Schiller only by using a fellow- 
 student's volumes. His clerical attire gave 
 him much concern ; not because it was a mark 
 of the calling which he had begun to think 
 unsuited to his talents and temperament, but 
 because the single cassock, worn every day, 
 showed too many patches. If he did not know 
 where to find the fifteen or twenty francs 
 required for his Teutonic dictionary and its 
 auxiliary tomes, how could he secure the sixty- 
 five which a decent soutane cost in those days ? 
 A correspondence, touching and anxious, 
 passed between him and the good mother away 
 in Brittany, on this matter of Ernest's wardrobe. 
 Henriette, in her grand but forlorn castle, 
 among the far-off Polish woods, sent what 
 means were at command ; but we read with 
 sympathy and sadness of Madame Veuve 
 Renan putting together all the silver she had 
 and dispatching it to Issy in April 1843. It 
 arrived at a critical moment. His superiors 
 had invited Renan to receive the tonsure, 
 which would have given him the rights and
 
 3 6 Renan 
 
 status of a cleric, though binding him to no 
 farther step. Was it possible for him with a 
 good conscience to accept ? The question 
 had a twofold bearing. His mother would 
 suppose that, if he asked for delay, some 
 natural feelings were at work within him. 
 But, however that might be, the trouble was 
 of another sort, and he knew it. His faith in 
 Revelation had undergone a great shock. 
 
 Nothing is more characteristic in this lad of 
 twenty than his discreet way of handling the 
 persons with whom he came in contact. Smil- 
 ingly, the later Renan ascribes it to his Jesuit 
 politeness and clerical reserve. But there was 
 another explanation. As a child he had wit- 
 nessed how frail is the security of the very 
 poor ; he was alarmed when he thought of the 
 wild waters raging outside that peaceful haven 
 in which he lay sheltered ; and he dreaded to 
 make shipwreck of his existence. He was never 
 insincere ; but he acted with a peasant's wari- 
 ness, finely touched by genius, moulding itself 
 in every phrase and at each conjuncture on 
 the qualities of those who could help or injure 
 him. Not even with Henriette was he com-
 
 Eclipse of Faith 37 
 
 pletely frank at the present st«ge. To his 
 mother he speaks as if her advice would be 
 almost decisive. She, poor woman, replies, 
 " Ernest, my dear Ernest, obey the inspira- 
 tions of grace." She would never be a hin- 
 drance to him. Her letters are beautiful in 
 their warmth and simplicity. M. Gosselin 
 decides that he ought to take the step. On 
 May 12, 1843, he consents ; but a warning 
 word falls from his pen : he is " ready for the 
 sacrifice," — we think of Racine's l-phigenie ; — 
 however, he ends by assuring Mme. Renan 
 that calm has returned after the storm. 
 
 In three weeks all is changed. His letter of 
 consent, he writes home on June 6, was a 
 " fatal " one ; at the last moment he has 
 drawn back. The page that follows is cer- 
 tainly the most moving and sincere that he 
 ever achieved. It is one long cry of agony 
 lest his mother should doubt the affection he 
 bore her, and refuse to bless him, to pardon 
 him ; yet how, he reiterates passionately, could 
 he be unfaithful to the voice of conscience ? 
 He meant every word of all this ; but only an 
 acknowledgment which would have terrified
 
 3 8 Renan 
 
 the unhappy woman, as if it were sacrilege, 
 could henceforth clear up the situation. 
 And he felt incapable of making it. Between 
 these two hearts a dreadful ambiguity had 
 fallen like a veil. M. Gosselin added a few 
 lines, approving of Ernest's hesitation. The 
 widow answered with infinite tenderness. She 
 was resigned but not enlightened. And so the 
 first crisis came to an end. 
 
 Excellent M. Gosselin, learned in ancient 
 lore, but not in the secrets of the modern 
 spirit ! His penitent might endeavour to 
 lay bare his heart ; it was a sealed book 
 to the director. M. Gottofrey, a young 
 priest of twenty-eight, with clear English 
 features — he was not altogether French — 
 sensitive and acute, perceived in this eternal 
 reading and sharp argumentation of Renan 
 symptoms which had escaped all others. In 
 a scholastic tournament the young sceptic had 
 broken a lance too vigorously against received 
 views. His master ended the tilting-match 
 at once, took him aside, and after enlarging on 
 the perils of overmuch study, the futility of 
 mere science, and the arrogance of Rational-
 
 Eclipse of Faith 3 9 
 
 ism, cried in a passionate voice, "You are no 
 Christian ! " Renan was thunderstruck. He 
 lay awake all night, and the terrible words 
 echoed around him ; they had gone right 
 home. M. Gosselin did his best to comfort 
 the troubled youth. M. Manier, sensible and 
 moderate, advised him not to get lost in 
 details ; the Christian religion should be 
 judged as a whole. This amiable man seems 
 to have felt that Ernest had no vocation to the 
 priesthood ; for he was the first to hint that 
 in the Ecole Normale his gifts as a teacher 
 might be employed to edification. 
 
 This episode we have related at some length 
 as offering a genuine clue to events which 
 were afterwards thrown out of perspective 
 by Kenan's Oriental studies. His faith was 
 eclipsed, and in fact all but extinguished, by 
 the new view in philosophy which he was de- 
 riving partly from Malebranche and yet more 
 from what he could ascertain of German meta- 
 physics. Though he made his own Descartes' 
 abstract and inflexible rule of evidence, — clear 
 ideas, — the sovereign conception to which he 
 was yielding is rather a tendency than a for-
 
 40 Rena7i 
 
 mula. Science, he felt, was the only certain 
 truth ; everything else an hypothesis or a 
 dream. By pure physical induction, founded 
 on experience, the world might be interpreted 
 and subdued, or else not at all. 
 
 Such is the language of Bacon ; and Male- 
 branche added that in the order of facts 
 no special interpositions of the Divine 
 Will are to be allowed. In other words, 
 general laws must be identified with God's 
 Providence. This recondite axiom, to which 
 Malebranche gave an orthodox meaning, 
 appears again and again in Kenan's treatises ; 
 we may term it his great first truth, never 
 proved but assumed as undeniable. Followed 
 out to its consequences, it seemed to make the 
 name and idea of Deity superfluous. The order 
 of facts is sufficient for itself ; what more do 
 we want ? Miracle and revelation cannot be 
 admitted, since they would break the supreme, 
 all-encompassing law, and disclose personality 
 other than our own in the universe. Thus 
 Renan argued, substituting an ideal system for 
 the living God. From this ground he never re- 
 treated and never advanced. Only a year or two
 
 Eclipse of Faith 41 
 
 went by before he came to realize, and joyfully 
 to maintain, the principle of scientific Atheism, 
 which he was now unconsciously making his 
 own. We ought, nevertheless, to bear in 
 mind that philosophers of schools so different 
 as were Leibnitz and Stuart Mill, would not 
 have allowed his reasoning. To quote only 
 the latter : " Science," observes Mill, " con- 
 tains nothing repugnant to the supposition 
 that every event which takes place results from 
 a specific volition of the presiding Power, pro- 
 vided that this Power adheres in its particular 
 volitions to general laws laid down by itself." 
 
 But there was nothing more distasteful to 
 this fluctuating elusive temper than statements 
 he could not recall. Though science had be- 
 come his only source of truth, he manipulated 
 its assumptions with a poet's freedom ; when 
 least original in matter, he was always himself 
 in manner. We can never mistake a page 
 written by him, even at this youthful 
 stage, for any other man's ; it is always 
 classical in expression, tinged with subdued 
 light as in a dream, self-controlled, and, 
 even where it seems agitated, imperturbable.
 
 4 2 Renan 
 
 Renan was kind-hearted but not passionate ; 
 he could scarcely endure the soldier's trade, 
 which courted, as well as inflicted, wounds and 
 slaughter. He sought no authority, felt no 
 enthusiasm for any propaganda, did all he knew 
 to make his vision achromatic ; then he sat 
 down by the side of the process, watching 
 how it would turn out. 
 
 Life thus became an experiment in chemis- 
 try, the will counting as a cipher, to be elimin- 
 ated before anything was done. But while 
 his conceit of himself as a purely reasoning 
 machine proved fatal to Kenan's Christianity, 
 his imagination took fire at the mystic spring 
 of German romance. For it would be the 
 easiest matter in the world to show that Kant, 
 but much more Fichte and Hegel, had but 
 thrown into severe logical forms the old Pan- 
 theism, or mystery of the All and One, which 
 colours every Teutonic writer of name, from 
 Eckhardt and Behmen to Angelus Silesius. 
 Strictly-measuring science did not invent it, 
 and cannot be charged with it. The Faust 
 legend, which even now captivated Renan, is 
 poetry, not experiment, a flower of the fancy
 
 Eclipse of Faith 43 
 
 which never blossomed out of modern testing- 
 tubes. That which tempts the physical ex- 
 plorer to disbelieve in God, is his own absorp- 
 tion in disclosures where personality does not 
 count. Whether we may deal after this 
 method with religion is, to say the least, a 
 problem ; all men except an inconsiderable 
 few have until now decided against it, or have 
 taken their whole nature, moral and mental, 
 as a guide to the divine. 
 
 And our young scholar did that, too. The 
 flash of lightning, he says, came and went 
 again, leaving him unaffected. He decided on 
 entering St. Sulpice. Henriette had for- 
 warded by his brother Alain five hundred and 
 fifty francs to defray his holiday at home and 
 the cost of new clothes. He spent a happy two 
 months in Brittany, and, on October 13, 1843, 
 took up his abode in the gaunt barrack-like 
 building which occupies the site of M. Olicr's 
 seminary. Within, all things were as that 
 self-denying founder had left them. M. Gar- 
 nier, the superior-general, was upwards of 
 eighty-four. He had known M. Emery, 
 Napoleon's favourite ; he spoke of " Monsieur
 
 44 Renan 
 
 Bossuet " and " Monsieur Fenelon," as if the 
 last of the Doctors had been calling on him 
 yesterday. M. Hugon had served as acolyte 
 when Talleyrand was consecrated in 1788, and 
 the Saturday after had accused himself in 
 confession of " rash judgment concerning the 
 piety of a holy bishop." For M. d'Autun 
 had behaved, during the ceremony, with scant 
 reverence. 
 
 These excellent men offered a contrast to 
 the raptures and singularities of M. Pinault 
 and the other " saints " at Issy. They were 
 neither mystics nor metaphysicians. M. Gar- 
 nier, an Oriental scholar of enormous learning, 
 had written cahiers, or lectures, sound on points 
 of language, but untouched by modern critic- 
 ism. He did not teach now ; his pupil and 
 successor was a tiny Breton, M. Le Hir. This 
 orthodox luminary, who died in 1868 on the eve 
 of the Vatican Council, to which he had been 
 invited, knew the latest opinions at Tubingen, 
 had examined the Leben Jesu of David Fred- 
 erick Strauss, and, according to Renan, was 
 perfectly candid in his quotations, while re- 
 maining as orthodox as ever. A saint and a
 
 Eclipse of Faith 45 
 
 savant^ M. Le Hir could appropriate from 
 Gesenius or Ewald whatever he deemed to be 
 not incompatible with his creed. But in ques- 
 tions of divinity other masters ruled over him, 
 German Catholics illustrious at that time, such 
 as Mohler and the rising school of Munich. He 
 had passed beyond the " old French Scholas- 
 ticism," we are told — a system which Renan 
 took for the one and only standard of belief, 
 with consequences disastrous to him as to it. 
 
 This Gallican school, it must be remarked, 
 has played in modern Catholic movements a 
 part not unlike that of Calvinism elsewhere ; 
 by its excessive and forbidding formulas it has 
 called out a reaction not less exaggerated, 
 tending on the one side to infidelity, on the 
 other to superstition. Its fatal defect was 
 the severance between dogma and history. It 
 knew nothing of development. It reduced 
 Church and Bible to a code in which at the 
 close of propositions, often debatable, still 
 oftener not scaled with supreme authority, 
 and detached from the living context in which 
 alone their importance could be estimated, 
 the formula " Est de fide " (it is matter of
 
 46 Ren an 
 
 faith) appeared with a frequency as great as 
 that of the death-penalty in secular enact- 
 ments. French divines were narrow, forensic, 
 curiously ignorant of the laws upon which 
 ecclesiastical growth had gone forward. Time 
 and change they did not allow among their 
 categories ; and they assumed that all men, 
 everywhere, moved on the same level of under- 
 standing. When Ernest Renan brought his 
 new idea of science face to face with their old 
 theology, a conflict was inevitable and speedily 
 broke out. 
 
 At St. Sulpice the rule of freedom prevailed 
 to a degree which contrasted singularly with 
 Napoleon's iron-bound institutions ; it was a 
 house founded rather on the old independent 
 University of the Middle Ages than on the 
 military code which reigns supreme over all 
 State-schools in France. A young man, left 
 to his own devices, might pass years without 
 receiving direction from his superiors ; the 
 machine went on of itself, and there seems to 
 have existed no es-pionage in the establishment 
 at Paris. On the other hand, a certain coldness 
 dwelt in the atmosphere ; friendships did not
 
 Rclipse of Faith 47 
 
 easily spring up among strangers brought to- 
 gether as in an hostelry from the four corners 
 of the land. Renan was more lonely than ever. 
 During his two years of residence he lived as a 
 hermit in the great city. Acquaintance he 
 had scarcely any at all. Once a week he 
 trudged along the Rue Vaugirard with his 
 companions to spend an afternoon at Issy, 
 according to the good old monastic rule which 
 is observed by colleges abroad, of giving the 
 scholars a day's villegiatura by way of relief 
 from the city air. He did little else than read, 
 reflect, write home, and fix his mental attitude 
 on the problems of Christian history which 
 were now troubling him. From the abstract 
 discussions of first principles he had advanced 
 into a thicket where innumerable questions 
 of fact solicited his attention. Yet he yielded 
 so far as to accept the tonsure at Christmas 
 1843 from Mgr. Affre, Archbishop of Paris, 
 who was martyred on the barricades five years 
 later. His director had taken the responsibility 
 of a step which appeared only becoming if 
 Renan was to continue his studies at the 
 Church's expense. Minor orders followed on
 
 4 8 Renan 
 
 June 5, 1844. Madame Renan felt supremely 
 happy. But her son was approaching a de- 
 cisive term — the subdiaconate — which would 
 have bound him as by vow to a single life and 
 permitted no turning back again. To faith 
 all things are possible ; how if he had already 
 made shipwreck of his faith ? 
 
 What is peculiar in this young man's falling 
 away from a creed so venerable and majestic, 
 is the silence, the utter solitude, in which he 
 undid every link of the golden chain. Others 
 as gifted as he went over to modern ideas, but 
 on crowded paths and with loud acclaim. 
 Victor Hugo, George Sand, Lamennais, drew 
 all eyes upon their defection. Alfred de 
 Musset, the " son of his century," told the 
 secret of many a French lad when he wrote : 
 " In my young days, innocent as I was and 
 simple, vice came before me as a world admir- 
 able and immense. The moment I could, I 
 plunged into it with delight." In lycees 
 beyond counting, the tone had been to dis- 
 believe in God, hate Christ, and practise the 
 forbidden. But while from such a discipline 
 Lacordaire came out to be champion of a
 
 Rclipse of Faith 49 
 
 despised religion, this other lonely youth, 
 modest, edifying, submissive to rule, could not 
 find in his Christian bringing up any motives 
 that would countervail the objections of un- 
 believers. 
 
 He disliked Voltaire, then and always. 
 He felt a strong repugnance to the campaign 
 which Michelet and Edgar Quinet, renowned 
 University professors, were directing in those 
 years against the Catholic Church. But he 
 felt an invincible prejudice which would not 
 suffer him to admit Revelation as a fact, or 
 miracles as probable ; and thus in details he 
 was at one with Voltaire and the Encyclopedia. 
 Antecedent presumptions, trust in a good 
 God, which the devout have relied upon, and 
 to which Newman ascribed a weight only to 
 be put aside by self-contradiction in the mes- 
 sage or impossibility in its announcements, 
 were made by Renan, somewhat after the 
 fashion of Hume, reasons for doubting. He 
 demanded proof such as might satisfy a board 
 of physicians and which amounted to ocular 
 demonstration. When that was not forth- 
 coming, he renounced the Gospel. 
 
 4
 
 5 o Renan 
 
 These thoughts, which float up slowly to 
 the surface of his correspondence, filled his 
 mind between October 1844, when he 
 returned from vacation, and the conclusive 
 moment a year later that saw him leaving 
 St. Sulpice. " Terrible doubts " had, indeed, 
 assailed him as he went up to the altar and was 
 repeating the words of the Psalm, " The Lord 
 is the portion of mine inheritance," while the 
 Archbishop clipped his hair in token of that 
 dedication. He put them from him, but they 
 were not silenced. Reason, he learned in St. 
 Thomas Aquinas, had its claims ; it must 
 prove the credibility of Revelation and dis- 
 cover grounds for submitting to the Church. 
 But he found in the medieval system a 
 strange likeness to its vast cathedrals. Therein 
 he beheld " grandeur, wide and empty 
 spaces, but nothing solid." What were its 
 arguments ? He answered, " triumphant 
 syllogisms built on the void." What was its 
 fatal defect ? Surely the " want of his- 
 torical criticism due to the confounding of 
 dates and environment." He was mastering 
 Hebrew and applying his new-found know-
 
 Eclipse of Faith 5 i 
 
 ledge to the Bible-narratives, not in the least 
 as an original student, but with ready acquies- 
 cence in the methods of his German text- 
 books. Under that light the supernatural 
 faded away ; every form of Christian dogma 
 perished ; of religion itself nothing was left 
 save some scattered moral elements, without 
 transcendent source, or divine sanction, or 
 scope beyond^this world. The critic stood 
 aloft on a heap of ruins. In the endeavour 
 to find out why he believed, he had ceased to 
 believe in anything. 
 
 Now, then, Renan looked about for an issue 
 which would take him without observation from 
 one camp to another. He had got leave to 
 attend the lectures of M. de Quatremere, at 
 the College de France, to his mother's alarm 
 but his own gratification. A sign of the 
 coming tempest falls on his page ; he has no 
 desire to begin reciting his Breviary, and 
 therefore will not be a subdeacon yet. We 
 turn to the correspondence with his sister, and 
 find him a little more open. He had called 
 the tonsure an " immolation," which must 
 have awakened in Hcnriette the feeling that
 
 5 2 Renan 
 
 Ernest had confidences to make, if she would 
 but encourage him. Two years previously, 
 in March 1843, she had written, " I blame 
 myself not seldom for searching into your 
 most intimate thoughts, and leading you to 
 search ; but how can I conceal what is in 
 my heart ? " The last months at Issy, she 
 is now told, in a letter dated April 16, 
 1844, were vexed by unkindness from his 
 companions. He dislikes the clerical pro- 
 fession ; he is not of a temper to live with 
 common and intriguing spirits. M. Dupan- 
 loup has offered him a post in St. Nicolas ; 
 but " every one knows what a masterful man 
 Dupanloup is." He could, indeed, join the 
 Sulpicians, and they would welcome so success- 
 ful a scholar ; but he prefers a solitary and 
 private life, independence if possible, and the 
 means of research to be obtained in Paris 
 alone. What does Henriette advise ? 
 
 Among these considerations one which took 
 from them all significance had found expression. 
 " I have never hesitated," says the young man, 
 " except as desiring to know where the truth 
 was, or whether it commanded that I should
 
 Ec/ipse of Faith 53 
 
 serve it in the Church, notwithstanding the 
 human difficulties which I could not hide from 
 myself. But, whether I embraced the clerical 
 state or not, — I will say more — let my senti- 
 ments be what they might concerning the 
 religion in which I believed that I had found 
 the truth — a life serious and retired, far from 
 superfluities and pleasures, would have deter- 
 mined my choice ; and that is what I pro- 
 mised " — on taking the tonsure. He adds 
 prophetically, " Should I ever become a vain 
 and futile creature, attached to the despicable 
 rewards of a day, or to an opinion more 
 wretched still (I do not speak of glory, which 
 is no vanity if we can wait for it), then I should 
 hold that I had been faithless to my engage- 
 
 ment." 
 
 Henriette had thrown out a hope of some 
 travelling tutorship in Germany. It would 
 give him a respite, should nothing better fall 
 in his way. But she was emphatically against 
 his entering St. Nicolas or joining St. Sulpice. 
 And he must have time. With a generosity 
 that her brother could never forget, she 
 promised him a year — two years, if need be
 
 5 4 Renan 
 
 — of freedom at her own cost ; he should 
 see a little of the world ; and if he gave up 
 the priesthood, there was no dishonour m 
 obeying a sensitive conscience. Her letter of 
 February 28, 1845, in which these plans are 
 debated, is a model of passionate but restrained 
 eloquence, not stirring the deep chord of 
 doubt by so much as a finger-tip, but insist- 
 ing that he cannot act until he has arrived at 
 a " clear and individual decision." Unlike 
 Ernest, she knew her own mind, while he could 
 perceive reasons on both sides and was " cruelly 
 perplexed." 
 
 His answer, on April 11, 1845, is, at 
 last, candid. " If the end of man were joy," 
 he says finely, " life would be intolerable to 
 those who are denied it ; but when we have 
 fixed our term in a higher world we are less 
 troubled by what passes below." Then a 
 note is sounded which was to echo by and by 
 in his most famous volume, " I have comforted 
 myself as one that suffers for conscience' sake 
 and for virtue. The thought of that Jesus in 
 the Gospel, so pure, fair, and calm, so little 
 understood by those who worship Him, has
 
 Eclipse of Faith 5 5 
 
 been above all a wonderful support to me.'* 
 We are put in mind of George Eliot translating 
 with tears, before the crucifix, from the Lehen 
 Jesu, which was to make such consoling 
 thoughts impossible for a great and unhappy- 
 multitude. Renan goes on, " I don't think 
 that I ever told you the real motives ... I 
 will tell you now. Take it in a single word : 
 I do not believe enough." The Catholic 
 Church was once to him the absolute truth. 
 Could it be so still, he would devote himself 
 to it. But reason is awake ; it puts in its 
 claim, and the absolute has vanished. Catho- 
 licism holds him no more. 
 
 " I shall love it, I shall admire it always," 
 he exclaims ; " it has cherished and given joy 
 to my childhood ; it has made me what I am ; 
 its morality (I mean that of the Gospel) shall 
 ever be my rule ; I shall ever have in aversion 
 the sophists that assail it with slander and bad 
 faith ; they comprehend it even less than others 
 who receive it with closed eyes. Jesus, above 
 all, shall be my God. But when we come down 
 from this pure Christianity . . . forgive me, 
 Henricttc — I do not cling to these thoughts,
 
 5 6 Re?tan 
 
 but I doubt ; and it does not depend on me 
 to see otherwise than I do see. . . . That is 
 the only cause which keeps me from being a 
 priest." 
 
 Not celibacy, then, but the sagrifizio 
 d'mtelletto, as Cognat truly remarks, was the 
 spectre before whose presence Renan drew 
 back terrified. V e must even go beyond this, 
 and assert in him a dislike of all affirmations 
 not compelled by evidence as of the sun at 
 noonday. The priesthood was a lifelong 
 affirmation ; he desired, at most, only such 
 engagements as might be laid aside when he 
 suspected their hollowness ; and an instructive 
 parallel opens between this manner of binding 
 oneself to truth and the so-called Free Love 
 which in George Sand's best-known period 
 struck the keynote of her novels. 
 
 But the same thing meets us everywhere 
 in modern life and literature. The Zeitgeist, 
 a prisoner of time, shudders at " the constant 
 service of the antique world," whether it 
 was loyal to God or man. That a rustic with- 
 out experience, dazzled by abstract reasoning 
 on all sides of him, should not have seen
 
 Eclipse of Faith 57 
 
 the emptiness of such time-serving, may- 
 be pardonable. His masters, devout but 
 little versed in that science which F. von 
 Schlegel has well termed the philosophy of 
 life, could neither comprehend nor answer 
 him. Their apologetics were exhausted. As 
 for the splendid and vital fact of historic 
 religion, from which the divine personality 
 of Jesus could be torn only to deny Him 
 in the end, as Unitarians must do, Renan 
 possessed no light in himself whereby to discern 
 its value. He had acted and suffered too 
 little ; he had been dwelling not in the dark, 
 but in shadowland, too long, for even a genius 
 like his to measure the reality of things. And 
 Henriette, who had more to undergo, never 
 fell into the mood of artistic trifling which at 
 length absorbed all that was austere and fine 
 in her brother's character. 
 
 This judgment is not simply mine. It has 
 been uttered by men as unlike one another as 
 Tholuck and M. Seailles, the latter of whom 
 signalizes this period in Rcnan's life as heroic. 
 To go on with our story. Henriette, we may 
 surmise, had been waiting for this confession.
 
 5 8 Renan 
 
 She replied, June i, 1845, "I understand; I 
 sympathize." She had written to Vienna, and 
 taken steps to get him a tutorship ; but what- 
 ever came of them, she adds, " when certain 
 ideas have been ventilated, they leave their 
 trace. You are moving on a fresh path." 
 Her counsel would be to give up St. Sulpice, 
 continue the study of Eastern languages under 
 M. de Quatremere, and fix himself in Paris. 
 A young man could live on twelve hundred 
 francs a year ; she will find them for Ernest, 
 whose future is her chief concern. But their 
 mother ? Henriette was for plain-dealing ; 
 not so this apprehensive and less daring spirit, 
 who could not face the tragedy which seemed 
 imminent. The formidable secret had 
 been kept between them. He now talked of 
 shaking off a burden, the clerical state, which 
 destiny had laid upon him, and of sacrificing 
 all to duty. Could he not, however, take his 
 degree and prepare for the Ecole Normale ? 
 But he must surely wait till October ; he must 
 come back to St. Sulpice. He was then writ- 
 ing two days before the last vacation which 
 he intended to pass as a cleric in Brittany.
 
 Eclipse of Faith 59 
 
 His sister, addressing him by means of a 
 friend, so as to escape Madame Kenan's 
 observation, did not wholly approve. Let 
 him return to Paris in lay attire, take a lodging, 
 and have done with the Seminary. Alain, 
 who lived at St. Malo, would procure what 
 was needful. When she wrote in an open 
 letter, " Take your degree," such would be its 
 real meaning. 
 
 The poor mother looked on all this while, 
 with distress and growing perplexity. She 
 felt that her boy did not lay bare his heart to 
 her as of old. One day, as he was reading by 
 her side, she snatched the book out of his hand 
 with an exclamation, " Ah, Ernest, your ideas 
 will make them fling you on the pavement ! " 
 It was her continual but hitherto unspoken 
 dread. She recited instances ; the lot of a 
 discarded cleric was, indeed, too often miser- 
 able. But they talked of the journey over the 
 Rhine, which never came to pass in the way 
 she dreamt. Ernest felt that he could not 
 throw off the cassock. He was in extreme 
 agitation, and Hcnriette, thinking him irre- 
 solute, rebuked his want of courage in a
 
 6 o Renan 
 
 letter dated October lo, 1845, on the eve of 
 her departure for Italy with the Zamoyski. 
 By that time all was over, and Renan had 
 left the Catholic Church. 
 
 His resolution was not taken until the clos- 
 ing days of September. To his dear Breton 
 masters he could not enter upon questions 
 which he decided by weighing evidence in 
 critical scales, and which they forestalled by 
 the authority of tradition. As little would 
 his mother have believed that he was giving 
 up religion because, according to some Ger- 
 man expositors, the Messianic interpretation 
 of the Psalms was unfounded, or Gesenius 
 appeared to him a better judge of what Isaiah 
 meant than St. Thomas Aquinas had been. 
 Why, it may be asked, did Renan seek no 
 alternative in Liberal or Unitarian views ? 
 At home he gave up receiving the Sacraments. 
 He meditated on the large horizons which 
 Herder especially opened before his enchanted 
 gaze. Might he not be, then, as Herder was, an 
 enlightened modern while remaining a Chris- 
 tian minister ? During these two months he 
 felt like a Protestant. But logic triumphed.
 
 ERNEST RENAN's BIRTIU'LACK AT TR£GUIER.
 
 Rclipse of Faith 6 1 
 
 A secret voice whispered in his ear, " You are 
 no longer a Catholic ; your soutane is a 
 falsehood ; take it off." 
 
 On the other hand, he was no professor at 
 Halle or Tubingen ; to the French Huguenot 
 Church he had never been drawn. And, after 
 all, those who deny the supernatural cannot 
 be Christians in any definite or historical 
 sense. If the solitary dreamer was borne up 
 by an ideal which he named Jesus, that cloud- 
 phantom did not resemble the divine object 
 of faith. Among Kenan's former instructors 
 at Treguier only one caught a glimpse into 
 his mind. " Ah," he said, " I always fancied 
 they made you study too hard." His custom 
 of reciting the Psalms in Hebrew astonished 
 them ; did he want to turn Jew ? He de- 
 spatched a long account of his ideas to the 
 director in Paris who had failed, though with 
 the best of intentions, to lead him out of the 
 maze. " I did hope," said he, " that when I 
 had gone round the circle of doubt, I should 
 come back to the point from which I started ; 
 I have lost that expectation altogether ; I 
 could return to Catholicism only by abjuring
 
 62 R 
 
 enan 
 
 my reason." He had often been tempted to 
 revolt against so dangerous a guide. But 
 how could he ? The Catholic creed was a 
 bar of iron ; would there ever be set up 
 among Frenchmen a rational, a critical Chris- 
 tianity ? At all events, for him the priesthood 
 was out of the question. 
 
 To all this his director had no reply that 
 would avail. Catholic truth was one thing, 
 Rationalism another. " Then indeed," New- 
 man had written in 1839, "will be the stern 
 encounter, when two real and living principles, 
 simple, entire, and consistent, one in the 
 Church, the other out of it, at length rush 
 upon each other, contending not for names 
 and words, or half views, but for elementary 
 notions and distinctive moral characters." 
 This was what had happened to Renan ; but 
 never had a Church been less prepared to 
 meet such a crisis than the French in 1845. 
 Its knowledge of the situation was deplorably 
 inadequate. Of Biblical studies it had no 
 grasp ; philosophy had become to it a string 
 of formulas ; it saw only in the dimmest 
 distance what other Churches and nations
 
 Eclipse of Faith 63 
 
 were doing with religion. To this effect 
 wrote the late Mgr. d'Hulst, who would not 
 willingly have darkened the melancholy pic- 
 ture. Certain it is that we cannot recall a 
 name in those disastrous years among French 
 divines which united learning with insight, 
 or any one who could set forth in modern and 
 effective terms the ancient beliefs. Lacor- 
 daire, for example, is a memory of which 
 Catholics are proud. But Lacordaire knew 
 no German ; neither would his impassioned 
 rhetoric make up for the want of exegesis, 
 the limited acquaintance with history, primi- 
 tive or Eastern, the defective psychology, all 
 of which at that time bore hard upon ecclesias- 
 tical training. And who else was there ? 
 
 Ernest bade his mother farewell ; called in 
 St. Malo for Henriette's last letters ; and, still 
 wearing his cassock, arrived at St. Sulpice on 
 October 6, 1845. He found that the critical 
 moment was at hand. Mgr. Affre contem- 
 plated setting up immediately a house of 
 studies in which Renan should be one of the 
 professors. The young man was told to call 
 upon his Archbishop the same day and give
 
 64 Ren an 
 
 him a reply. A few hours later the prelate 
 came to St. Sulpice, and sent for him. Renan 
 consulted his friends. By their advice he 
 declined the interview. But his superiors knew 
 that he did not mean to stay at the Seminary ; 
 and as evening fell, he went down the steps for 
 the last time in his cassock, crossed the square 
 rapidly, and made his way to the neighbouring 
 hotel, or lodging house, of Mile. Celeste. The 
 change to lay attire was not at once completed. 
 But in this abrupt fashion the unknown had 
 been faced and Renan had flung himself upon 
 the pavement of Paris. 
 
 Three days afterwards, as we have set down 
 elsewhere, Newman submitted to the Catholic 
 Church at Littlemore. His reason had con- 
 vinced him that faith is indispensable ; that 
 Revelation is a fact ; that of alternatives one 
 must be chosen ; and that Church, Bible, 
 religion stand or fall together. He embraced 
 a consistent scheme of life, which had survived 
 long ages. Renan, taking the other path, 
 went into the wilderness, whither we must 
 now follow him.
 
 Chapter III 
 
 THE SCHOLAR IN PARIS 
 
 BEFORE setting out on her own journey, 
 Henriette had forwarded to Mile. 
 Ulliac in Paris a bill of fifteen hun- 
 dred francs for Ernest's use, payable Novem- 
 ber 10 at Messrs. Rothschild's. He was not, 
 therefore, destitute. He could always fall 
 back on this little store, although he seems 
 never to have taken from it. The Sulpicians, 
 too, behaved with a kindness which almost 
 overcame him, surprising as it was, he thought, 
 in men so orthodox towards a fugitive from 
 their house. They procured an honourable 
 post for him in the College Stanislas, the head 
 of which, M. Gratry, was eminent in literature 
 and mathematics. Dupanloup advised him 
 not to refuse it, adding, " My poor purse is at 
 your service ; I wish I could offer you some- 
 thing more valuable." The assistance was 
 
 06 c
 
 6 6 Renan 
 
 declined with no less good feeling than that 
 which had prompted it. Renan, bent on 
 sparing his mother, made trial of M. Gratry 
 and the College Stanislas. 
 
 He found the rector fascinating but 
 chimerical, wholly unversed in his own 
 branches of knowledge. Their conversations 
 were a perpetual misunderstanding on the 
 part of Gratry. But this arrangement could 
 not last. Renan was expected to appear, 
 like the other masters, in soutane. That 
 he would not do ; on All Souls' Day 
 he left the college, and took up his abode 
 in the Quartier St. Jacques as a private 
 tutor without salary. He was lodged and 
 boarded ; he had his own room ; two hours 
 a day with seven pupils paid for this not 
 disagreeable entertainment ; and he would 
 have felt happy, but that Madame Renan was 
 in great trouble about him, while the strange, 
 cold atmosphere chilled him after so long a 
 seclusion. His poor mother sang in her Breton 
 solitude of her Joseph whom wild beasts had 
 devoured ; his reticence had been a trial ; but 
 he could not yet bring himself to be open with
 
 The Scholar in Paris 67 
 
 her. Their correspondence during the next 
 months is painful reading. At last, in March 
 1846, Henriette, who detested concealments, 
 explained his conduct in a letter which sums 
 up the story. 
 
 By this time Ernest had taken his bachelor's 
 degree, not without some official embarrass- 
 ment, due to the place where he had been 
 trained. For St. Sulpice was not a Govern- 
 ment school. M. Jullien, the Chinese scholar, 
 was of use to him ; others had remarked his 
 quickness to learn. At twenty-three seldom 
 had a young provincial won so much notice. 
 Henriette, after dwelling on all this, foretells 
 that he will be distinguished and superior in 
 whatever calling he follows. She was writing 
 from Rome. In 1846 the Polish peasantry 
 broke out against the nobles, who had treated 
 them from of old like serfs. Count Zamoysld, 
 as it appears, was forewarned, and thought 
 well to start on a long holiday in Southern 
 Europe. Some of the nobles were murdered 
 shortly after at Zamosk. And there was hope 
 that Henriette might return to her people in 
 France — a hope deferred, however, until Sep-
 
 68 R 
 
 enan 
 
 tember 1850, when Ernest met her in Berlin 
 and took her home to Paris. 
 
 Ten years of exile had given her the 
 looks of middle age, though she was but 
 eight and thirty. " Of the charm," says 
 her brother, " which had been hers when 
 bidding me farewell in the parlour of St. 
 Nicolas, nothing remained but a delightful 
 expression, the token of unspeakable kind- 
 ness." She had lived long enough in 
 Rome to feel its attraction. Her creed was 
 a pure Theism ; and though she did not 
 permanently influence her brother's opinions, 
 while she lived the serious note which 
 we miss from his later writings was, on the 
 whole, dominant. 
 
 To the correspondence with Henriette suc- 
 ceeds, before long, an almost equally interest- 
 ing exchange of thought between Ernest and 
 a new friend, Marcellin Berthelot. From 
 November 1845 they were next-door neigh- 
 bours in the " obscure lodging-house " of the 
 Rue des Deux Eglises, where Renan passed 
 three years and a half, teaching without salary. 
 In power and accomplishments the young
 
 The Scholar 171 Paris 69 
 
 men were, perhaps, on a level ; in temper they 
 differed widely. After so fierce a struggle 
 with his Elohim — to speak Hebraically — the 
 recalcitrant Levite could still remind his 
 former associate Cognat, that " We are happy 
 in defiance of logic." M. Carbon had perceived 
 that the silent and seemingly morose Breton 
 was by nature of a gay disposition, though he 
 could be resigned to the inevitable. He was 
 resolute and sanguine ; but little given to " par- 
 ticular friendships," as the monastic phrase 
 went, chiefly because he found occupation in 
 his own thoughts, which he deemed equal to 
 other men's actions ; nor would he swerve, 
 when he had once made up his mind, to please 
 anybody. 
 
 Berthelot, four years his junior (born in 
 1827) is a more attaching figure. His mother 
 was of Paris ; his father, the son of a peasant 
 on the banks of the Loire, had taken a degree 
 in medicine and practised in a poverty-stricken 
 neighbourhood, close to St. Jacques la Bou- 
 chcrie. Too tender-hearted for ambition, 
 the doctor was always poor, and, says Mar- 
 cellin, " from the age of ten years I have been
 
 7 o Renan 
 
 troubled by the uncertainty of the future." 
 In his friendships, according to Henriette, 
 who knew and valued him, there appeared all 
 the sensitive delicacy of a woman. The 
 father, Gallican in his religious principles, 
 astonished Renan by his republican sentiments, 
 which were a new experience for the Breton, 
 himself willing to live under any Government, 
 if it would only last. Marcellin, who shared 
 these advanced views, cared nothing about 
 antiquity, laid out a path for himself in science, 
 and, thanks to his father's generous help, 
 lived in a world of disinterested research until 
 he was thirty. As a mere lad he counted 
 among the most brilliant pupils of the College 
 Henri IV ; and in 1846 he won the highest 
 prize in philosophy, though scarcely nineteen. 
 Already a Free-thinker, he was drawn to- 
 wards Renan by a certain likeness in their for- 
 tunes, by his " mild and serious expression," and 
 by the energy which he threw into his daily 
 work, often prolonged into the small hours of 
 the morning. They were both determined not 
 to mortgage their freedom, as too many have 
 done in France, by entering on the career of
 
 The Scholar 171 Paris 7 i 
 
 administration. Young, ignorant of life, eager 
 to know whatever could be known, they met 
 only to discuss the great problems. Berthelot 
 initiated his friend into the secrets of chemis- 
 try, and enlarged on the prospect of a new 
 social order. Renan persuaded Marcellin to 
 buy a Hebrew Testament, the leaves of which 
 he did not cut, and expounded theology to 
 him from the critic's point of sight. " A few 
 months were enough," says the unfrocked 
 cleric, " to relegate the vestiges of the faith 
 among our memories." Very soon they could 
 not have told which were their several parts in 
 the ideas that came to them. 
 
 But Renan had begun to write. Victor 
 Cousin, whose great fame was over, but whose 
 intellectual curiosity never slackened, and 
 Victor Le Clerc, the historian, encouraged him 
 to make good use of his Eastern lore. Under 
 such auspices, he gained an entrance to the 
 world of letters and libraries. In 1847 he 
 completed his degrees at the University. 
 That same year he presented to the Academy 
 of Inscriptions his General History of the 
 Semitic Languages. It is a bold and specula-
 
 72 R 
 
 enan 
 
 tive work, original in method, and it won the 
 Volney prize. We feel in reading it that the 
 author will never consent to be a mere savant ; 
 he throws out conjectures, lays open the soul 
 of Arab and Aryan, and explains religion by 
 race, landscape, and psychology. 
 
 On February 24, 1848, the street riots 
 broke out before which Louis Philippe ran 
 to England, leaving the Tuileries in the hands 
 of a mob. Whoever wishes to see that 
 shameful page of history as it was enacted, 
 let him study A Sentimental Education^ 
 by Gustave Flaubert. Renan, at that time, 
 was attending the lessons on Sanscrit of 
 Burnouf, at the College de France. On the 
 25th he found the lecture-hall transformed to 
 a guard-room. For one moment he, too, was 
 tempted by the fever of the barricades. But 
 he said to himself, " Science is a religion ; it 
 never loses its value," and making his way 
 along the armed streets, he went to Burnouf's 
 private residence, where the Sanscrit lesson 
 was resumed. Then came the " Days of 
 June," during which the working men of Paris 
 fought the middle class and were defeated
 
 The Scholar i7i Paris 73 
 
 with frightful slaughter. To his friend Ber- 
 thelot Renan writes on the 26th that it was 
 worse than the St. Bartholomew ; that he 
 would himself have been prepared to join the 
 National Guard in putting down anarchy, but 
 the Guard had become an executioner ; and 
 that, guilty as were " these poor maniacs," 
 more guilty still were the men who had made 
 of them helots and brutes. 
 
 A few days later he visited the battlefield — 
 St. Antoine, the Rue St. Jacques, which goes 
 from the Pantheon to the Quais, the Place 
 of the Bastille. His account, uncommonly 
 picturesque for Renan, is worth quoting. 
 " The barricades," he says, " were like regular 
 fortresses, with salient angles, one succeeding 
 another at every fifty yards. The square of 
 the Bastille offered a dreadful scene of chaos. 
 All the trees were cut down or shattered by 
 bullets ; houses pulled to the ground or still 
 in flames ; actual towers built up with scaffold 
 poles, vehicles overturned, paving-stones piled 
 in heaps. In the midst of all that, the people 
 stupefied, hardly knowing what they were 
 about in such unimaginable circumstances ;
 
 74 Renan 
 
 soldiers asleep on the flags, almost under the 
 feet of passers-by ; the rage of the conquered 
 showing itself under apparently quiet looks ; 
 the disorder of the conquerors as they cleared 
 their way across the barricades overthrown ; 
 and elsewhere the compassion of the public 
 who were asking charity for the wounded and 
 linen to dress their wounds ... it was a 
 sight of sublime originality, naked man face 
 to face with his fellow, nothing left but his 
 primitive instincts." 
 
 But the spectacle gave him a shock. He 
 had seen it too close at hand. He could not 
 love these new Barbarians. How shall they 
 cease to be proletarians, nay, bourgeoisie ? In 
 what way can the " people " be civilized, lest 
 they destroy all things of price like Franks or 
 Vandals ? These questions haunted Renan 
 during the seven months from November 1848 
 until June of the year following, which he 
 spent on a large and somewhat ungainly 
 volume, The Future of Science. It unfolds a 
 Utopian programme ; but all he ever knew or 
 dreamt may be traced across its pages, rudely 
 sketched, exuberant, or inchoate, wanting the
 
 The Scholar in Paris 75 
 
 touch of his mature style, for he was not yet 
 an artist. He felt convinced that scientific 
 research, not abstract speculation, would dis- 
 cover how mankind had originated. But if so, 
 it must not pause until it dealt with history, 
 philology, myth, and legend, the primitive, 
 spontaneous man who had created our govern- 
 ing ideas. This brings him to the Christian 
 origins, on which " the most important book 
 of the nineteenth century " is waiting to be 
 written. Nay, he will write it himself, unless 
 death or some other fatality interposes. 
 
 This pregnant volume remained in manu- 
 script until 1890. Kenan's best friends did 
 not advise publication ; and further experience 
 led him to acquiesce in their counsel. The 
 Republic had no need of critics. But, on the 
 motion of M. Le Clerc, he was sent by the 
 Academy of Inscriptions to Italy in November 
 1849. 
 
 The French had driven Garibaldi out of 
 Rome ; and their soldiers were holding the city, 
 while Pius IX was still at Gaeta. This expe- 
 dition, of which Renan became a member, had 
 for its object antiquarian research. He ac-
 
 7 6 Renan 
 
 cepted the mission with joy. " It will be an 
 epoch in my life," he wrote to Berthelot, " as 
 an artist and a man." Such, indeed, it turned 
 out to be. On November 9 he arrived in the 
 Eternal City. He came back by Turin at the 
 close of May 1850. Six months of a pilgrim- 
 age in search of the beautiful formed a second 
 or third stage of his intellectual training, which 
 his correspondence, in those years not scanty, 
 describes with ever-growing enthusiasm. 
 
 Rome enchanted him. His prejudices melted 
 away before the marvellous apparition ; he was 
 conquered by the Madonna, whose picture he 
 saw at every street-corner, adorned with lights 
 and flowers. His very religion rose from the 
 dead, a shadowy but subduing phantom. He 
 had never grasped what a popular faith really 
 is in a nation that knows no other. Faith and 
 civilization — not in the base mechanical sense — 
 attained in Rome to " an incomparable poetry, 
 height, idealism." In the French tempera- 
 ment to cultivate ideals was to invent formulas ; 
 here it meant the plastic arts, and life itself 
 was religion. The atmosphere had something 
 antique ; comfort did not exist, but who
 
 The Scholar^ in Paris 77 
 
 minded its absence ? Paris was profane, Rome 
 everlastingly sacred. The Revolution, as 
 understood in France, would never take root 
 south of the Alps. It was a Jacobin idea that 
 the Catholic Church must be annihilated ; but 
 for Italians to be orthodox was everything ; 
 they would defend their superstitions to the 
 death. As for the French army of occupation, 
 Voltairian or democratic, the people detested 
 its ways, and only the middle class, a small 
 minority, was in league with it. 
 
 These observations teach us that Renan had 
 good eyes under his heavy eyelids. We may 
 compare some other of his pages, denouncing 
 the clerical government, with Lamennais' 
 A f aires de Rome, in the spirit of which they are 
 cast. But that which he gained for his own 
 benefit was a revelation of the old classic exist- 
 ence, untroubled by industry, spending its hours 
 in the Forum, everywhere surrounded by 
 creations of an art which ministered far more to 
 public life than to private luxury. From these 
 days we may reckon his attachment to the 
 world of which printed classics had but shown 
 him the least remarkable aspect. More and
 
 7 8 Renan 
 
 more his vision turned towards the past, beyond 
 what he afterwards called the " frightful ad- 
 venture of the Middle Ages," to a seemingly 
 nobler antiquity. When he went down to 
 Naples, the landscape gave him a setting for his 
 future treatment of the Apocalypse ; but he 
 was disgusted with so gross a population and its 
 villainous taste. The ruins of Paestum, famed 
 for its temples and its roses in the time of 
 Virgil, filled him with melancholy. One civi- 
 lization had perished thus ; what would be the 
 fate of our own ? 
 
 He wrote again from Monte Cassino, in 
 January 1850. The Benedictines were Italian 
 patriots, who vied in enthusiasm with Gioberti, 
 Rosmini, Ventura, — priests and leaders at that 
 time celebrated. But Padre Tosti, not long 
 since the counsellor of Pius IX, was in a sort of 
 exile at Rome ; the monks trembled for their 
 abbey ; meanwhile they discussed German 
 thought and French revolutions. In one of 
 their cells Renan found the Lehen Jesu of 
 Strauss. He admired their zeal ; he smiled at 
 their Guelfic dreams. The salvation of Italy, he 
 declares, will come from its monks ; but they
 
 The Scholar in Paris 79 
 
 must not think of imitating his own country- 
 men. He saw Tosti later, but did not forebode 
 the long martyrdom of that brave spirit, which 
 ended only with his life not many years ago. 
 Returning to Rome after a hasty survey of 
 Florence, and a day never to be forgotten '^t 
 lovely Pisa, the French traveller, who had been 
 received in audience with his companions by 
 Pius IX, awaited the Pontiff's entrance with 
 curiosity. He conjectured that his welcome 
 would be a cold one, and merely official. But, 
 on April 12, 1850, he was present in the square 
 of St. John Lateran when Pius arrived from the 
 South ; and he beheld a scene of frantic rejoic- 
 ing all round him, with cries as violent as they 
 were momently sincere. We may be permitted 
 to add a sequel. Twenty years later, on Sep- 
 tember 19, 1870, the present writer happened 
 to witness from the Scala Santa Pius IX driving 
 into the same square for the last time. He had 
 come to ascend the sacred steps and to bless his 
 little army, a detachment of which was holding 
 the Gate of St. John against the Italian troops. 
 But now there was no wild shouting, and the 
 Pope in red mantle looked deadly pale as he
 
 8o R 
 
 enan 
 
 raised his hand in benediction. Next morning 
 Rome was taken ; Pius IX became a prisoner 
 in the Vatican, which he never afterwards 
 quitted. Renan observes that the population, 
 whose transports were so indescribable on a day 
 of triumph, would have insulted their sovereign 
 had he been mounting the scaffold. In good 
 and bad the Romans were extreme. 
 
 He travelled into Umbria, where he praised 
 Assisi beyond all for its beauty and pathos, 
 calling St. Francis " the Christ of the Middle 
 Age." Towards the end of May 1850 he 
 arrived in Venice. Venice, he remarks with 
 profound truth, is the lagoon, not the terra 
 ferma. He admired it as a lovely flower which 
 could not live in the modern air ; but, again, 
 he thought it more Byzantine than classic, and 
 the time came when he stigmatized the Place 
 of St. Mark as something barbarous. The 
 Venetian people, by origin Gauls, were mixed 
 with Slavs and Hungarians ; he could not 
 admire them as he did the " Athenians of 
 Florence." However, in this part of his jour- 
 ney Renan discovered materials at Padua for 
 the book which he was meditating on the great
 
 The Scholar iii Paris 8 i 
 
 Spanish philosopher, Averroes, from whom that 
 university derived much of its debased doctrine. 
 At Milan the Emperor Napoleon and the 
 Kingdom of Italy reigned still. A glance at 
 Turin sufficed ; and we find him once more in 
 Paris, to which, as he told his mother in 1845, he 
 clung for dear life. 
 
 In September, as already noted, he met his 
 sister at Berlin, and brought her to the small 
 apartment, in a garden overlooking the Car- 
 melites, near the Val de Grace, where they 
 lived six years. Henriette kept house for him 
 with a Frenchwoman's graceful economy ; she 
 shared his studies and copied his manuscripts 
 for the press. But she did more. By her se- 
 vere and penetrating criticism she compelled him 
 to lay aside whatever was hard or excessive in 
 his first manner, to check his fondness for the 
 satirical, and to be content with a simple, un- 
 alloyed French, akin to that of Port Royal, 
 which had become her own standard. By this 
 description we are led to think of Pascal ; but 
 Ernest Renan, though he writes as pure a lan- 
 guage, did not compass the brief sententious 
 style of the Pensees ; he was always a little too 
 
 6
 
 82 R 
 
 e?ian 
 
 malicious even for the Lettres Provinciales. 
 " I had never suffered," he says, " and I found 
 in the discreet smile, provoked by man's weak- 
 ness or vanity, a certain wisdom." He pre- 
 tends that he gave up the ironical habit ; let 
 the reader of his last writings and speeches 
 agree, if he can. 
 
 Together they went into questions of French 
 art and architecture. They visited Rouen, 
 Rheims, and the country between, where the 
 pointed style had attained its perfection. 
 Henriette was happy, but she thought Ernest 
 should be so too, and she advised him to marry, 
 not without secret misgivings. He was familiar 
 with a Dutch artist of repute, Ary Scheffer, and 
 from that intimacy, says Berthelot, had derived 
 new lights which added to his literary powers. 
 M. Scheffer's niece, Cornelie, was highly accom- 
 plished, in every way the wife that Renan 
 would have chosen. But now his sister's 
 jealous affection led to an agitating episode, and 
 some bitter days intervened. Ernest told 
 Mile. Cornelie that he would not marry unless 
 Henriette were satisfied. The same evening he 
 let his sister know what he had done. It was
 
 The Scholar in Pa7^is 83 
 
 enough. She ran next morning to M. Schef- 
 fer's, gave her full consent, and all turned out 
 for the best. It was on her savings that the 
 household depended. Renan was married in 
 St. Germain des Pres on September 11, 1856 ; 
 and the two ladies, though in different ways, 
 lived happy ever after. 
 
 Versatile and indefatigable, the man himself, 
 who loved knowledge for its own sake, was yet 
 a minor in business. " I will write books," he 
 had said as a child. But he did not fancy that 
 they would secure him a livelihood. What was 
 his astonishment when, one day, M. Michel 
 Levy came upstairs to his garret, praised certain 
 of his articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes 
 and elsewhere, and offered terms for a collected 
 issue ! He tells the story with a point of 
 humour ; gladly the bargain was made, and 
 thirty volumes followed in succession down to 
 1887. Eleven others, marked posthumous, 
 complete the record. Besides this great library, 
 which commands a general interest, we should 
 take into account Kenan's lectures in Hebrew, 
 his share in the Academy of Inscriptions, and 
 the volumes which he brougiit out jointly with
 
 84 R 
 
 enan 
 
 Victor Le Clcrc on France in the fourteenth 
 century. 
 
 A robust constitution served him well. His 
 appearance, we are told, was wanting in dis- 
 tinction. He made no effort to shine at social 
 gatherings, though he could talk supremely well 
 among the elect. He cared little for money 
 and shunned advertisement. Scarcely did he 
 affect to be a man of letters. The circum- 
 stances which were to transform a secluded 
 Oriental student into the most popular anti- 
 Christian of his time lay yet in the future. 
 Tempted by every branch of learning, from 
 Sanscrit, which he took up with Burnouf, to 
 Chinese and the Greek of the Middle Age, he 
 ran a risk, — it may be said that he did not 
 escape it, — which all dilettanti must encounter, 
 of losing himself among bypaths. Averroes, 
 which was published in 1852, proved almost a 
 dull book ; but it was meant for those who read 
 to be instructed, not to be passively entertained. 
 By it he won his degree as Doctor of Letters. 
 The History of the Semitic Languages opened a 
 fruitful contrast between the genius of Israel 
 or Ishmacl and the Aryan capacity for abstract
 
 The Scholar in Paris 85 
 
 reasoning. It was the scholar's prelude to 
 undertakings more literary on the same great 
 subject. First in the collected Studies of Re- 
 ligious History of 1857, ^^ approached the work 
 which was to make him famous, and startled 
 the orthodox into a suspicion that some new 
 enemy, a Celsus or even a Voltaire, was enter- 
 ing the field. 
 
 On the history of Israel, on the Critical 
 Historians of Jesus, on the Imitation and the 
 Bollandist Lives of the Saints he expressed his 
 views with a freedom which gave no small 
 offence. Towards F. D. Strauss he took up an 
 attitude which seemed equivocal ; but in de- 
 clining to be a mythologist Renan made light 
 of the Gospel facts. A charming fable had no 
 need of testimony. Did we care whether the 
 Iliad was founded on a veracious chronicle ? 
 The picture of a sublime character gains no- 
 thing, he said, by its resemblance to an actual 
 hero. 
 
 Jean Jacques had thought otherwise. " My 
 friend, it is not so that we invent," he 
 tells us in the well known passage, " it would 
 be more inconceivable that a number of men
 
 86 R 
 
 enan 
 
 had combined to fashion the Gospel than that 
 one man had furnished its subject." Renan 
 professed, in his correspondence at the semin- 
 ary, to be relying altogether on historical mo- 
 tives. He had even written to Berthelot from 
 Venice, " History is to me what reason is to 
 you." But facts were now to him of no conse- 
 quence, provided we could save the ideal in our 
 imagination. Whether events have justified 
 him, many of his desponding pages at an after 
 period will show. His judgment of Feuerbach 
 is curiously applicable to himself. " When he 
 resolves to be an atheist, he is one devoutly 
 and with a kind of unction." That sentence, 
 which reminds us of Montaigne, might be 
 printed as a running epigraph on every one of 
 the forty volumes which amused, or fascinated, 
 or shocked the innumerable readers of a 
 romantic who protested against Romanticism, 
 an idealist who strove in vain to be common- 
 place, an archangel ruined who could not forget 
 the Heaven whence he had cast himself down. 
 To adverse comments he made no direct 
 answer, but a subsequent volume, Essays in 
 Morals and Criticism, which appeared in 1859,
 
 The Scholar i7i Paris 87 
 
 began with a preface which was marked by all 
 his inimitable qualities and held out a challenge 
 to dogmatic Christians not likely to be for- 
 gotten. He was sorry to give them scandal, 
 but he believed in duty, which was not the art 
 of being happy, and he quoted Kant. Then he 
 enlarged upon the religion of the heart, dis- 
 engaged from symbols, and expressed his de- 
 light in meeting with assailants whose faith 
 appeared to be so lively. Religion might be 
 permitted to indulge in some narrow ideas and 
 an indifferent style ; for himself he was a critic 
 and he could pardon the Church when it said 
 uncivil things of him. Renan proceeded to ex- 
 plain that in 1851 he had taken the French 
 Revolution to be liberal in principle, but he 
 could do so no longer. Its violence, its atomic 
 conception of man and society, its lowering of 
 culture, its destruction of initiative, had brought 
 in the reign of mediocrity. There was need to 
 reform 1789. He might be a pessimist ; he 
 acknowledged that his mood was not sanguine ; 
 for he could not believe that industry and the 
 fine arts would flourish together, and the Great 
 Exhibition gave him no comfort.
 
 8 8 Rena7i 
 
 At last he rook refuge in the poetry of the 
 Celtic races — there was his ideal country, he 
 cried in a lyric outburst. " O sires of the lowly 
 tribe at whose hearth I learned to believe in 
 the unseen, — humble clan of peasants and 
 mariners, to whom I owe it that I have kept 
 the vigour of my spirit in a dead land, in an 
 age without hope, ye doubtless have roamed 
 over those enchanted seas where our father 
 Brandan sought the Land of Promise. . . . 
 Sometimes I regret that your bark, leaving 
 Ireland or Cambria, did not run before other 
 breezes. In my dreams I see those peaceful 
 cities of Clonfert and Lismore, where I ought 
 to have passed my days, — poor Ireland ! — 
 borne up on the sound of thy bells, on the story 
 of thy mysterious wanderings. . . . Let us 
 find comfort in our fancies, our nobleness, our 
 disdain. Who can tell whether our dreams 
 may not be more true than reality ? God is 
 my witness, ye ancient sires, that my only joy 
 is to imagine, as I sometimes do, that I am 
 your very conscience, and that by me ye come 
 to have a life and a voice ! " 
 
 The eighty pages on Celtic bards and legends
 
 The Scholar iii Paris 89 
 
 to which these words invite us, have never been 
 surpassed in their faint elusive colours, their 
 romance of history, their pleading tone. They 
 found an echo with Matthew Arnold, whose 
 eyes, we may conjecture, were opened by them 
 to fresh and untrodden vistas ; half a century 
 ago they pointed to the Gaelic revival, with 
 its poetry of resistance, its disdain for the 
 vulgar modern spirit. As Augustin Thierry 
 well observed, the prophetic fame of Cambria 
 during the Middle Ages was won by the 
 refusal of its bards to despair of their own 
 future. The Celt may suffer defeat ; he is 
 never vanquished. Arthur will come again. 
 *' Almost every strong appeal to the super- 
 natural," concludes Renan, " has been due to 
 the nations that hope against hope." He 
 cites the greatest, Israel. But his argument 
 bears a deeper application, for it implies that 
 religion is not of this world. 
 
 After the idealist comes the critic. Much as 
 he owed to Victor Cousin, he made bold in the 
 most flattering way imaginable to draw that 
 celebrated man from a superior point of view. 
 Cousin was the sparkling French professor, true
 
 90 Ren an 
 
 descendant of Gorgias or Protagoras, bred up by 
 the University in all the arts which could be 
 displayed on a theatre. His world was Paris ; 
 and though he had once crossed the Rhine, 
 luckily what he brought back of Hegel and 
 Kant would never damage his exquisite style. 
 To old ideas he gave new expression. Good 
 French is so difficult that it tempts one to say 
 a great deal more than one thinks. True, 
 there is no need, if a man be skilful, to offer it 
 violence. But, then, a lecturer must be elo- 
 quent and " theory in France springs up 
 armed " ; among Germans it is otherwise. 
 Philosophy does not look to consequences ; 
 but with a crowd some diplomatic handling 
 may be required. M. Cousin had shown 
 himself a real tactician of the idea. His 
 countrymen prefer form to substance ; they 
 judge reason by its political and social tenden- 
 cies ; no wonder if in such a latitude systems 
 freeze into scholastic repetitions and the dis- 
 covery of unknown truth becomes impossible. 
 What is the cure for this ? Rcnan, still prais- 
 ing M. Cousin, would recommend an infusion 
 of science, mathematics, and above all of history.
 
 The Scholar in Paj^is 91 
 
 Education is now only a training in literature, 
 which means declamation. But the history of 
 the human mind, — not as an individual, which 
 was the mistake of former studies, — no, as it 
 moves in nations and epochs, — that, says 
 Rcnan, is the philosophy we should acquire. 
 Cousin defends the established religion ; what 
 has he to tell us about dogma, Bible, the con- 
 tents of that for which he stands up ? Just 
 nothing at all. In like manner he bows to the 
 French Revolution, which was but a Gallic 
 episode, not a European turning-point ; and 
 then, despairing of his own time, seeks refresh- 
 ment in the more heroic period of the Fronde. 
 It is well. To pursue the ideal, though we 
 should never attain to it, brings an abundant 
 reward. 
 
 Those who would measure the resources of 
 French phrase, should examine this piercing, 
 yet perfectly well-mannered, essay side by side 
 with M. Taine's on the same subject. In 
 sentiment there is little difference ; in deHcacy 
 and point Renan has all the advantage of a 
 supple genius, disporting itself at ease. Taine 
 is strong, satirical, somewhat forced \ his blows
 
 92 R 
 
 enan 
 
 are heavy as they are telling. But, at the age 
 of thirty-five, the quondam Sulpician has 
 polished his instrument like a born courtier ; 
 he knows its powers and uses it as an enchanted 
 sword, irresistibly keen. In a moral aspect the 
 sight is not pleasant, for Cousin had laid him 
 under a debt of gratitude. His excuse might be 
 that he was criticizing the University, drawing 
 attention to the barrenness of purely French 
 ideas. But why not choose another target ? 
 
 In writing about Lamennais, his sympathy 
 was more sincere ; not that he admired Liberal 
 Catholicism, which he reprobated in the name 
 of St. Sulpice, " that suave and touching remi- 
 niscence of the past " ; nor that he could away 
 with democracy, or trusted in any fanatical 
 movement ; but he understood his fellow-pro- 
 vincial. Lamennais thought he did well to 
 be angry ; his eloquent hatred was a burning 
 sombre flame ; he should have gone out from 
 the Church by " the royal road of history and 
 criticism," whereas he did but exchange an 
 absolute creed for its opposite. One great 
 thing he had wrought. The Words of a Believer^ 
 which men might praise without reserve on
 
 p 
 
 o 
 
 •J 
 
 o 
 
 
 C/3 
 00 
 
 
 
 
 '■> 
 
 
 k 
 
 Si' 
 
 5^ 
 
 =Nv 
 
 ^ 
 
 si< 
 
 
 :«5
 
 The Scholar in Paris 93 
 
 condition that they did not think of copying 
 it. " I never read those stirring pages," said 
 Renan, " without an impression of contag- 
 ious magic " ; their rude austerity, sudden ten- 
 derness, and languor in the midst of an over- 
 mastering rage, were absolutely Breton. Yet 
 a " respectful irony " was something better. 
 " Disdain," said the critic, " almost always 
 produces a delicate style " ; but anger is often 
 in bad taste. Thus far the Epicurean who, 
 yielding to a kindlier emotion, confesses that 
 Lamennais' impatience was due to " the unrest 
 of a noble spirit." He adds, with a glance at 
 himself, "The man that God has touched is 
 always a being apart." And so he would fain 
 give hospitality to this wandering soul, whose 
 thoughts, however, had been " too simple to 
 be true." 
 
 Professing German ideas in a mere literary 
 Paris, opposed to the ways of the University, 
 and claiming the right of private judgment 
 under Napoleon III., who was nervously 
 anxious to keep on terms with St. Michael, 
 while not putting down Satan too violently, it 
 was clear that Renan would raise up foes on
 
 94 Ren an 
 
 every side. To J. J. Weiss, who wanted such 
 a quarrel, Taine wrote in January 1858, " I 
 regret what you say about Renan. I know 
 him personally ; I own that his hands are too 
 ecclesiastically gloved ; but he is very eager, 
 attached to his convictions, immensely learned, 
 rich in general ideas ; he has the refinement of 
 an artist and a man of the world ; he will be 
 one of the great men of this century." Others 
 divined his coming influence. Augustin 
 Thierry, to whose place in the Academy of 
 Inscriptions Renan succeeded in 1856, and 
 who died a Catholic, had taught him how facts 
 might be made interesting and historical 
 periods set out in bold relief. M. de Sacy, an 
 old-world Jansenist, treated him as a favourite 
 pupil, when they met at the office of the Journal 
 des Debats, where Renan exercised his pen 
 with effect in the cause of freedom. For 
 he was a Liberal, as Englishmen construe the 
 word, though he felt some hankerings after 
 protection for those frail objects, art and litera- 
 ture, which the crowd is only too apt to trample 
 down in its march. 
 His home life was exceedingly happy. Hen-
 
 T'he Scholar in Pa?^is 95 
 
 riette and Cornelie vied in devotion to him. 
 He lost a little daughter, Ernestine ; but his 
 boy, Ary, who figures in the correspondence as 
 Bebe, lived to be a poet and draughtsman of 
 promising skill. His mother had now given 
 up Treguier. She was living under the same 
 roof with her children in the Val de Grace, 
 and resigned herself (somewhat as Carlyle's 
 mother in circumstances not unlike) to the 
 ways of a son who assured her that his relig- 
 ion was at heart the worship of Jesus. She 
 could not but feel elated as he grew famous in 
 so brilliant a sphere. Full of spirit, herself a 
 woman of great natural endowments, she soft- 
 ened Henriette's austerity and brought out 
 the livelier gifts of her daughter-in-law. 
 
 M. Ary Scheffer died in 1858. But another 
 death had occurred, several months previously, 
 on which the future of Renan, his wife, and 
 his sister, was to depend. M. de Quatremere 
 had expired in September 1857, leaving 
 the chair of Hebrew vacant in the Col- 
 lege de France. It was a position that his 
 most distinguished pupil meant to inherit. 
 But how would public opinion regard the
 
 9 6 Renan 
 
 authorities who should put the Bible, as it were 
 officially, into Renan's hands ? To ask for 
 it was like throwing down a gage of battle. 
 " I cannot, however," he wrote to Berthelot, 
 " accept for myself or for science the part of 
 capitis minor.'''' He appeared as a candidate ; 
 the engagement was begun. 
 
 Renan's apology for his act will be quoted 
 in due course. But wc may say at once that 
 the College de France was never, it would 
 seem, an ecclesiastical institution ; and, though 
 at Oxford Pusey insisted on teaching Hebrew 
 as a part of divinity, this view could scarcely 
 find favour with a mere critic. " Independent 
 science " was the cry on one side ; " respect 
 for the established religion of Frenchmen," 
 was retorted on the other. Some of the less 
 wise declared that Renan was ignorant of 
 Hebrew. He answered by publishing a re- 
 markable translation of the Book of Job, and 
 an ingenious, if too fanciful, dramatic interpre- 
 tation of Solomon's Song. There could be no 
 doubt that he was qualified to fill a cliair of 
 Semitic languages ; whether in that chair he 
 might express himself freely concerning the
 
 The Scholar in Paris 97 
 
 Sacred Scriptures was a question of propriety 
 and public order. The nomination did not 
 take place at this time. A substitute was 
 appointed, and Renan still maintained his can- 
 didature. He would offer no compromise. 
 The Emperor, whose religious indifference was 
 absolute, looked round for a distinction which 
 he might bestow on this unconquered Liberal. 
 The French troops were about to occupy the 
 Lebanon, as in 1849 they had occupied Rome. 
 Napoleon offered him a mission in search of 
 Phoenician antiquities, not very largely en- 
 dowed, and, on Henriette's advice, he accepted 
 the charge. His sister made up her mind to 
 go with him. Ary was to be left at home ; 
 Cornelie might follow her husband after- 
 wards. Berthelot saw his two friends off at 
 Marseilles, where they embarked for Beyrout 
 in a French transport on October 21, i860.
 
 Chapter IV 
 
 GALILEE AND AFTERWARDS 
 
 FROM this voyage Henriette was never 
 to return. Her brother's absorption in 
 his work grew daily. He had ceased to 
 be a lively correspondent, as in his Italian 
 tour ; the pains which he spent on authorship 
 forbade it. All his mind was given to that 
 daring enterprise which shone through the 
 Syrian expedition and above it like a star. In 
 his Future of Science we observed the prophetic 
 words which announced that the greatest book 
 of the nineteenth century would be entitled, 
 ^he Critical History of the Christian Origi?is. 
 Even now the image of a human and ideal 
 Jesus of Nazareth, filled his imagination. He 
 was not destined to bring back from Tyre and 
 Sidon much that an archaeologist would value. 
 But the landscape of Galilee, the Syrian sky, 
 the beauty of Hermon and Lebanon — these 
 
 98
 
 Galilee and Afterwards 99 
 
 were to be his great discoveries. And for them 
 Henriette paid with her Hfe — no reluctant 
 victim. 
 
 They reached Beyrout in the early days 
 of November i860. " If you would set eyes 
 on the strangest mixture of things charming 
 and hideous," Renan wrote to his friend, " a 
 natural scenery of which the grace is be- 
 yond words, an incomparable sky, a sea that 
 is a wonder, the finest mountains, the filthi- 
 est cities, a horrible race not wanting in 
 exquisite types, and society in the lowest stage, 
 come out hither." Lebanon intoxicated him. 
 These smiling Alps were the paradise of 
 God. His magnificent health, in which he 
 put too much confidence, and this delightful 
 season, urged him to labour and to move 
 about incessantly, accompanied by his sister 
 when possible, bent as he was on finding 
 inscriptions and monuments by day, and at 
 night busy with his writing. They took up 
 their regular quarters at Amschit, not far from 
 the ancient Byblos, lodging with a wealthy 
 Maronite, Zakhia, in a pleasant house which 
 overlooked the sea.
 
 loo R 
 
 enan 
 
 Berthelot had just brought out the work 
 on synthetic chemistry, which Renan called 
 his Profylcea. It was a success, and to the 
 explorer a challenge. It spurred him to 
 activity ; while his anxious friend talked of 
 Syrian fever, and Henriette mourned over a 
 selfish devotion to art which seemed to kill 
 affection, the days passed. Cornelie, it was 
 decided, should join them at once ; Berthelot 
 projected an expedition also, but could never 
 manage it. If any words might persuade him, 
 Renan's description of ruined Maschnaka would 
 have succeeded. " It is the valley of Adonis," 
 he said, " if we may term that a valley which 
 is a precipice more than a thousand feet down, 
 the space between no more than a few hundred. 
 There begin the lasting snows of winter. On 
 the horizon, the white domes of Aphaca. The 
 contrast of snowy wind and brilliant sun is in- 
 describable. Two glaciers, not large, in two 
 sunless hollows, are enchanting." The valley of 
 the river Adonis appeared in his eyes the most 
 ravishing sight he had ever seen. " One can 
 fancy nothing more romantic or more solemn. 
 It is a landscape made for lamentation over
 
 Galilee and Afterwards i o i 
 
 the dead gods." At no great distance from 
 this place Henriette was to find a tomb. 
 
 Her first illness occurred in February 1861. 
 Of her brother she wrote that he was no longer 
 the same, he was quite transformed. Berthelot, 
 deeply troubled, begged them both to return. 
 " I believe your sister is always ill," he 
 insisted ; " let her come back." Ernest, 
 however, would not hearken. He went on 
 with his excavations at Tyre, after which 
 they set out for Galilee and Jerusalem, 
 arriving in May at the Holy City. Thirty- 
 four days, never to be forgotten by him, 
 were spent in Palestine, and at the end of 
 July Cornelie quitted her husband. She 
 was expecting the birth of another child. 
 Henriette should now have gone home. The 
 French army, suffering from fever, were leav- 
 ing Syria. But she lingered, though terribly 
 fatigued, while Ernest, at Ghazir on the slopes 
 of Lebanon, was flinging down on paper as fast 
 as he could, with happy eagerness, his vision 
 of the " gentle Galilean." From Beyrout he 
 announced triumphantly to Berthelot, on 
 September 12, 1861, " In eight days it will
 
 I o 2 Renan 
 
 be finished." Not pale phantoms or abstract 
 types, he said, but living figures, — such were 
 to be his creations. " This great fragment in 
 my portfolio is all my strength," he declared, 
 but it must not be advertised too soon. His 
 friend answered on September 26, " Your 
 letter breathes I know not what secret joy." 
 Two days earlier Henriette had passed away 
 at Amschit. 
 
 The last rites were given to her by a good 
 Maronite priest while her brother was lying 
 unconscious in a fever-dream. He had not 
 fancied her indisposition serious ; and he 
 was busy embarking his monuments at Bey- 
 rout, when, on returning to Amschit, the 
 burning sun struck him down. Except for 
 one or two passing moments, he did not 
 know what had befallen himself or his beloved 
 sister. She had spoken to him about her last 
 will ; he was to have all she might leave. Her 
 thoughts dwelt on the friends at home ; and she 
 excused her jealous affection for him by say- 
 ing, " Je t'ai aime comme on n'aime plus." On 
 the Tuesday, at three in the morning, she died. 
 Zakhia opened his father's tomb, and in it she 
 
 \
 
 Galilee and Afterwards 103 
 
 found a resting-place, hard by a chapel under 
 the palm-trees. " There let her wait for me," 
 wrote Ernest, in after days, " beneath the palms 
 of Amschit, in the land of ancient mysteries, 
 nigh unto sacred Byblos." . . . 
 
 Alone, hardly recovered, and with a deepen- 
 ing sense of what he had lost, Renan came back 
 to the Academy of Inscriptions and to the 
 world of Paris. Taine writes to Edouard de 
 Suckau on February 8, 1862, " Renan is 
 returned from the East as cross as an owl ; 
 Berthelot is worn out." A superficial judg- 
 ment ; in that sturdy constitution of the 
 returned pilgrim, there was obstinacy, but 
 not ill-humour. He was now meditating the 
 boldest act of the nineteenth century. That 
 act would be a memorial of the unknown 
 Henriette, whose legacy to her brother, as he 
 often said, was the Lije of Jesus. During the 
 pleasant sojourn at Ghazir it had been thrown 
 off in the white heat of inspiration, kindled by 
 their journey together as they went up from 
 Galilee to Jerusalem and rode back again to 
 Lebanon. " Delightful hours, too quickly 
 vanished ! " he cried, when she was no more.
 
 1 04 Re7ian 
 
 " Ah, may Eternity be like them ! From morn- 
 ing till night I was drunk with the thought that 
 unrolled itself before me. I fell asleep upon it, 
 and the first ray of dawn behind the mountain 
 gave it back to me clearer and more living than 
 the eve. Henriette watched the growth of my 
 work day by day ; when I had finished a page, 
 it was hers to copy it. In the evening we 
 walked on our terrace under the brilliant stars ; 
 she offered me her thoughts, remarkable for 
 their tact and insight, some of which came to 
 me as a revelation. Her joy was full ; those 
 moments, doubtless, were the sweetest in her 
 life." 
 
 There is, commonly, in great crises, a union 
 of the many elements which make for drama. 
 Kenan's whole soul was concentrated on his 
 manuscript, the publication of which would 
 stir all France and might be his ruin, when 
 he found himself gazetted, on January 1 1, 1862, 
 to the chair of Hebrew. The two Academies 
 had sent up his name on request of the Minister. 
 Napoleon HI appointed him, and a storm of 
 protest at once broke out. 
 
 Oriental scholars, it would appear, did not
 
 Galilee a7t(t Afterway^ds i o 5 
 
 believe that a man who wrote such exquisite 
 French could be pedantic enough for the 
 teaching of dead literatures. Young men in 
 the Latin Quarter set down the Liberal who 
 had taken the Emperor's bribe as a renegade. 
 Catholics declared the nomination an insult 
 to their faith. And Renan himself, who never 
 answered critics, but whose nerves were in 
 good order, welcomed, though he did not show 
 any indiscreet exultation, the tumult which 
 brought him before all men's eyes. It was the 
 path to glory which he had long been expect- 
 ing to see open. Friends advised him to begin 
 his course on a special subject, in the hall where 
 his predecessor had lectured to half-a-dozen 
 students. His answer was that he would do so 
 by and by. First, he had resolved to speak on his 
 general duties as a teacher, in the large amphi- 
 theatre of the College de France. 
 
 The day came, February 21, 1862. Outside, 
 the crowd was so violent that the police had 
 to clear the courtyard by force ; within, the 
 great spaces were occupied by opposing and 
 opposed battalions, orthodox, free-thinking, 
 revolutionary. Renan was greeted with hisses
 
 io6 R 
 
 e7ia?i 
 
 and applause. But for twenty minutes he 
 could not obtain a hearing. His written dis- 
 course was read, however, at length, amid 
 the cheers and counter-cheers which broke 
 it into fragments. The subject in itself was 
 worthy of philosophic handling. " What part 
 have the Semites contributed to Western 
 civilisation," Renan inquired. " They have 
 brought us religion," he answered ; " to them 
 we are indebted for the most extraordin- 
 ary of moral events that have changed the 
 world." Every one caught the allusion ; free- 
 thinkers applauded. Christians turned pale with 
 excitement. The speaker did not pause ; but 
 his words floated uncertain over the gather- 
 ing storm. " An incomparable man," he 
 continued, reading from his notes, " so great 
 that, although we must judge of all things in 
 this place from the view of positive science, I 
 would not gainsay those who, struck by the ex- 
 ceptional character of his work, have called 
 him God, — he it was that established the ever- 
 lasting religion of humanity, the religion of 
 the spirit." But he went on to say, " the 
 high thought of Jesus, scarcely understood by
 
 Galilee and Afterwards 107 
 
 His disciples, has undergone many defeats," 
 and " in adopting Christianity, we have pro- 
 foundly altered it ; in reality, it is our creation." 
 By this time all was a sea of raging sounds. 
 The young Liberals cheered ; their opponents 
 cried out at this blasphemer. Taine, who was 
 present, remarked afterwards that the orator's 
 action was " somewhat episcopal — a bishop 
 in fartibus infidelium,^^ and so were certain 
 phrases of his lecture. " He is too unctuous," 
 concluded the severe Hegelian. But an unc- 
 tion which breaks the head is more exasperat- 
 ing than a quarter-staff. The Catholic young 
 men could not forgive him. To the free- 
 thinkers it was a glorious day ; they " applauded 
 coarsely," says Taine once more, " like readers 
 of the Siecle,^'' and forming a procession of 
 umbrellas — it was raining hard — they went off 
 to the Rue Madame and cheered under the new 
 professor's windows. He had escaped from the 
 amphitheatre by a side exit. The irony of 
 circumstances was complete when Madame 
 Veuve Renan, Catholic and orthodox, came 
 out above, to receive congratulations from this 
 noisy crowd of unbelievers on behalf of her son.
 
 io8 R 
 
 enan 
 
 Next day, the lectures were suspended by- 
 Government. They were said to threaten 
 public order. But Renan would not resign. 
 For two years he went on accepting the 
 emoluments of his chair, and teaching Hebrew 
 to all who would attend his lessons. The 
 Emperor could not send him a lettre de cachet, 
 and there was no Bastille. On the other 
 hand, superior persons smiled at the " menace 
 to public order " which a company of gen- 
 darmes might have dealt with safely. Yet 
 the question in Paris, which is the city of heat 
 as well as of light, was more serious than 
 it would have seemed in any other European 
 capital. When the Bible was discussed on plat- 
 forms, and an official person, almost one of 
 the Government, as French opinion held and 
 still holds in all such cases, could openly set 
 down Jesus Christ on the level of mere 
 humanity, there was danger in the air. Mr. 
 Stuart Mill, no enemy to freedom of thought 
 and speech, has told us that '' undoubtedly 
 the manner of asserting an opinion, even 
 though it be a true one, may be very ob- 
 jectionable, and may justly incur severe cen-
 
 Galilee and Afterwards 109 
 
 sure." We might ask, also, what science could 
 hope to g^in by Renan's lecture, in presence of a 
 chance assembly, the purpose of which was not 
 to learn anything, but to manifest its like or dis- 
 like of the heterodox professor ? He was now 
 doing, under provocation if we will, the very 
 thing which he had charged upon Victor Cousin 
 as undignified. Was he not degrading his 
 erudition to politics ? His friends have, in 
 effect, granted so much. But the overpowering 
 sense of his " great fragment," now secure 
 in his portfolio, drove him on like a goad. He 
 yearned for the battle that could not long 
 be delayed, the thunder of the captains and 
 the shouting. 
 
 In 1847 he had written from Treguier 
 to his fellow-student, that Christianity was 
 " dead and well dead " ; that nothing could 
 be made of it unless it were transformed ; 
 and that he perceived in their own century the 
 elements of a new religion. This latter hope 
 had waned. But his ideal system might still 
 wear a halo, if it could be shown that Jesus 
 of Nazareth was its supreme expression. Cer- 
 tainly, Renan was willing to make converts ;
 
 I lo R 
 
 enan 
 
 the hour of disappointment had not sounded 
 in his ears. To his colleagues he now addressed 
 a manifesto, defending his inaugural lecture, on 
 which we shall have more to say by and by. It 
 ended with a defiant prophecy that, if silenced 
 in his chair, he could still publish books and 
 find an audience who would listen to him. 
 The allusion was transparent. And on June 23, 
 1863, The Life of Jesus appeared. 
 
 Its success was immediate, far-reaching, and 
 extraordinary. In November sixty-iive thou- 
 sand copies had been sold. But that was only 
 a symptom of the universal interest. On all 
 sides men looked upon the volume as a banner 
 lifted up, which must be attacked or defended. 
 In the eyes of Catholics it was a crime with- 
 out parallel, an offence against God and man. 
 The fierce assault which they at once opened 
 upon it made The Life of Jesus known to every 
 priest in France. Not a clerical meeting was 
 held between Provence and Brittany but its de- 
 merits came up for discussion. Abroad, it leaped 
 into fame at a bound. French was now, as it long 
 had been, the common language of society and
 
 Galilee and Afterwards 1 1 i 
 
 of culture. Such a book, appearing in Eng- 
 lish, would have taken five years to cross the 
 Channel. To England, Bishop Colenso was the 
 critic who gave offence, but who could not win 
 renown, by his dull cross-examining of the 
 numbers in the Pentateuch. Strauss had put 
 forward his theory, which resolved the Four 
 Gospels into myth and allegory, a generation 
 earlier. But to the frivolous coteries of Paris 
 that German professor was only a name ; and 
 not so much as a name to the French clergy 
 at large. What, then, had Renan achieved ? 
 Something great, if not portentous. Thanks 
 to his unrivalled command of language, to the 
 colour of his description, to the suavity of 
 a sentimentalism which enchanted without 
 rhetoric, he had transformed the Gospels into 
 a publication of the day. Dealing with pages 
 hitherto regarded as the Latin of the Mass, 
 which only priests recited, while none but the 
 faithful listened, he made of them a French 
 classic, and the least orthodox now read with 
 surprise how beautiful they could be. 
 
 Not for a moment did this latest of New 
 Testaments, thus boldly thrown upon the ways
 
 112 R 
 
 enan 
 
 of men, prevail because it was learned, or exact, 
 or creative as high poetry may be when it takes 
 up realities from the past. Renan has keenly 
 observed that French literature, since the time 
 of Louis XIII, is a tertiary formation ; it is 
 Greek rendered into Latin, and this again 
 manipulated by Racine or Moliere, to suit the 
 people of the Seine. In like manner his own 
 most venturesome book, though not his greatest, 
 gives back the Hebrew strength and sweetness 
 which so marvellously work upon us in the 
 Gospels, not as he finds them there, but quali- 
 fied to please a literary taste. His version 
 stands to St. Matthew or St. Luke much as 
 TeUmaque stands to the Iliad and the Odyssey. 
 A man of letters who had quarrelled with 
 Renan, Edmond de Goncourt, called it the 
 Bible fenelonise, and so far justly, that from the 
 " swan of Cambray " its author had learned 
 the secret of " painting by moral strokes," on 
 which he prided himself. The " Hebrew 
 truth," to speak with St. Jerome, had been 
 softened down into an idyl, which was not 
 truly Eastern, but which corresponded to the 
 decadent mood of Paul and Virginia^ and was
 
 Galilee and Afterwards 113 
 
 sometimes more than a little cloying in its 
 over-sweetness. 
 
 For that effect several reasons may be assigned. 
 Renan had never passed through the fire of a 
 passion that cleanses and heightens emotion. 
 Though the son of many prophets, he was no 
 prophet himself. His art is delicate rather 
 than sublime ; and of French sentiment the 
 danger has always been a pretty affectation 
 tending towards the madrigal. Again, he could 
 not, like the true magician, shoot his soul into 
 another form and there be something different 
 from what he was by nature. He drew 
 portraits by looking in the glass. He stays 
 with his readers and in front of them, hinting 
 how like the picture is to the painter by subtle 
 asides and a knowing smile. Without books, 
 having only Josephus and the Greek^New Testa- 
 ment at hand, dreaming open-eyed in divine 
 Galilee, the Breton fancied how things might 
 have seemed to him, had he been among the 
 disciples, on the Lake of Gennesareth, or as they 
 went through the Sabbath fields, and plucked 
 the ripe ears of corn. That which was in- 
 stantly admired, and which alone will not be 
 
 8
 
 114 Renan 
 
 forgotten, in the Lije of Jesus, was the Gali- 
 lean episode. The landscape gave birth to the 
 character, not any well-interpreted documents. 
 But again, the character may be traced in 
 Renan's own history with its varying stages ; 
 Brittany is the key to Nazareth, Paris shadows 
 forth Jerusalem. By " gently soliciting " the in- 
 spired text, as he admitted, or, says M. Seailles, 
 by arbitrary cuttings in it according as they 
 suited his purpose, Renan put together, in 
 mosaic fashion, a sentimental romance which 
 was coloured from end to end by his own 
 experience. 
 
 By divination, therefore, and by conjecture, 
 as he tells us at the outset, was a task so formid- 
 able to be fulfilled. Not that Renan con- 
 sidered it beyond his powers. He said in after 
 years, " I am the one man of my century that 
 has understood Jesus and St. Francis of Assisi." 
 The sketch of that " Umbrian Christ," which 
 he had already attempted, was a prelude to 
 this supreme endeavour. Yet neither sketch 
 nor masterpiece can be judged a triumph be- 
 fore the only court to which, in his Future of 
 Science, the author would have appealed. For
 
 Galilee and Afterwards 115 
 
 the facts do not lead up, as they ought, to the 
 explanation ; but, contrariwise, Renan starts 
 with an axiom a -priori before which the docu- 
 ments give way. He breaks up the unity of a 
 living spirit when he divides between the legend 
 and the truth, rejects the miraculous, and, 
 however more exquisitely than Voltaire, yet 
 on the same principles, brings down the life of 
 Saint or Saviour to a moral apologue. 
 
 These are not merely the views of orthodox 
 Christians. Strauss had resolved the Gospels 
 into a myth, no part of which could be verified, 
 because he felt that they must be taken or 
 left as a whole. George Eliot, his translator, 
 shared that opinion. She writes, slightly in 
 Mr. Casaubon's vein, " For minds acquainted 
 with the European culture of the last half- 
 century, Renan's book can furnish no new 
 result ; and they are likely to set little store by 
 the too facile construction of a life from 
 materials of which the biographical significance 
 becomes more dubious as they are more closely 
 examined." She would not, however, cast 
 utterly away the " Idea of Christ " ; she be- 
 lieved in a " sacred past of one woof with the
 
 ii6 ;?, 
 
 enan 
 
 human present." Renan might have echoed 
 these last words ; but, if he had no facts to go 
 upon, his volume was simply a mixture from 
 the painter's palette. Science, in that event, 
 would pass by on the other side. Or, again 
 to quote George Eliot, " this Vie de Jesus, and 
 still more, Renan's Letter to Berthelot, have com- 
 pelled me to give up the high estimate I had 
 formed of his mind." Artistic merit he cer- 
 tainly did possess ; but he was not, as she had 
 reckoned him, among the finest thinkers of 
 the time. 
 
 If such was the verdict uttered by one who 
 marched in the vanguard towards that " new 
 religion " called of Humanity, we may expect 
 from others, like Carlyle, who thought history 
 should deal with what had really happened, a 
 more emphatic condemnation. Carlyle disliked 
 the book, and wished it had not been written. 
 On the minds of German scholars, believing 
 as Tholuck, or sceptical as the later Strauss, it 
 left no trace discernible. " Das ist nichts," said 
 Tholuck, many days afterwards, to an American 
 inquirer. Ewald and Keim were severe upon 
 this romance, " whicli professed to deal with
 
 Galilee and Afterwards 117 
 
 great questions, but which answered none." And 
 though Renan protested against such criticism, 
 it was only an exception when Mommsen 
 declared him to be " a savant, in spite of his 
 beautiful style." Tubingen was yet in the 
 ascendant — a school " without tact or mea- 
 sure," said the French writer almost bitterly, 
 which carried its denials too far. But, we may 
 rejoin, was he not himself imaginative beyond 
 the letter of his documents ? " The striking 
 agreement of texts and situations, the wonder- 
 ful concord between the evangelical idea 
 and the country that served as its frame," 
 might be an argument when we had evidence 
 to bear it up ; and it had come to the traveller 
 as a revelation. Yet, surely, taken for the 
 ground of faith, topography was not enough. 
 To students, as to believers, Renan brought 
 no message. How, then, did he fare with his 
 own French public, in the " diocese of Sainte 
 Beuve," as it was wittily termed, where he 
 pontificated rather more than to austere free- 
 thinkers like Taine was pleasing ? 
 
 At first, loud and triumphant was their 
 acclaim. That which scandalized Christians
 
 1 1 8 Renan 
 
 gave them matter of exultation. In the 
 struggle for life and death between Catholics 
 and infidels, one Name had, as by tacit consent, 
 been respected. True, there was a literature 
 for the lower classes which went to every 
 length ; but hitherto, in chairs such as Renan 
 occupied, and in serious writings, the Gospels 
 were treated with decorum. A new thing had 
 come to pass. When the Romans besieged an 
 enemy's city, they called on its tutelar gods to 
 leave it and follow them to the Capitol. This 
 unhappy fugitive from the Christian altar was 
 busy with a like incantation. He desired to 
 make the Prophet of Nazareth an idealist who 
 had set him the example, a free spirit in revolt 
 against the hierarchy. The cause of Jesus was 
 to be severed from that of the Church and to 
 be identified with revolution. Who should seize 
 this flag was now the question. A merely 
 human Jesus would be ruin to all possible 
 creeds which rested on faith in God. That 
 was, undoubtedly, the issue at stake ; and how- 
 ever little prepared for so fresh a problem, 
 Catholics like Meignan, afterwards bishop 
 and cardinal of Tours, saw what they had to
 
 Galilee and Afterwards 119 
 
 encounter. The supernatural would be 
 vanquished if Jesus were left in His enemies' 
 keeping. 
 
 But rebels have never known how to deal 
 with a captive king, except to make away with 
 him, and so it proved now. Renan, in spite of 
 his art, which is especially cunning in its juxta- 
 position of elements not by nature agreeing, 
 fills the canvas with cloud when what we are 
 seeking is light. He cannot explain the mira- 
 culous. His wavering policy reduces it to 
 legend, misunderstanding, illusion, innocent 
 deceit ; all subterfuges of his own tempera- 
 ment, which was curiously insensible to the 
 abnormal, and, on this side, was not less frigid 
 than Hume's. Renan felt uneasy when he 
 heard men talk of Providence ; the touch of a 
 Divine Hand made him shiver. He meant as 
 decidedly as any Rationalist to clear away the 
 inexplicable in which the Gospels abound. 
 Then the dilemma returns — were those miracles 
 a concession to credulity, or were they sincerely 
 wrought ? Choose either alternative, but abide 
 by the consequences. A miracle-working teacher 
 would be fatal to Renan's scientific principles ;
 
 I20 7? 
 
 enan 
 
 a Jesus who was not sincere, though but a re- 
 luctant impostor, would be no pattern for 
 men to live by. Under the double strain, this 
 new construction falls to pieces. We grasp 
 in it no distinct figure, and that which, by 
 design, was to be the grandest of all literary 
 creations, melts into mist and shadow beyond 
 the domain of history when we compare it to 
 the Gospels. 
 
 In a sentence that drew smiles, Renan has 
 likened himself to the " fabulous beast of 
 Ctesias," one half of which devours the other 
 half. Contradiction he gloried in, when his 
 own reasoning led up to it, as a sign that he saw 
 all round the object. He said also that " the 
 real is a vast outrage on the ideal." Never- 
 theless, it is wisely observed that we must know 
 the life of Hamlet before we can invent a theory 
 of Hamlet. The application is immediate. 
 What did Renan mean by history when he 
 called it to M. Berthelot his " reason " ? If 
 not facts that had taken place, and men that 
 had thought and wrought them, could it be 
 other than an idle dream ? To this note of 
 interrogation his answer is, " What you will."
 
 MADAM li ERNES r KENAN. 
 From a /tainting by Ary SchcJTt'r.
 
 Galilee and Afterwards 1 2 i 
 
 He cannot be sure, as we have seen repeatedly, 
 whether he criticizes dogma because it is im- 
 possible, or because it may be convicted of 
 falsehood. Sometimes his argument runs, 
 " Every alleged miracle is a legend " ; but 
 again he lets that fall to insist on discrepancies 
 in the evidence. He is realist and idealist by 
 turns. The illuminating vision of a Thucy- 
 dides, the insight of a Shakespeare when 
 moving over the stage of time, he never had. 
 
 It is significant that, whether dealing with 
 Old Testament or New, not a hint drops from 
 his pen which has proved fertile of undiscovered 
 truths regarding either. He waits upon the 
 Germans, Baur or Strauss or Wellhausen, from 
 whose conjectures he may glean for his poetry 
 of the Bible. He has cleared up no difficulties, 
 started no investigations, fixed no disputable 
 points of custom or language. His contribu- 
 tion to the Gospel is a dissolving view where 
 the hallucinated writer infects with his fancies 
 a reader who is taken by delightful words. His 
 sympathies even for the highest are inter- 
 mittent. He loves the Jesus of Galilee ; when 
 the last days come at Jerusalem and a tragic
 
 122 R 
 
 e?ian 
 
 note is sounded, too deep for his calm temper, 
 he hesitates, is bewildered, and turns from the 
 scene. He cannot endure a crucified Christ, 
 or allow any substance to a risen one. The 
 glory of Jesus, he affirms, does not consist in 
 His being relegated beyond history ; a true 
 devotion will show that all history is incom- 
 prehensible without Him. Yet this " capital 
 event in the world's record," unique as it is 
 confessed to be, our fifth evangelist leaves 
 unresolved into its only adequate causes. For 
 neither Christian nor Antichristian has ac- 
 cepted the phantom, which is all that Renan 
 presents to them as an historical reality. 
 
 In truth, we cannot, to please George Eliot 
 or any of her school, divide " the idea of Christ " 
 from '' the man Jesus." As well might we 
 attempt to understand Christianity itself, with- 
 out following back its pedigree in Israel to 
 the Hebrew prophets. But Renan, by appeal- 
 ing at one time to the pure idea and at 
 another to the Gospel story, on no fixed 
 principle of which we can take account, has 
 evaporated into ether that supreme personality 
 which is the incarnation of both.
 
 Galilee a7id Afterwards 123 
 
 It has been lately said of Kenan's Lije of 
 "Jesus that it is " by far the most subtle attempt 
 ever made to deprive Christ of His divine 
 attributes, and reduce Him to the level of a 
 mere philosopher or dreamer." So much may 
 be granted, and no manipulation of epithets, 
 designedly vague, will restore the true linea- 
 ments on a canvas like this, the ground-tone of 
 which is mere Nature. On the other hand, 
 from a scandal so arresting, and of such pro- 
 portions, which has been perpetuated in thirty- 
 three editions at home, with translations and 
 cheap issues in every European language, one 
 result, hardly anticipated by its author, is 
 becoming daily more evident. The Lije of 
 Christ, passing from technical theology, from 
 catechisms and sermons, into literature, vindi- 
 cates to itself an importance as the first in 
 every sense of human biographies, and the 
 centre of history. Between sacred and pro- 
 fane the old wall of division has been broken 
 down. It is impossible for any man to explain 
 the world without fixing his regard on Jesus. 
 He is real to the present generation, even of 
 those who do not believe, as He never was to
 
 124 Re7ian 
 
 the Voltairian or the free-thinker of a previous 
 age. Theologians comprehend, in a more vivid 
 fashion than ever before, that creeds and dog- 
 mas are but aspects of His words, His works, 
 His personality. Critics know that they have 
 to deal with Him as a fact. And the relation 
 of Church and Testament is explored on all 
 sides, with a view to discovering the Founder 
 in the institution, and to bring out His truth 
 in the record. 
 
 No " Life," indeed, undertaken by a modern, 
 is likely to satisfy the demands both of critical 
 science and of vital religion ; yet none, perhaps, 
 has been entirely a failure. Of Kenan's own 
 it must be allowed that the Galilean pages are 
 often exquisite as landscape, or setting, or em- 
 broidery on a theme which was constantly too 
 great for him. If we take his point of view, 
 the everlasting splendour of Deity fades from 
 that countenance ; but there is left a simple 
 yet profound sense of joy in this renewal of 
 the world's youth, amid a flowering Paradise, 
 where the disciples troop about their Master, 
 and He awakens in them all the qualities that 
 were soon to be called Christian — humility,
 
 Galilee and Afterwards 125 
 
 faith, detachment, an eager looking for the 
 Kingdom of God. It is a pastoral play over 
 which floats the music of the Beatitudes ; a 
 story that runs into parables and delights in 
 imagery caught from the life around, from lake 
 and field, springtide and harvest, while the 
 fierce hubbub of an unregenerate world sounds 
 only as a murmur afar off. All this Renan 
 touches with a pencil the effect of which is 
 often something too soft ; we are put in mind 
 of the Caracci ; but he succeeds admirably in 
 what Catholic writers term the " composition 
 of place," or the framework for devout medita- 
 tion. 
 
 He is, of course, not equal to the loftier task 
 of delineating character. At no time has 
 he set before us any other than his own. 
 Trained in the seminary to abstract reasoning, 
 brought up on texts and analysis, busy with 
 small points of criticism, and not very observant 
 of life as he went his way, the student could 
 never be a creator. He is not direct enough 
 in his strokes, nor can he deliver them with 
 force and sharpness enough, to fix on our 
 memories a clear outline. We should never
 
 12 6 Renan 
 
 have known Jesus or His chosen followers, had 
 we to learn our Gospel for the first time in these 
 chapters, which engage us while we read them, 
 but which melt into a summer-cloud when 
 we have laid the book aside. 
 
 Though by temper sceptical, Renan was not 
 disposed to follow his German guides to their 
 extreme conclusions. When he has to tell of 
 the last scenes at Jerusalem, he quotes the 
 Gospel of St. John as, to a large extent, 
 authentic ; he accepts the episode of Bethany- 
 more or less from his hands ; the discourses, 
 we are told, cannot be relied upon, but 
 the facts were familiar to the Fourth Evan- 
 gelist. A position so conservative roused up 
 the younger Teutons ; and in later editions 
 Renan yielded somewhat under their attack. 
 But he maintained always that, however per- 
 plexing the Johannine problem might be, there 
 was no reasonable ground for dissociating 
 the Apostle from a work which embodied 
 his reminiscences. And he thought a more 
 moderate view would tone down the " rigour 
 and vigour," as Matthew Arnold termed 
 it, of Baur's absolute denials. This, thanks
 
 Galilee and Afterwards 127 
 
 to fresh documents and a less airy method, 
 has actually come to pass. Arnold himself, 
 though no great authority as regards evi- 
 dence, was much too fine a critic not to per- 
 ceive that in the themes of the Fourth Gospel 
 a kinship may be established with what we 
 possess in the other three. If, as Renan is 
 never tired of repeating, Jesus " was more than 
 the reformer of an old religion," if He created 
 " the everlasting religion of humanity," then 
 His assertions about Himself in St. John are 
 inevitable echoes of words uttered in the vehe- 
 ment disputes at Jerusalem which led up to 
 the end. He who declared Himself to be the 
 Messiah, could not but claim the powers and 
 attributes of which those discourses are so 
 emphatic in their ascription to Him. Such 
 claims are already visible in the Synoptics ; 
 and nothing else would suffice to account for 
 the charges on which Jesus was condemned 
 to death by the Jewish Sanhedrim. 
 
 Our Gospels take us on to the Resurrection. 
 But Renan pauses when Calvary is reached. 
 For him the Son of Man now enters into the 
 ideal, which becomes a kind of immortality. He
 
 128 R 
 
 enan 
 
 addresses Christ on the cross in terms of 
 passionate recognition. " Thou, " he exclaims, 
 " art destined to become the corner-stone of 
 Humanity in such wise that to tear Thy name 
 from this world, would be to shake it to its 
 foundations." And he concludes by saying that 
 " whatever be the unexpected events of the 
 future, Jesus will never be surpassed. His 
 worship will renew its youth unceasingly ; 
 his legend will call forth tears without end ; 
 his sufferings will touch the best of hearts ; all 
 ages will proclaim that among the sons of men 
 a greater was never born than Jesus."
 
 Chapter V 
 
 IN ST. PAUL'S FOOTSTEPS 
 
 WHILE his book was making such a 
 stir, Renan with his family had 
 been enjoying a summer expedi- 
 tion to Dinard, from which they went on, in 
 August 1863, to Jersey. He had resolved not 
 to answer his critics ; but he wrote, not quite 
 in his usual temper, to a Scottish friend, 
 Mr. (now Sir Mountstuart) Grant Duff, 
 " Sometimes, I confess, when I observe the 
 rage that my volume has provoked among the 
 orthodox, I almost repent of having published 
 it. I did not expect so much passion or party 
 spirit. However, what I have done was in 
 absolute sincerity." His friend Berthelot, not 
 many days later, told him, " When you come 
 back, you will not be merely assailed with 
 small troubles ; look out for a storm of con- 
 tradiction and hatred : — pope, archbishops,
 
 130 Renan 
 
 bishops, cures, deacons and subdeacons, not to 
 speak of the third order and the sons of ex- 
 Liberals. But you will get the upper hand of 
 all that by holding to your opinions ; Voltaire 
 stood out well, without much persecution. 
 But you are in for it as long as you live ; and 
 you will escape persecution simply if you never 
 flinch. Your name will be conspicuous in the 
 nineteenth century, as the philosophers were in 
 the eighteenth. The insistence and lasting 
 hatred of Catholics will suffice to point out 
 your way." 
 
 Berthelot added that the Empress Eugenie, 
 who of course did not share Renan's views, 
 defended his freedom as a writer ; but that 
 neither friend nor foe expected the resumption 
 of his lectures at the College de France. The 
 lecturer was not daunted. He might be 
 deprived of his chair, but the public would 
 buy and read him ; a strong body of opinion, 
 which had its centre in Paris, would back him 
 up. M. Taschereau had offered him a position 
 as Under-Keeper of MSS. in the Imperial 
 Library, where he was formerly an assistant, 
 with seven thousand francs a year ; but he
 
 In St. PauPs Footsteps 131 
 
 could not hold it and continue to be professor 
 of Hebrew. He had answered by a distinct 
 refusal on that very ground. He thought of 
 demanding from M. Duruy permission to open 
 a " free course " ; if that were not allowed, 
 he would come forward as a Parliamentary 
 candidate for Pans. Berthelot, who was in 
 close relations with Government, replied to 
 his friend that the Emperor minded very little 
 about the lectures in themselves, but it was 
 a question of public order, and they would 
 inevitably lead to disturbance. " France," he 
 said, " is in no condition to hear scientific 
 truth without passion one way or the other ; 
 I am not sure that other countries would 
 be more patient under the circumstances in 
 which you announce it, and which are not those 
 of abstract erudition." Kenan's work had 
 been great and successful ; but reaction could 
 not be avoided. The Lije of Jesus was not a 
 Life of Buddha ; it implied " an action of 
 propaganda,'' which the other did not. Far 
 from being engaged in pure science, Renan 
 found himself in the midst of battle. So 
 judged his most intimate acquaintance ; and
 
 132 Re7ia7i 
 
 we ought not to overlook that judgment when 
 the champion of unbelief deprecates, as we 
 have seen, the rage of party spirit that had 
 been stirred up against him. Had he not 
 stirred it up himself ? 
 
 The rest of the story is soon told. In 
 July 1862 the professor, on being silenced, had 
 addressed to his colleagues a letter which was 
 much more of an explanation than an apology, 
 as regarded his inaugural lecture. He pleaded 
 for perfect freedom as a scientific man to 
 express whatever he thought to be true, pro- 
 vided his language was respectful towards the 
 object of it and kept clear of religious contro- 
 versy. There had never existed in the College 
 de France a chair of divinity proper. That 
 lay institution, founded by Francis I, aimed at 
 learning rather than teaching ; it investigated 
 and explored. What Renan himself intended 
 was a course of Hebrew literature as such ; 
 and if he had drawn upon general considerations 
 in beginning it, he did but follow the ordinary 
 custom. For his method he appealed to 
 Reuchlin, Henri Etienne and Descartes, who 
 were scholars but did not pretend to be
 
 In St. PauPs Footsteps 133 
 
 theologians ; as for the condition which deter- 
 mined his handling of the Bible, that also was 
 scientific, namely, the exclusion of miracles or 
 the supernatural from all arguments which 
 dealt with facts. And he proceeded to quote 
 M. Littre, the Positivist, whose words to this 
 effect were constantly on his lips. But to 
 separate religion from the supernatural was 
 not to be irreligious. The notion of miracles 
 was a lost cause. He ended by saying that he 
 would not be stopped by any one and that he 
 could wait. If to-day ten people would not 
 listen while he spoke, to-morrow ten thousand 
 would read what he had written. In 1863 his 
 prophecy had been more than fulfilled ; but 
 he was not to lecture again in the chair of 
 Hebrew for many years. 
 
 His Liberal friends were now anxious that 
 he should come out as a candidate in Paris for 
 the Corps Legislatif. But in face of a strong 
 opposition. Conservative as well as Catholic, he 
 had no chance. It is difhcult to imagine Renan 
 as a popular chief ; he was better guided by 
 instinct when he turned his back on the 
 insignificant party-strifes of the next few years,
 
 134 Re?ian 
 
 and visited the cradle-lands of Christianity 
 once more. In November 1864 he arrived at 
 Alexandria on his way to the East. By this 
 time his quarrel with Government had passed 
 into the fifth and last act. On June 2 the 
 world had been informed, by means of an 
 official report in the Moniteur, that a new 
 chair of Comparative Philology would absorb 
 the funds previously allocated to the chair of 
 Hebrew. But by way of compensation, M. 
 Renan was named Assistant-Keeper of MSS. — 
 an offer which he had rejected nine months 
 earlier. 
 
 That very day he sent to the Minister of 
 Education a polite but scathing letter, declin- 
 ing the functions thrust upon him, and firm 
 in his contention that he had never been 
 deprived of his post. He had not given up 
 teaching ; as for the stipend which was paid 
 him, " science," he said, " takes into account 
 the results achieved, not the carrying out more 
 or less punctually of a regulation ; if, iVI. Ic 
 Ministrc, you ever make it a reproach that the 
 scientific man who does honour to his country 
 has not earned the poor allowance which the
 
 /;/ Sf. PauTs Footsteps 135 
 
 State doles out to him, believe me, he will 
 answer you as I do at this moment, and after 
 an illustrious example, ' Pecunia tua tecum sit.' 
 Apply then, M. le Ministre, the funds voted 
 for the chair of Hebrew, Chaldee, and Syriac 
 to any purpose you think proper. I shall keep 
 the title which I owe to the double presenta- 
 tion of the professors in the College de France 
 and my colleagues at the Institute. Without 
 a stipend I will discharge the duties laid on me 
 by that title, and do my utmost to promote 
 the studies entrusted to my keeping." 
 
 This challenge was answered by a fresh 
 decree signed " Napoleon," in the Moniteur 
 of June 12, which cancelled Renan's appoint- 
 ment to the Imperial Library, and relieved 
 him of his duties in the College de France. 
 No reasons were given. But every one recog- 
 nized that, after the Fie de Jesus had taken 
 its place among European books as an event of 
 the first magnitude, its author could not hope 
 to escape reprisals in a country where, as he 
 said, all questions ran into politics. Until the 
 Second Empire fell, Renan was in opposition 
 to the Government, though he became an
 
 136 Re?tan 
 
 _. , ■ ■ — -. , ^.. — -■— » ■ .. ^^ ■ .■■ ■■■■ — 
 
 intimate friend of some among the Bonapartes. 
 He greatly admired Prince Jerome Napoleon ; 
 he was on familiar terms, as a frequent guest, 
 with the Princess Mathilde, whose genius he 
 rated very high, and whose drawing-room at 
 St. Gratien was a centre of artistic and literary 
 meetings. Before 1863 Renan might have 
 claimed the reputation of a scholar among 
 scholars ; the French public did not know 
 him. From that climacteric year of the 
 nineteenth century, which proved, thanks to 
 the Mexican adventure, to be a fatal one 
 for the House of Bonaparte, his renown 
 went on increasing. 
 
 He was just turned forty. His character 
 had not lost its firmness ; he meditated 
 volumes more solid and erudite than the 
 unsubstantial romance by which he had 
 achieved a doubtful fame as the Celsus of a 
 new Paganism, loftily patronizing what be- 
 lievers adored. Antiquity was his subject, 
 sunshine his element. On his first expedi- 
 tion to Palestine he went as a poet ; from his 
 second he came back an historian, always 
 indeed mixing his own dreams with realities,
 
 /;/ &. PaiiPs Footsteps 137 
 
 but writing over again the Roman annals 
 where they touched the Christian in a style no 
 less delicate than persuasive. Yet on these 
 delightful undertakings events of the darkest 
 tragedy were to cast their shadow. 
 
 From Alexandria, which he found " dirty, 
 hideous, vulgar, disgusting in its immorality, 
 baseness, and deformity," Renan wrote in 
 November 1864 to Berthelot that he was on 
 his way to Cairo and the Pyramids. All he 
 intended was a flying visit ; but M. Mariette, 
 who directed the French excavations — a man 
 of rare charm and scholarship — led him along 
 the Nile for five hundred miles, as far as the 
 First Cataract. He suflFcrcd a little from 
 sunstroke at Thebes, but was otherwise in 
 excellent health and spirits, eager to see every- 
 thing like an indefatigable tourist, and sending 
 to the Journal des Debats an account of it 
 all, which is still pleasant reading. 
 
 He was infinitely curious about the ancient 
 world. Its greatness never failed to carry 
 him away ; for, like Newman, he did not 
 believe it had been surpassed by later civili- 
 sations. Henceforth, more than ever, his
 
 138 Renaft 
 
 tone is that of a Greek, nay, an Athenian 
 who composes in French because the Attic 
 idiom would find no readers, and who among 
 his modern acquaintance is a survival from 
 the age of Pericles. Well as he understood 
 Hebrew, the attitude in which he drew nigh 
 to Prophet or Apostle was by no means sym- 
 pathetic. Their burning enthusiasm repelled 
 him ; so vehement a style he could not away 
 with ; he thought them even a little wanting 
 in good manners. Such was the frame of 
 mind in which Renan set forth to trace the 
 life and journeyings of St. Paul. 
 
 Madame Renan went with her husband, who 
 could not bear to travel by himself. The 
 children, Ary and Noemi, were left at home. 
 From Beyrout, in a January which might have 
 been April, the pilgrims rode through anemones 
 and cyclamens on their " sweet sad expedition " 
 to Amschit, where Henriette lay buried. They 
 were welcomed by patriarch and people with 
 open arms. 
 
 The tomb was on a slope of Lebanon, 
 between two valleys from which the sea was 
 visible, and the port of Byblos, encumbered
 
 In St. PauPs Footsteps 139 
 
 with ruins, towards the suuth. All round about 
 flourished vines, olive-groves, and palms, while 
 the mountains which closed in the horizon 
 were covered with snow. Renan had thought 
 of giving his beloved sister a separate grave and 
 of raising a monument over it. But Zakhia the 
 jMaronite pleaded hard that she might rest in 
 the sepulchre of his family, and so it was deter- 
 mined. In the chapel not far off, at Kenan's 
 petition. Mass was celebrated according to that 
 ancient Syrian rite, the whole village joining 
 in. " This for me is now holy ground," he 
 wrote to Berthelot ; " I shall come back again ; 
 I have left there one of the best parts of my- 
 self." Only those who compare the Epicurean 
 of his latter years with Henriette's brother as 
 he w^as during her lifetime, will measure how 
 truly he spoke. 
 
 Damascus, " melancholy and sombre," was 
 the next stage. " I have fixed my horizon," 
 lie wrote again to his friend in Paris, " for the 
 scene of St. Paul's conversion. It came to 
 pass in a great cultivated plain, perhaps in the 
 midst of gardens. We must certainly put 
 aside the notion of an outward accident \ tlic
 
 140 Re7tan 
 
 whole thing took place in the man himself." 
 Berthelot had informed him of an event 
 which was then hotly discussed — the publica- 
 tion by Pius IX of his Encyclical Quanta Cura, 
 with its appended Syllabus, in which the 
 author of the famous Life had his own portion. 
 Kenan's observations in reply, dated from 
 Alexandretta, January 22, 1865, make so 
 highly significant a forecast of things which 
 have since fallen out, or which seem likely 
 to happen, that it deserves to be quoted. 
 He predicts a strong Galilean reaction sup- 
 ported by the State ; but a national Church 
 in France could never live happily, for it 
 would be worse than the present situation. 
 A schism was inevitable, not external, but 
 within the Church itself. " In three or four 
 years the Galilean party of Darboy, etc., will 
 cease to exist." This, we may remark, came 
 about after 1870 and the Vatican Council. 
 Renan continues, " There will be two factions 
 of Catholics enraged against each other, one 
 wild with reaction, the other entangled in a 
 network of changes, and really Protestant. At 
 last the State will draw itself out of these
 
 In St. PaiiTs Footsteps 141 
 
 disputes, and separation will take place. But 
 all that will bring about strange troubles 
 (dechirements), which will occupy the end of 
 this century." Renan was by no means 
 always a true prophet ; but the man who set 
 down these lines forty years ago had the gift 
 of vision. 
 
 To Antioch they went in fair weather — a 
 difficult journey ; thence by sea to Athens, 
 where the travellers arrived in February 1865. 
 This was a culminating moment in Renan's 
 life. He saw now " the absolute perfection 
 of the Greek ideals," and he felt dazzled 
 by their profound, their infinite charm. He 
 could not tear himself away from the Acro- 
 polis ; Athena became to him the symbol of 
 beauty, intellect, wisdom ; and he poured 
 forth his prayer in ecstatic smiling dithyrambs 
 to his Greek Madonna, with a fervour that 
 would have touched Sophocles. The lovely 
 Erechtheum wins his admiration at once ; but 
 he comes only by degrees to understand 
 how great, how majestic, is the Parthenon. 
 In a vivid page he groups the monuments, 
 and then continues, " The spirit of all that
 
 142 Renan 
 
 has been excellently rendered by Michelet. 
 His Athens is perfectly right. The incom- 
 parable superiority of the Greek world, the 
 true and simple grandeur of all it has left 
 behind, that is what strikes one on every side. 
 '^here are the real ' great men,' and I am less 
 attentive to the want of literary talent in a 
 certain preface " — which Napoleon III had 
 just then published to his fragment on Julius 
 Caesar — " than to the limited horizon which 
 prevents its author from seeing beyond the 
 Roman world. That, by the bye, is a French 
 peculiarity. France can never travel farther 
 than Rome. Whatever it has attempted in 
 the guise of Hellenic art has always been 
 Roman." 
 
 The longer Syrian exploration had to be 
 given up. From Athens to Smyrna is a short 
 and not unpleasant voyage, which after six 
 weeks in Attica Renan undertook. He went 
 by rail to Ephesus, and then " plunged," as he 
 said, into Asia Minor, in quest of the Apostolic 
 Churches. It was a hazardous thing to do, 
 but the fine-toned landscapes which adorn his 
 5/. Paul^ especially those of the Lycian interior,
 
 I?i St. Patd's Footsteps 143 
 
 rewarded him and his brave companion for 
 their fatigues. He attempted, on his home- 
 ward journey, to reach the harbour of Patmos 
 from Scala Nova ; winds and waves did 
 battle against him, and, after tossing about 
 for fifty-two hours on rough waters, he 
 was compelled to turn back. 
 
 At Smyrna we find our travellers once 
 more, on May 6, 1865, bound for Athens a 
 second time. They saw Mycenae, Tiryns, 
 Corinth ; embarked for Salonica ; traversed 
 Macedonia during a favourable season ; and 
 ended at Constantinople a series of expeditions 
 which would have done credit to Layard or 
 Burton. What Renan said in disparagement 
 of Stamboul, much as he admired Saint Sophia 
 and the picturesque of sea and shore, is worth 
 reading. Fresh from the glories of Athens, he 
 could not bear the city which Constantine set 
 up *' to be the everlasting capital of intrigue 
 and baseness." He would never come there 
 again. 
 
 On this word his correspondence with 
 Berthelot breaks off until the eve of 1870, 
 although we possess long and interesting
 
 144 Ren an 
 
 letters written to him by the now illustrious 
 chemist who, in October 1869, 'Accompanied 
 the Empress Eugenie, when she went to 
 Egypt for the opening of that new waterway 
 between East and West, the Suez Canal. 
 
 But our concern is with Renan the historian. 
 Les Afbtres came out in 1866, St. Paul in 1869 '■> 
 and these form a connected narrative which 
 has a unity of its own. To Les A-pHres was 
 prefixed one of those fascinating but super- 
 ficial prologues wherein the writer discoursed 
 pleasantly of himself, his authorities, and 
 things in general. It is a very pretty piece, 
 sparkling with irony, gracious to the " good 
 Luke," whose Gospel and Acts had been too 
 much undervalued, and eloquent on the 
 claims of religious peace, which could always 
 be secured by giving up a little more dogma. 
 During the stormy scenes of the French 
 National Assembly there was an incident, 
 tragi-comic and quite without consequence, 
 known as " le baiser de Lamourette," which 
 Carlyle translates as " the Delilah kiss." We 
 are put in mind of it when M. Renan, 
 whose deity is in the making, entreats
 
 In St, PatiPs Footsteps 145 
 
 Christians of every colour to defend their 
 interests by sacrificing all their principles. 
 
 From a spirit so curiously insensible to 
 the real issue, we shall not look for any 
 treatment of the Resurrection more profound 
 than the despised eighteenth century had 
 bequeathed to him. Renan's language is 
 tender, nay, unctuous — we cannot escape the 
 recurring epithet — but he alternates, like a son 
 of the Aujkldrung^ between theories of impos- 
 ture and theories of expectant delusion. He 
 will not accept the witness, as it has been 
 called, of the empty tomb ; he declines the 
 force of St. Paul's spiritual experience. When 
 he needs delusion, he summons up Mary 
 Magdalene, " queen and patroness of idealists," 
 by whose dream on Easter morning the 
 world has won its vision of joy. But im- 
 posture claims its turn ; " quelque petite 
 supercherie," some trifling act of trickery, 
 some pious fraud, must have taken place 
 on the part of disciples unknown, who 
 were certainly not victims of hallucina- 
 tion. Let us not look too narrowly into the 
 facts, he says, any more than we did when 
 
 10
 
 146 Renan 
 
 the mighty works of Christ were in question. 
 Only by such ambiguous means can a religion 
 be founded ; not by clean-handed philosophers, 
 but by men and women of the people, who 
 create the gods before which they afterwards 
 fall down in worship. 
 
 So much for the " empty tomb." What, 
 we ask, on leaving this cloud-land of illusion, 
 extravagance, and fever-dreams, are we to make 
 of St. Paul, who cannot have cherished antici- 
 pations about Jesus, for he never set eyes on 
 Him in the flesh, and who breathed out 
 threatenings and slaughter against His fol- 
 lowers ? Can St. Paul be explained away 
 under a psychological rubric borrowed from 
 physicians ? 
 
 Renan does not like to be cross-examined 
 in so rude a fashion. By judicious mingling 
 of times and seasons, by reading back into 
 the Pharisee that which the Apostle has told 
 us of his later ecstasies, by supposing him 
 to have been a neurotic subject from his 
 youth up, and by comparing this sudden 
 change, effected without visible antecedents, 
 to Lamennais' apostasy, which took years to
 
 In St. PauPs Footsteps 147 
 
 accomplish, the story-teller gets rid of a 
 miracle that in its circumstances was no less 
 beyond what we have learned about the laws 
 of Nature than was the Resurrection itself. 
 Any incident, he assures us, will suffice when 
 we can take refuge in psychology — a thunder- 
 storm, the noonday heat, the coming on of 
 a fever such as Renan had himself experienced 
 at Amschit, That nothing of the kind is 
 mentioned by St. Paul or in the Acts can 
 make no difference. Revelation not being 
 admissible, hallucination is the only key to a 
 portent of which the witness may not be set 
 down as a deliberate impostor. 
 
 Yet, as is well known, Ferdinand Christian 
 Baur could never feel satisfied that this was 
 the true account of Saul's conversion. The 
 Apostle, who told his own story again and 
 again, had but one explanation, from which 
 he did not draw back in any presence. But 
 to allow it, Renan must have accepted the 
 existence of a spiritual unseen world encom- 
 passing the world in which we live and move. 
 That was impossible. He could never grant 
 that an intellect superior to the human was
 
 148 R 
 
 e7ian 
 
 extant in the universe, or that death of the 
 body did not involve extinction of the spirit. 
 His great first principle, which admitted only of 
 " phenomena," and was identical with Comte's, 
 carried with it these consequences. To a 
 deeper science they appear singularly inade- 
 quate, and even incredible, as they are surely 
 destructive of all that mankind has cherished 
 under the name of religion. 
 
 These defects, which for ever divide Renan 
 from the company of spiritual seers in whose 
 light humanity lives, must not blind us to his 
 merits as an artist, a scholar, and an historian. 
 The insatiable curiosity of a spirit untamed 
 was learning to concentrate its powers on one 
 subject, enough for a lifetime, the transforma- 
 tion of the Roman Empire into the Holy 
 Catholic Church. During eighteen years 
 Renan was intent on this great epic, which he 
 viewed in all its stages and at every centre 
 where it had left a record. In dedicating 
 5^. Faul to his wife, Cornelie, he says, " We 
 have seen together Ephesus and Antioch, 
 Philippi and Thessalonica, Athens and Corinth, 
 Colossae and Laodicaea. ... At Seleucia,
 
 In St. PauPs Footsteps 149 
 
 standing on the disjointed stones of its ancient 
 mole, we felt a little envious of the Apostles, 
 who there set sail to conquer the world, full 
 of a burning faith in the Kingdom of God." 
 He was already familiar with Rome, to 
 which those hopes and fears had all converged. 
 He lived day by day among the reminiscences 
 of antiquity. His own large reading, the con- 
 sultation of experts in Eastern lore, and the 
 insight which his Catholic bringing up had 
 given him into the circumstances that call 
 forth new religious associations, fitted him 
 admirably for some part of his task. Unlike 
 Gibbon, he is reverent in dealing with Saints 
 and Martyrs ; but he cannot, like Gibbon, 
 draw a strong and lively picture in a few 
 firm strokes. His descriptions are pictur- 
 esque ; his personages, on the other hand, 
 leave us uncertain whether we should know 
 them if they suddenly came before us. 
 In grasping the moral and social causes 
 to which Christianity owed its triumph, 
 he is far more successful. Yet, even here, 
 when he traces the decline of Paganism, 
 especially among the Greeks, he might have
 
 T 5 o Renan 
 
 borrowed with advantage from Plutarch and 
 Pausanias details, both light and sombre, 
 which would have added to the somewhat low 
 relief of too abstract a style. 
 
 Always by preference classic, and even, one 
 may say, Catholic, as opposed to the Protestant 
 of a fierce controversial type, Renan, who 
 looked upon St. Paul as the father of Luther 
 and Calvin, as a Hebrew in his very revolt 
 from what was afterwards the Talmud, and as 
 a theologian who justified the whole scheme 
 of sin and redemption, could not forbear to 
 exhibit the great Apostle in a crude light. 
 
 St. Paul's outward and inward man are to 
 this worshipper of Apollo equally displeasing, 
 and on the same ground, their lack of beauti- 
 ful form. Trusting to late works, for instance, 
 the Philopatris, the writer indulges himself in 
 a caricature which might very well describe 
 Thersites, but is surely not worthy of a place 
 in history. We know better how to judge of 
 a style which is not apocryphal like this 
 fancied portrait, but which lies open to our 
 view in St. Paul's Epistles. It is, we grant, 
 neither Attic nor Ionic ; yet it is endowed with
 
 In St, PaiiPs Footsteps 151 
 
 energy so astonishing that for eighteen hun- 
 dred years it has borne to be read in all the 
 churches without losing any of its power. 
 
 Renan, who detested writing letters, al- 
 lowed to St. Paul this inferior kind of com- 
 position ; it " suited his feverish activity, his 
 need of expressing in a moment what he felt." 
 And the critic sums him up, " Lively, rude, 
 polished, mischievous, sarcastic, then all at once 
 tender, delicate, almost pretty and coaxing, 
 with phrases happy and subtle in a high de- 
 gree, toning down his manner with reticences, 
 reservations, infinite safeguards, sly allusions, 
 cloaked ironies, he could not but excel in a 
 manner which is, before all things, spontaneous. 
 The epistolary turn of St. Paul is the most 
 individual that ever was. His language, so to 
 speak, is brayed in a mortar ; no two sentences 
 follow in succession. It would be impossible 
 for any one to set aside more boldly the logic, 
 I do not say of Greek, but of human speech 
 altogether. We might call it a rapid conver- 
 sation taken down in shorthand, then repeated 
 without corrections." 
 
 But in spite of his marvellously ardent
 
 152 Renan 
 
 spirit, the Apostle has no great store of 
 phrases. " A single word haunts him " ; he 
 will come back to it in season and out of 
 season for a whole page ; " not that his mind 
 is barren, it is only troubled ; he never thinks 
 a second time about style." Hence, con- 
 cludes Renan, his Epistles, though strikingly 
 original, have no charm. Nevertheless, a 
 judge as competent as the French critic, we 
 mean Cardinal Newman, dwells on St. Paul's 
 " gift of sympathy," and goes so far as to 
 call him, " this sweetest of inspired writers, 
 this most touching and winning of teachers." 
 Such, too, was the opinion of St. John 
 Chrysostom, who, as a Syrian and a Greek 
 orator, was pecuharly intimate with the 
 Pauline temperament. 
 
 Not, then, a great artist, according to Renan, 
 the Apostle is likewise not a learned Hellene ; 
 nor a mystic, although rapt to the third 
 Heaven ; nor is he eminently a saint. He 
 stands far behind the " friends of Jesus," who 
 founded the Christian tradition and wrote the 
 Gospels. He is the man of action, the con- 
 quering missionary, " fierce, harsh, difiicult,"
 
 
 >
 
 /;/ St. PauFs Footsteps 153 
 
 abounding in dogmas and formulas, not in 
 gracious parables like the divine Master ; liis 
 very faith is a struggle. But he had the genius 
 to discern that, if ever men embraced a univer- 
 sal religion, it would not be one in which the 
 rites and ceremonies of Judaism were made 
 obligatory on all nations. How different from 
 Mohammed, whose disciples cannot live out- 
 side certain degrees of latitude, and whose 
 teaching everywhere betrays the influence of 
 Arab customs and the desert ? St. Paul, in 
 this view, is the second founder of Christianity ; 
 when he pursues the track of Jewish propa- 
 ganda from synagogue to synagogue along the 
 shores of the Mediterranean, he is fulfilling 
 the ancient prophecies that made of Israel an 
 apostle to the Gentiles. He did more than 
 write the first chapter of dogmatic theology in 
 his Roman Letter ; he taught the West how it 
 might be Christian, yet escape from the yoke 
 of a foreign law ; and by so doing he substi- 
 tuted Rome for Jerusalem, the Vatican for 
 Mount Zion, as " the mountain of the Lord, 
 the house of the God of Jacob." 
 
 To travel with St. Paul on his missionary
 
 154 Renan 
 
 voyages has been a favourite occupation in 
 modern books. We cannot undertake, as 
 Renan did, to visit those ruined cities : An- 
 tioch, with its amphitheatre of hills ; the 
 valley of the Lycus or the Maeander ; Ephesus, 
 the shrine of Artemis ; Alexandria Troas, or 
 Philippi, standing out boldly in its fruitful 
 plain. Paul before the Areopagus offers to 
 our view a contrast to which only Paul in the 
 presence of Nero may suggest a parallel. 
 These are two moments in history when the 
 drama of a world's fate is shown openly on the 
 stage. But Renan is not to be captivated by 
 that exquisite pleading in the seventeenth of 
 Acts on behalf of the " unknown God," whose 
 revelation was at hand. All he can perceive 
 is a " small ugly Jew " decreeing that the 
 marble gods and their temples thall pass away ; 
 an " iconoclast " whose eyes are shut to the 
 beauty which he condemns, and who takes 
 Athena for an idol. 
 
 The artist in Renan cries out with tears 
 against that sacrilege. Yet he was aware, for 
 he had read Aristophanes, that no degree of 
 culture, however finely expressed, no statues
 
 In St. PauVs Footsteps 155 
 
 or poems, though supremely fair, could save 
 the Athenians from unspeakable degradation. 
 St. Paul knew it better than he, not by- 
 studying antique remains on the spot or in 
 dead museums, but by an experience which 
 daily and hourly came before his eyes in 
 every city of that corrupt world. Culture, 
 says our critic, was unable to believe in the 
 Resurrection. Nevertheless, he observes, in 
 the discourse of St. Paul on the Hill of Mars, 
 we are witnessing a first attempt to reconcile 
 the supernatural with science, to translate 
 Christian and Jewish thought into Greek ; 
 Clement of Alexandria and Origen were to 
 follow the example by and by. But the 
 reconciliation would never find its opportunity 
 in Athens. 
 
 The school of Tubingen had always attracted 
 Renan by its dissolving criticism ; it repelled 
 him, for he was French and moderate in 
 temper, by what he considered its extrava- 
 gance. From it he borrowed lavishly in treat- 
 ing of the dissensions which broke out between 
 St. Paul and his Jewish brethren, as recorded 
 in the Acts and the Epistles, but he declined to
 
 156 Renan 
 
 go the whole way. He, too, made much of the 
 pseudo-Clementine literature, which is Ebio- 
 nite, Petrine, and zealous for the rights of 
 Jerusalem. He was willing to identify St. Paul 
 with Simon Magus, whom, in those polemical 
 fictions, St. Peter follows everywhere and 
 denounces as the " enemy " or the Antichrist. 
 On the other hand, in St. Luke he recognized a 
 disciple and apologist of St. Paul ; and he was 
 reluctant to deny the historical value of that 
 passage in itself so remarkable, which brings 
 together St. Peter and the Roman Cornelius, 
 and thus affords a meeting ground for the 
 tolerant practices of both Apostles. 
 
 In like manner he would now be termed 
 conservative as regards the Pauline writings, 
 which he divides into three classes, rejecting 
 only those to Timothy and Titus, while 
 assigning to some unknown hand the Epistle 
 to the Hebrews, perhaps to Barnabas. He 
 addressed a warning in sharp language to the 
 pedants who have determined a 'priori how 
 the Apostle must have written. And he 
 added, not unfairly, that German professors 
 wrangling among themselves in lecture and
 
 In St. PauVs Footsteps 157 
 
 dissertation, were the last who would be 
 likely to understand how a popular religion 
 had begun. In his view, therefore, no such 
 complete antagonism existed, even between 
 St. Paul and the party of legal zealots 
 represented by St. James, as would hinder 
 them from sharing in the common effort 
 to spread their faith. He was thus not very 
 far off, when we consider his principles, from 
 the orthodox position which has combined in 
 the same New Testament Paul and James and 
 John, the Apocalypse and the Epistle to the 
 Romans, as chapters which make up severally 
 the one Divine message. 
 
 But nothing would induce him to like St. 
 Paul. " After having been for three hundred 
 years, thanks to Protestantism, the Christian 
 doctor 'par excellence^ Paul is now coming to an 
 end of his reign." So the volume concludes ; 
 and Matthew Arnold's comment may follow : 
 " All through his book M. Renan is possessed 
 with a sense of this close relationship between 
 St. Paul and Protestantism. Protestantism has 
 made Paul, he says ; Pauline doctrine is identi- 
 fied with Protestant doctrine ; Paul is a Pro-
 
 158 Renan 
 
 testant doctor, and the counterpart of Luther. 
 M. Renan has a strong distaste for Protestant- 
 ism, and this distaste extends itself to the 
 Protestant Paul. The reign of this Protestant 
 is now coming to an end, and such a consum- 
 mation evidently has M. Kenan's approval." 
 
 It had undoubtedly. Much as the free- 
 thinking Herder at one time drew the student's 
 admiration (who knew little about him except 
 his free-thought), towards real Protestants, 
 orthodox or liberal, he felt something like 
 aversion. " I am often asked by German 
 Christians," he said in a phrase which was 
 clamorously taken up, " what do I make of 
 sin ? Mon Dieu, I believe that I suppress it." 
 A brilliant epigram ; but even in his liveliest 
 days Renan had seen the writing on the wall 
 which told France that its sin would find it out. 
 In the preface to St. Paul these words stand on 
 record, " Our youthful age saw melancholy 
 times ; and I dread lest Fate should show us 
 no good before we die. Some enormous mis- 
 takes are driving our country into the abyss ; 
 when we point them out we are met with 
 smiles." His Questions Contemporaines, pub-
 
 In St. PauPs Footsteps 159 
 
 lished in 1868, holds the warning, strongly and 
 almost passionately uttered, to which these 
 forebodings allude. It was an indictment of 
 the French Revolution, no less emphatic than 
 Edmund Burke's, and so much better warranted 
 that a succession of calamities had set on it 
 their seal. 
 
 One passage became immediately the war 
 cry of all those who still clung to the alliance 
 between throne and altar. It spoke of the 
 Revolution as an experiment which had failed. 
 Only a single kind of inequality was left, 
 that of fortune, in a State which took to it- 
 self all things else ; which created an intel- 
 lectual desert for the sake of Paris ; which de- 
 graded social service into mere administration ; 
 which put an end to the growth of colonies ; 
 and which could not be sure of the future. 
 Bankruptcy was inevitable with a code of laws 
 " that seemed to have been made for a citizen 
 committed to the foundling hospital at birth 
 and dying a bachelor " ; laws that made every 
 collective and enduring work impossible ; that 
 divided the father from his children, the hus- 
 band from his wife ; and that, instead of giving
 
 i6o R 
 
 enan 
 
 property a moral value, turned it into the 
 symbol of sensuous enjoyment. What could 
 such laws bring forth but a world of pygmies 
 and rebels ? 
 
 On the other hand, said Renan, look at 
 Prussia. There philosophy, government, char- 
 acter were joined in a public task ; a great 
 Germany, wise and liberal, was coming to 
 the birth. Let France not attempt a military 
 organization like the Prussian, unless it was 
 prepared to adopt the moral training on which 
 that system was founded. German science, 
 German universities, the German method of 
 handling religion, these were prerequisites to 
 a German army. For such a people victory 
 would be assured. But " in the fatal round of 
 revolutions, deep calleth unto deep. Examples 
 may be cited of nations which, having gone 
 down into that hell of Dante, have come out 
 again alive. What shall we say of the nation 
 that has escaped from it and yet will plunge in- 
 to it once more, nay even, twice and thrice ? "
 
 Chapter VI 
 
 PARIS AND JERUSALEM 
 
 DESTINY, which is Providence judging 
 the world, was not long in giving the 
 answer. A Liberal Opposition had 
 taken to driving the chariot of the sun, while 
 Phoebus-Napoleon slept. " Dormira sem- 
 pre," said Renan, who in May 1869, ^*^^ ^^^ 
 short instant, fancied that he had a call to 
 political action. He put out his manifesto in 
 big letters on the walls of many villages, ad- 
 dressing the district of Meaux in philosophic 
 terms. " No revolution ! " he cried. " No war ! 
 A war would be as great a disaster as revolution." 
 He was for peace, retrenchment and reform. 
 But Cassandra did not get elected. The clerical 
 influence on one side, the Jacobin on another, 
 were dead against a man whose party, if it could 
 be said anywhere to exist, had no command 
 over the multitude. As on a previous occasion,
 
 i62 7?, 
 
 e7ian 
 
 he found solace for his defeat in travelling. 
 Prince Napoleon took him in the summer of 
 1870 on an expedition to the Arctic Circle. 
 He paid a flying visit to Inverness and 
 coasted along the fiords of Norway. There 
 was talk of sailing to Spitzbergcn. From 
 Storen near Trondheim, on July 11, Renan 
 despatched a gay letter to Berthelot, full 
 of these plans and projects. At Tromsoe, 
 one week later, a telegram informed the Prince 
 that war with Prussia was certain and immedi- 
 ate. 
 
 " A fit of madness, an absolute crime," 
 exclaimed Renan when the news was brought. 
 But the crime had been committed, and 
 the travellers hastened back to France. In 
 his pleasant summer home at Sevres the 
 disconcerted idealist, who had been proposing 
 a reduction of the French army, looked on 
 while his philosophers from beyond the Rhine 
 proved what science could do with a rifle 
 on its shoulder. His unhappy countrymen 
 were not only suffering reverses on a hun- 
 dred battlefields ; they were victims of the 
 " decomposition of society " against which he
 
 Paris and yerusalem 163 
 
 had raised his voice. Did he and his Life of 
 Jesus count for nothing in that irretrievable 
 disaster, as a symptom, if not as a cause ? 
 Years afterwards, in the Priest of Nenii, one 
 Ganeo lays down the philosophy of cowardice, 
 which sees in flight the chance of enjoyment 
 to-morrow. The French soldiers fought, in- 
 deed, with proverbial courage ; but they had 
 lost religion for the greater part ; they were 
 wanting in stamina, physical and mental ; their 
 generals were victims or patrons of intrigue ; 
 the ice of the Beresina broke under them, and 
 the flood carried them away. 
 
 For Renan the " downfall " was more than 
 a public misfortune, however anticipated ; it 
 came as a private grief to him. His whole 
 character underwent a change in the " Terrible 
 Year." Edmond de Goncourt, who had made 
 his acquaintance at the literary dinners in the 
 Cafe Brebant, gives us a description of the man, 
 dated May 25, 1868, before these things came 
 to pass. " Called on Renan," he writes, " the 
 fourth storev in Rue Vanneau, — a small set of 
 rooms, bourgeois and neat, the furniture in 
 green plush, heads by Ary Scheffer on the
 
 164 Re?ian 
 
 walls, and among keepsakes from Dunkirk the 
 hand of a woman delicately moulded. Through 
 an open door the library is visible, shelves in 
 white wood, large unbound volumes lying in 
 stacks on the floor, the tools of learning, 
 medieval or Eastern, quartos of all kinds, a 
 section of a Japanese dictionary, and on a small 
 table the slumbering proofs of 5/. Paul. Out of 
 the two windows an immense prospect, one of 
 those forests of verdure hidden among the 
 walls and stones of Paris ; it is the Pare Gal- 
 liera, the ocean of tree-tops over which appear 
 sacred buildings, domes, bell-towers, something 
 of the pious horizon of Rome. The man him- 
 self seems always more charming and affection- 
 ately polite. He is the pattern of moral grace- 
 fulness in a body far from graceful ; the apostle 
 of doubt has the high intellectual good-nature 
 of a priest of science." 
 
 This appreciation does not go deeper than 
 the surface ; but all the accounts we find of 
 Renan bear it out. In a universal shipwreck, 
 however, to be amiable is no great help ; the 
 apostle of doubt was torn by emotions which 
 set in fierce antagonism his devotion to science
 
 Pa?'is and yerusale7n 165 
 
 and his love for France. Nor can the latter 
 be doubted, although it bore little resemblance 
 to Gambetta's fury and was rather old-Breton 
 than new-democratic in its colouring. He 
 would have rejoiced at a conquest of Paris by- 
 Herder and Goethe ; in Bismarck and the Red 
 Prince he could discern simply the Barbarians. 
 He was unjust — pardonably in so sudden and 
 frightful a storm of war ; but those who have 
 lingered among the ruins of the Castle at 
 Heidelberg, and who remember what Louis 
 XIV made of the Palatinate, will be thankful 
 that no French soldiers crossed the Rhine in 
 1870. Rcnan tells us, without a blush, that if 
 he had been ever compelled to enlist he should 
 have deserted. When he saw the troops 
 marching out in August 1870 along the Boule- 
 vards he despised them. "^Not a man there," 
 he said, *' is capable of a virtuous act." He 
 was for peace at almost any price. In Septem- 
 ber 1870 his letter to David Strauss pleaded, 
 however, against the violent seizure of Alsace 
 and Lorraine, without regard to the will of the 
 inhabitants. Not race, but history, made a 
 nation. He reminded his German friends that
 
 1 66 R 
 
 e7ia7i 
 
 Russia was the coming danger. Strauss trans- 
 lated this eloquent epistle, bound it up with 
 his own reply, and sold it for the benefit of the 
 German wounded. Renan could not help ex- 
 pending a little irony on this performance 
 when it came to his ears. " Heaven forbid," 
 he said smiling, " that I should quarrel with 
 you over a point of copyright. The work 
 for which you lay me under contribution is a 
 work of humanity ; and if my humble prose has 
 purchased a few cigars for the men that plun- 
 dered my cottage at Sevres, I thank you for the 
 opportunity you have given me of obeying 
 some precepts of Jesus which I believe to be 
 quite genuine. But remark certain slight dif- 
 ferences. Had you permitted me to publish 
 one of your writings, never, oh never, should I 
 have thought of selling it on behalf of our Hotel 
 des Invalidcs. Your aim misleads you ; passion 
 will not suffer you to heed those fancies 
 of a worn-out people which are known as tact 
 and good taste." 
 
 Unhappy France ! Betrayed, as Renan was 
 never weary of saying, in February 1848, when 
 Louis Philippe capitulated to a mob in the
 
 Paris a7ic{ yerusakm 167 
 
 streets ; bound and gagged by the midnight 
 crime of December 185 1 ; it had been brought 
 to a pass where, he continued bitterly, " the 
 good God vanished, to make room for an in- 
 flexible Sebaoth, who could only be touched by 
 the moral delicacy of Uhlans, the undoubted 
 excellence of Prussian bombshells." The hor- 
 rible reign of violence had set in. Napoleon 
 III was swept into the gutter. And Kant's dis- 
 ciples laid siege to Paris with a stern categorical 
 imperative, which blazed out in sheets of flame 
 on the wintry sky and rained upon Neuilly a 
 tempest of fire. 
 
 What could the peaceful professor do in 
 this tumult ? Like the two millions of Paris 
 he had no retreat. He stayed in his old 
 house, lived on his dole of black bread and 
 salt meat, attended the dinner at Magny's 
 where a small company foregathered still, and 
 listened while Berthelot, who was the chemist 
 of the Third Republic, denounced Trochu and 
 wrung his hands over the infinite disorder that 
 reigned in high places. Strange food was eaten 
 by the besieged philosophers and men of letters. 
 Goncourt relates, with a giim countenance,
 
 i68 R 
 
 en an 
 
 how they were compelled, at last, to eat dog, 
 disguised as mutton, and how Renan rushed 
 with loathing from the banquet. A singular 
 conclusion to his German studies ! But he 
 would not indulge, as even better men did, in 
 the hope of revenge. In November, when Metz 
 had fallen and Gambetta was urging forward 
 those untrained levies which did but prolong 
 the agony of France, Renan braved public 
 opinion by advising that a Parliament should 
 be called and peace made. He could not win 
 a hearing, but he had done his duty. 
 
 A conversation at Brebant's, taken down 
 without leave by Goncourt, on September 6, 
 1870, became in after times celebrated. The 
 guests were calling out for vengeance on the 
 invader, who would soon be persuading them to 
 devour unclean meats and broth of abominable 
 things, when Renan protested. The Germans 
 were a superior race — great in war as in science 
 generally ; and as for revenge, " Perish France," 
 he cried, rising to his feet, " perish our country ; 
 above it all is the kingdom of Duty and Reason." 
 He was met with shouts of execration. " No," 
 thundered St. Victor, " we are not going to be
 
 Paris and yerusalem 169 
 
 esthetes and Byzantines ; there is nothing 
 above our country." Renan, says the narrator, 
 had quitted his place and was moving round 
 the table with uncertain steps, waving his short 
 arms in the air, and reciting verses from the 
 Bible. " All is there," he reiterated, adding 
 as he went to the window, from which the 
 evening promenade of Parisians was visible, 
 " Look, what will save us is the effeminacy of 
 that population." 
 
 The hero of this remarkable scene denied it 
 in 1890 almost with petulance, but it shows the 
 man, and was not invented. His Intellectual 
 and. Moral Reform, composed during the siege, 
 tells a like story in words more carefully chosen. 
 " The country of idealists," he repeated, in 
 spite of contradiction, " is wherever they may 
 think freely." The Prussian bombardment 
 drove him, in January, 1871, from his house on 
 the left bank of the Seine ; but it could not 
 alter principles which were the fruit of a life's 
 meditation. Every day his wrath against 
 government by popular suffrage grew more 
 fierce. " Civilisation has always been a crea- 
 tion of aristocracy, upheld by a small number,"
 
 170 Renan 
 
 he told Bcrthelot in an historic letter. He 
 preferred the House of Orleans to any Republic. 
 It was the ignorant peasantry that had raised 
 Louis Napoleon to his dictatorship. This 
 Third Republic would never have existed but 
 for " presumptuous imbeciles," — he meant 
 especially Gambetta, — rhetoricians from the 
 south who, as in 1789, had proved too much 
 for the national good sense with their frothy 
 eloquence. 
 
 On the other hand, St. Cloud was a heap 
 of smoking ashes ; Auteuil lay bare beneath 
 such a hailstorm of shells as made of it one 
 ruin; on January 18, 1871, King William 
 was crowned German Emperor at Versailles 
 amid " all the glories of France." Rumours 
 flew about that Paris itself would be burnt, if 
 it did not surrender. " We shall witness a 
 fresh Apocalypse," said Renan, sighing deeply. 
 
 The capitulation arrived; he saw his Ger- 
 mans march down through the Champs Elysees 
 to the Place dc la Concorde, as in a city 
 of the dead. Then he went back home • 
 but a month had scarcely elapsed when 
 the National Guard, a prctorian democracy.
 
 Paris and yerusalem 171 
 
 proclaimed the Commune ; and while he was 
 quoting Scripture and Spinoza, " To arms ! " 
 resounded once more along the Boulevards. 
 *' The weakness, the hesitation, of Government 
 has ruined us," said this enlightened critic, 
 whose judgment of M. Thiers, when he 
 abandoned the Capital, has been confirmed 
 by history. Could France live again ? Had 
 corruption seized its vital parts ? He asked 
 the question, but hardly dared to answer it. 
 
 His intention had been to remain in Paris, 
 provided there were not a second investment 
 by the Prussians. But he could not expose his 
 family to a growing risk ; about April 28, after 
 a month of the Commune, he fled with them to 
 the dismantled cottage at Sevres which now 
 gave refuge to sixteen persons. Berthelot, 
 who was at Honflcur, had been invited to 
 England ; but Renan dissuaded him from going 
 in forcible language, though he almost ex- 
 pected to sec France broken up and the 
 nation perish. He felt more than ever that 
 in dethroning her Royal House she had 
 committed the unpardonable sin, the crime 
 against history. Liberals — he named Littre
 
 172 Re7ia7t 
 
 and Henri Martin — dealt with human affairs in 
 too simple a manner. Their aim was right, 
 their system childish. 
 
 The ink of these reflections was hardly dry 
 when a cloudburst of shells from the ad- 
 vancing army fell on Sevres and obliged 
 Renan to decamp. He passed on with his 
 household to Versailles. The last day of the 
 Commune, Sunday, May 28, 1871, dawned in 
 blood and fire. He was then writing from 
 Sevres in his old house, and towards night- 
 fall he watched the great sulphureous con- 
 flagration which lit up with a yellow glare the 
 sky towards the east. There he might view 
 the end of a " criminal extravagance," the 
 reduction to the absurd of theories that took 
 not into account elements and forces which 
 were no less real than indispensable to civilized 
 life. Equality, it seemed to him, never had 
 existed among nations or individuals. " The 
 true foundation of kindness," he wrote in those 
 fearful days, " is to believe in a providential 
 order, where each thing has its place and its 
 rank, its use and its necessity." But he saw 
 religion dying round him, and he said, " We
 
 Paris a7id yerusalem 173 
 
 are living on the shadow of a shade. By what 
 will men live after us ? " 
 
 Though fearing that the soul of France had 
 been mortally wounded in 1789 and 1793, 
 Renan proposed in his Reform Intellectual and 
 Moral a plan which no one would ever have 
 deduced from the tastes of so resolutely classical 
 a scholar. In literature he was becoming more 
 and more the Greek who was condemned to 
 write in French, and who made the best of it. 
 But his politics were German, feudal, and 
 aristocratic. 
 
 To explain his position in few words is not 
 easy. Englishmen have seldom perceived how 
 close is the connexion between the Imperial 
 Roman Law and the Code Napoleon ; neither 
 do they seem to realize that democracy in 
 Latin countries is altogether unlike what we 
 call by the name in these islands or in the United 
 States. For on the Continent it has drawn 
 from Justinian's Pandects the twofold element 
 of an equality without distinctions and a despot- 
 ism without any court of appeal. Now the 
 French Revolution was nothing but this Roman 
 Law dressed in modern costume, applied to an
 
 174 Renan 
 
 order of things which had grown out of quite 
 different principles, and which, therefore, it 
 could only pull down. Renan had a clear view 
 of the opposition between these two forms, the 
 Imperial and the Feudal. He held that State 
 Socialism could not fail to be the outcome of 
 French democracy ; that private property must 
 be defended on a far different system ; and 
 that without the principle of hereditary succes- 
 sion, made permanent in a royal line, civilized 
 Europe would be at the mercy of adventurers 
 — of soldiers like Bonaparte, or lawyers like 
 Gambetta. The Gauls had triumphed over 
 the Franks when Louis XVI was executed, but 
 they could only break with so resplendent a 
 past by falling into the pit of an ignoble 
 anarchy. The omnipotent State would never 
 heal these woes, for it was their very source 
 and their aggravation. 
 
 Freedom, he went on to argue, was not, as 
 people fancied, a mere means ; it was an end in 
 itself, a permanent condition of progress ; and 
 the Barbarians that overthrew the Western 
 Empire had established freedom. For what is 
 freedom if not the independence of individuals,
 
 Partis and yer^usa/em 175 
 
 and the right of private associations to manage 
 their own affairs ? But these are precisely the 
 things which no government issuing from the 
 Revolution will endure. Yet progress does 
 not come from without ; virtue cannot be 
 decreed by Act of Parliament. France had 
 " sown her gardens of Adonis, and hoped that 
 the sun would fertilize flowers which had no 
 root " ; her idea of freedom was a tyranny 
 pressing on all alike, and she had robbed her 
 citizens of the courage to think and to will. 
 The true social life was a part of the divine 
 life itself, and its last word was conscience. 
 
 To call this indictment of the Revolution 
 unpatriotic was much easier than to answer it. 
 Perhaps a candid opponent, while allowing its 
 chief articles, would reply that not one or two, 
 but all the old Sibylline books had been burnt, 
 and that democracy on the Roman system was 
 in possession, while the better form of which 
 Renan dreamt could simply not be created so 
 late in the day. This, at all events, is true ; that 
 with piercing insight he who was, in other re- 
 spects, much of a dilettante, had seen what 
 scarcely a Liberal in any land had taken to
 
 176 Re7ia7t 
 
 heart, the value of an historical past to a nation, 
 and the penalty exacted for disregard of it. 
 Whether the Latin peoples were ever to enjoy 
 an ordered freedom, in Church or State, might 
 be a problem. But rare, surely, was the merit of 
 an observer who had never lived among free 
 men, yet who drew so distinctly the line which 
 divides Europe into rival camps, and which 
 alone will account for the political vicissitudes 
 of the nineteenth century, though it has been 
 overlooked on all sides. 
 
 No one, however, was inclined to follow 
 Kenan's lead. The old factions tore their coun- 
 try asunder ; Henry V waved his white flag ; 
 the Bonapartes and the House of Orleans struck 
 their traditional attitudes ; the Republic, slowly 
 gathering might, threw off and exiled the 
 families which had reigned in France. Under 
 this Government of the baser sort Renan was 
 destined to live out his days. He counted for 
 nothing in the world of politics. The Chair 
 of Hebrew had been restored to him in 1870. 
 When the Commune had bled its last, bayon- 
 etted and shot to death by MacMahon, the 
 professor,'"now an important man in his Col-
 
 Paris and jferusalem 177 
 
 lege, went to Italy, that he might renew his 
 acquaintance with Rome, and evoke from the 
 ruins of the Forum and the Palatine the ghost 
 of Nero. 
 
 He was caught once more by the ancient 
 charm ; his imagination kindled, and under 
 that impulse he produced his Antichrist, a 
 work of art, perhaps the most brilliant of all 
 that he has left us. It amused and delighted 
 him. " I will not deny," he said by way 
 of introduction to it, " that a taste for 
 history, the incomparable pleasure which 
 one has in seeing unrolled before one the 
 spectacle of mankind, has drawn me on in this 
 volume. Sometimes I have rebuked myself 
 for enjoying life so keenly in my workshop, while 
 my poor country was consumed in a slow agony; 
 but my conscience is at rest." He had done 
 what in him lay to prevent or to heal the troubles 
 of the time. He could not act the charlatan. 
 This very book, though addressed to the curious 
 and the artistic, not to the crowd, had its own 
 moral, " triumphant vice denounced when at 
 its height in sublime accents by the saints." 
 " More than ever am I convinced," said the 
 
 12
 
 178 R 
 
 e72a77 
 
 writer, " that religion is not a self-inflicted 
 deception ; that it answers to an object outside 
 of us ; and that he who obeys its inspiration 
 is well guided." What such a confession 
 amounted to we shall learn by and by from the 
 Philosophic Dialogues, thrown down on paper 
 at Versailles in 1871, but not given to the 
 world until years had passed. 
 
 His present subject was Nero, the true 
 Antichrist of the Book of Revelation. " Over 
 against Jesus, the ideal of goodness," he 
 warns us, " rises up a monstrous being who is 
 the embodiment of evil. Reserved like Enoch 
 and Elias to play his part in the world's 
 last act, Nero completes the Christian myth- 
 ology, inspires the first sacred book of the 
 new canon, by a hideous massacre founds 
 the primacy of the Roman Church, and sets on 
 foot the revolution which is to make of Rome 
 the Holy City, the second Jerusalem. At the 
 san^e hour, by one of those mysterious coin- 
 cidences which are not unknown in the great 
 crises of mankind, Jerusalem is destroyed, the 
 Temple passes away ; Christianity, more and 
 more emancipated, is free henceforth from a
 
 Paris and jferusalem 179 
 
 vanquished Judaism, and works out its own 
 destiny." 
 
 But again the figure of St. Paul rises before 
 us, a prisoner in Rome, as the Acts describe 
 him, yet not hindered in preaching the gospel. 
 Renan could by no effort overcome his repug- 
 nance to the great dogmatic teacher. St. Paul's 
 exaltation of Jesus in the later and genuine 
 Epistles — to the Philippians, Colossians and 
 Ephesians — went on increasing, says his critic, 
 until there was little to choose between his 
 doctrine and that of the Fourth Evangelist. 
 It was, in fact, the spirit of St. Paul, he con- 
 tinues, which ruled those Church assemblies 
 from Nicaea to Chalcedon, where the creed 
 of Christendom was definitely shaped. Rcnan 
 calls him a sectary enamoured of the absurd 
 like Tertullian, an enemy to culture, which 
 his disciples have always flouted and thrown 
 back. He is the father of Puritans, and by 
 his hatred of the world, odium generis humani 
 — the charge brought against Christians in 
 Tacitus — will always provoke a reaction to 
 those Greek ideas which he has decried in his 
 most violent pages. The Letters to Titus and
 
 I 8 o Renan 
 
 Timothy are not of St. Paul's composition, 
 according to Renan, but, as in an historical 
 romance, they picture not untruly his mind, 
 as well as his anticipations, when the catastro- 
 phe which ended him was approaching. 
 
 St. Paul had felt that he must bear witness to 
 his Master in Rome, and a vision of Jesus con- 
 firmed the resolve he had taken. That appeal 
 to CiEsar and his eventful voyage determined 
 St. Peter to follow him. The two Apostles 
 were friends, although Peter could not boldly 
 take sides with Paul against James and John, 
 champions of legal or Ebionite principles. But 
 by quoting, as he does, from the Pauline 
 writings in his one authentic missive, dated at 
 the Roman Babylon, the Prince of the Apostles 
 refutes that conception of Baur which makes 
 no allowance for Jewish freedom of speech, and 
 which is too absolute to be trustworthy. 
 
 Yet St. Peter it was, continues Renan, who 
 gave the Roman Church its supreme place in 
 Christendom. The poor Syrian emigrant who 
 found a home in the Ghetto beyond Tiber, at 
 the foot of the Janiculum, began in effect that 
 wonderful dynasty which succeeded to all the
 
 Paris a7id jferusa/em i 8 i 
 
 splendour and more than the prerogatives of the 
 Caesars. St. John also, the son of thunder to 
 whom we owe the Apocalypse, by his opposi- 
 tion of Rome to Jerusalem, admits or recognizes 
 the part that was to be enacted by the Imperial 
 City in God's counsels. The seer had accom- 
 panied St. Peter, perhaps had undergone a trial 
 when the Neronian persecution broke out. Last 
 of all, the so-called Epistle to the Hebrews was 
 dictated by the same events, probably sent from 
 Ephesus to the Roman Christians, and abounds 
 inTauline ideas. Thus, if we glance back over the 
 progress of the new religion, we see it advancing 
 from Jerusalem to Antioch, from Antioch to 
 Ephesus, from Ephesus to Rome. And at Rome 
 the chief Apostles meet in their several ways to 
 suffer martyrdom, while Luke, the follower of 
 St. Paul, and John Mark, the disciple of St. 
 Peter, prepare in the world's Capital to write 
 their biography of Jesus. 
 
 To this unexampled situation, in which 
 elements at once diverse and strong were to 
 be fused together, Nero supplies the centre, 
 the crisis, and the issue. Waiving aside the 
 dreams of mystics, Renan, with supreme good
 
 1 82 R 
 
 e7tan 
 
 sense, fixes on history as a clue to the Apoca- 
 lypse. He accepts, indeed, too lightly the 
 grotesque supposition that St. Paul everywhere 
 lies concealed beneath opprobrious names and 
 types in that " written ecstasy " — to use the 
 admirable definition which Balzac once gave 
 of it. But on such a point we need not 
 stop to argue. That Nero is the subject 
 of St. John's anathemas, and that under 
 the veil of strange words, cabalistic numbers 
 and heaped up symbols, the revolutions of the 
 Roman Empire have been shadowed forth, is 
 a theory which explains what would otherwise 
 be incomprehensible. Nor was that theory un- 
 known to the generation immediately following 
 the Apostolic age. How it fell into discredit, 
 while the Book of Revelation itself was doubted 
 or left among the Apocrypha by the Eastern 
 Fathers, Rcnan has described in a suggestive 
 chapter. These questions are for theologians. 
 The reading public, which is incompetent to 
 decide them, will be more taken with his sketch 
 of Roman life and manners when Nero, the 
 crazy artist, was king. 
 
 That " unfortunate young man " must have
 
 Paris a? id yerusalem 183 
 
 appeared to the Renan who utters his para- 
 doxes in Goncourt's Journal as a singularly 
 modern type. He is decadent, Parisian, nay, 
 in the slang of the artist, un rate, one who 
 has attempted great things and achieved none 
 of them. He cannot be presented in self- 
 respecting language as he really was. The 
 French biographer has left unquoted his 
 Roman authors — laudably enough, for they 
 defy translation in our Christian speech — at 
 the most melancholy turns of the story. Sucli 
 reticence has a grave disadvantage ; we may 
 be led to think of the monster almost with 
 indulgence, forgetting his crimes to smile at 
 his extravagances. 
 
 However, it is certainly true that " mad- 
 ness was in the air"; and that "if we except 
 the groups of aristocratic Romans who were 
 destined to arrive at power with Nerva and 
 Trajan, a general want of seriousness tempted 
 men the most considerable in some sort to play 
 with life." The arbiter of elegance was 
 Petronius ; the preacher, himself not deeply in 
 earnest, was Seneca, from whom our dilettante 
 borrows a significant phrase, applicable to the
 
 184 Renan 
 
 Paris of his own day, " Intemperantia litterarum 
 laboramus," we are suffering from a plague of 
 literature. But no one wrote or painted or 
 sculptured beautiful things any more. Nero 
 himself is defined as a literary perversion, 
 whose greatest achievement was setting fire to 
 old Rome. 
 
 This burning up of ancient palaces and sacred 
 shrines marks the birthday of another Rome, 
 Christian, nay Catholic, which rose amid flames 
 and slaughter in the Vatican Circus of Nero, 
 where St. Peter's Confession now stands. Early 
 writings connect the persecution so vividly 
 described by Tacitus with the martyrdom of 
 both Apostles. Renan sees no ground for 
 doubting the statement ; but he adds a con- 
 jecture that in some way the Jewish enemies of 
 a rapidly growing faith were instigated by 
 jealousy to denounce their former brethren. 
 At all events " after the day when Jesus ex- 
 pired on Golgotha, that day of festival in Nero's 
 gardens (we may fix it about August i, in the 
 year 64 a.d.) was the most solemn in Christian 
 history." 
 
 From Parisian decadents Renan had learned
 
 Paris a7id ye?^usalem 185 
 
 how to represent, " intus et in cute," the elegant 
 parricide, actor, singer and chariot-driver who 
 gave to Rome its baptism of blood. He lin- 
 gered even a little too complacently over the 
 art which from flowers of evil distils a deadly- 
 bouquet. He was not altogether so serious as 
 his dreadful subject demanded. But his second 
 chapter, dealing with revolted Judaea, the siege 
 of Jerusalem, and Nero's downfall, required to 
 be written in another key, of which the note 
 was struck by his experiences during the Com- 
 mune. Had the Temple continued to exist, 
 with its law and its sacrifices, how could St. 
 Paul's free spiritual religion have survived ? 
 The Fourth Gospel is not to be distinguished 
 on this point from the Epistle to the Romans ; 
 in both it is the assertion of Jesus and His true 
 disciples that " not in this mountain nor yet at 
 Jerusalem shall ye worship the Father." An in- 
 fatuation which amazed the Roman world, a 
 frenzy breaking out in revolt, murder, and the 
 suicide of a whole people, brought Vespasian to 
 the walls of the " beloved city," as it is termed 
 in the Apocalypse. Then East and West 
 fell into confusion. Three Emperors, Galba,
 
 I 8 6 Renan 
 
 Otho, Vitellius, passed like phantoms over the 
 scene. Nero became a fugitive, who heard 
 in pursuit of him the Furies that hunted 
 Orestes. He disappeared ; but was he dead ? 
 Would he not come again, from the Parthians 
 or from Egypt, conquering and to conquer ? 
 At this fateful moment, in the first days of the 
 year 69 a.d., so Renan argues, the Book of 
 Revelation appeared, written by St. John or at 
 his suggestion. It is the seal set on Old 
 Hebrew prophecy, the parting embrace be- 
 tween Gospel and Talmud, ere they bid each 
 other an everlasting farewell. 
 
 How bold a thing it was to comment before 
 all Paris on such a work as the Apocalypse, and 
 how rare the skill with which the commentator 
 fulfilled his task, will be evident to those who 
 have gone through Renan's large volume, where 
 every page is ancient history in a modern setting. 
 We may liken the renegade of St. Sulpice, now 
 a somewhat worldly-minded man, or, as a witty 
 friend called him, " the dandy of exegesis," com- 
 pelled to look on while Paris was burning, to 
 Josephus, equally a deserter, yet always a Jew, 
 and the historian of his nation's ruin. Josephus
 
 Paris and yerusalem 187 
 
 wrote his chronicle for the Flavian Emperors, 
 perhaps under their roof on the Palatine. 
 Renan hoped against hope that Paris would take 
 warning from Jerusalem. 
 
 As ever, his heart was divided. Imperial 
 Rome conquered by virtue of its good sense, 
 its law which did not involve a theocracy, 
 its common rights of citizenship. The Jew, 
 the zealot, the Christian, the monk, all 
 akin and one as intolerant as the other, 
 have been, he says, a menace to civilisa- 
 tion. Yet the victory of Titus could not be 
 final. Our Western races are the flower of 
 men, but in religion they create nothing 
 durable or profound. What could be expected 
 from the prosaic Roman ritual, the super- 
 stitions of Gaul, or even the Greek mysteries, 
 in comparison with ideals like the Synagogue 
 and the Church ? The heavenly Jerusalem 
 did, therefore, overcome Babylon when the 
 earthly had sunk down in flames ; and the arch 
 of Titus records a triumph which is seen to be 
 undone upon the arch of Constantine. 
 
 But, says the preacher, let France read her 
 future in that past. Every nation which de-
 
 i88 R 
 
 enan 
 
 votes itself to social and political agitation is 
 doomed. If it seeks a " kingdom of God," lives 
 on general ideas, pursues a quest of world-wide 
 importance, it will never be a great Power. 
 " We are not mistaken when we cry out 
 to France, ' Give up the Revolution or 
 perish,' but yet if a single one of its dreams 
 should be fulfilled, the misery of 1870 and 
 1871 will have had its revenge." Is this an 
 apology for the Commune ? Renan abhorred 
 its excesses ; but he was ever unwilling to shut 
 the gates of the future in the face of unknown 
 possibilities. In daily life a peaceable and 
 smiling bourgeois, the instant he takes up his 
 pen he becomes a Utopian. The hero as 
 thinker must not be scared by the police ; 
 no transformation, in the long run, is incredible. 
 Jerusalem fallen, the old order vanished, the 
 Christian set free from a yoke which even St. 
 Paul could not have unfastened, a problem of 
 reconciliation between the new faith and the 
 ancient Empire could not fail to arise. How 
 it was resolved is the question which occupied 
 three volumes and another nine years of this 
 indefatigable career. The Antichrist came out
 
 Paris a7id jferusalem 189 
 
 in 1873, Marcus Jurelius, which completes the 
 Origins of Christianity^ was published in 1882. 
 A full twenty-five years had been consumed in 
 journeys, reading and composition, since the 
 author took up his large enterprise. Only ten 
 years remained to him ; these he spent on 
 minor works and the History of Israel. 
 
 A change in tone and treatment had, mean- 
 while, come over his writings. He had always 
 denied miracles ; but when he began the Life 
 of Jesus, there was in his mind a tendency to 
 recognize what we may term the Divine 
 drama, something not unlike Providence, under 
 whose guidance Greek, Hebrew, and Roman 
 were united in a common though unconscious 
 building up of Humanity. The doctrine of 
 final causes, not quite in its popular sense, was 
 admitted, was dwelt upon. Then came the 
 catastrophe of France, and farewell to Renan's 
 calm serenity, which had led him to believe in 
 progress, and at one time actually to maintain 
 that " the world made better by science will be 
 the kingdom of the spirit, the reign of the chil- 
 dren of God." But now he perceived that 
 science might yield a Prussian army as its
 
 190 Renan 
 
 outcome, or a revolution ending in the torches 
 of the fetroleuses. Another man, thunder- 
 stricken like St. Paul, would perhaps have 
 revised his premisses ; not so the unrepentant 
 cleric. What he did was to alter his con- 
 clusions, modulate into a lighter key, frankly 
 contradict himself, and take pleasure in be- 
 wildering his readers. 
 
 Friendly critics have described this decline 
 from the serious to the merely amusing as 
 " M. Renan's third manner." The first was 
 learned and a trifle heavy, witness Averroes. 
 The second, which took its colour from 
 Michelet and George Sand, was romantic, 
 sentimental, persuasive, balanced, not incapable 
 of rising to heights where the grandest his- 
 torians had trodden. What was the third ? 
 In diction, admirably French, on a model that 
 cannot quite be found under Louis Quatorze, 
 yet is hinted by Fenelon, and would have been 
 praised by Port Royal. The lucid words, 
 however, and the sentences that flow like a 
 stream of honey, do not convey one uniform 
 or consistent idea. That charming woman, 
 Madame Alphonse Daudet, said in her gentle
 
 Paris and yeriisalem 191 
 
 way of Renan, when he had delivered his 
 address on being received into the French 
 Academy, " No, he really has not the sentiment 
 of affirmation." He was the newest Abelard, 
 setting in parallel phrases the " Yea and Nay " 
 of a spirit essentially incoherent. 
 
 He would not bribe the judge ; that had been 
 his argument ; but in things which lie outside 
 mathematics there is no judge, if we do not pass 
 sentence ourselves. What is Truth, if not sacred, 
 ethical, and the reward of conviction, — in other 
 words, an active insight to which we contri- 
 bute all our powers, including a good will ? 
 At any rate, we may watch this fine intellect 
 losing its grasp on reality in proportion as it 
 loses its moral earnestness. The unity of its 
 conception wavers and disappears ; the Divine 
 drama moves " in a wide sea of wax," not tend- 
 ing anywhither ; and by a fortune which we 
 have illustrated elsewhere from his French 
 contemporaries, this Plato becomes, instead of 
 a noble thinker, a student in bric-a-brac, idly 
 strolling through collections wherever old 
 curiosities are to be found. If science did not 
 lay down conclusions, why should he ? The
 
 192 Renan 
 
 plausible guesses which left events undecided — 
 much as certain story-tellers have written two 
 endings to their novels — were at least amusing. 
 History thus became anecdotage, or psycho- 
 logy taught by examples ; the governing idea 
 withdrew into its own heaven whither no man 
 could pursue it. Science, admitting its failure 
 to interpret the facts, was yet a chapter, nay 
 the whole series of chapters, in the world's 
 development which had been denominated 
 " history " and " reason." The contradictions 
 in such a view are flagrant enough ; Renan 
 assures us that they are inevitable and do not 
 signify. 
 
 There is no room, and little need, to travel 
 over the second Christian century with a guide 
 so capricious. Yet we may remark on the 
 comparative soundness of his judgment where 
 it touches the Gospels, their date and their 
 relation to one another, while the leading Ger- 
 man critics were still at play among unverified 
 conjectures. Questions remain which can be 
 solved by no ingenuity, for the terms of a solu- 
 tion are not given. But in coming back to- 
 wards the traditional view of the Synoptics,
 
 ^f 
 
 > 
 
 D 
 
 ■y.
 
 Paris and y ems a /em 193 
 
 the Acts, the Pauline Epistles, Renan showed 
 courage no less than acuteness, which deserve 
 to be acknowledged. Of the Fourth Gospel 
 he writes, after much hesitation, " It is likely 
 that a disciple of the Apostle John, who had 
 inherited many of his reminiscences, felt 
 authorized to speak in his name, and twenty- 
 five or thirty years after his death to write 
 down those things which unhappily had not 
 been fixed on paper during his lifetime." 
 That Gospel was the stroke which at last de- 
 livered the Church from Judaism. It opened 
 the way to Christian philosophy, as St. Paul 
 had been the first to sketch its theology. But 
 the canon of Scripture, to whom was that 
 owing ? Renan takes us to the year 180 a.d., 
 to the Roman Church, and the Muratorian 
 Fragment (since, in its original form, assigned 
 to Hippolytus of Porto) as the time and place 
 where the New Testament was closed against 
 additions. His early admiration of Rome 
 never died out. The Catholic Church, he 
 declared, was the saving of Christianity from 
 Gnostics, Oriental and Greek, who would have 
 turned it with a host of wild fancies into a 
 
 13
 
 194 Renan 
 
 conventicle of madmen. And Rome first 
 uttered that august name. 
 
 True, he continues with transcendent scorn, 
 authority is founded on the commonplace ; 
 but bishops were preferable to epileptics, and 
 in the Roman See bishops had a centre upon 
 which they might always fall back. Not per- 
 sonal inspiration but collective wisdom ; not 
 anarchy but unity ; this was the creative idea 
 which became visible in Clement, and which, 
 gaining power with every success, drawing to 
 it appeals from orthodox and heretic, in the 
 capital of the world, formed the keystone of 
 an arch that would otherwise have fallen into 
 a heap of ruins. The reconciliation of Peter 
 and Paul in the Roman legend had been a 
 master-stroke. Tradition, authority, prestige, 
 were combining to establish the Papal domin- 
 ion, which before the second century ended was 
 manifest in sovereign acts, as when Victor 
 threatened to excommunicate the Churches of 
 Asia, though they pleaded against him St. 
 John's example in the Quartodeciman con- 
 troversy. 
 On questions like these, once hotly debated,
 
 Paris and jferusalem 195 
 
 but now in course of settlement, Renan was 
 almost as Catholic as ever he had been. He 
 could not trace in the Gnostic aberrations, 
 which mingled with some elements of the 
 Gospel fantastic and too often demoralizing 
 myths from Asia Minor, nay from the Inner 
 East, the true lines upon which Christian de- 
 velopment moved. He had never taken the 
 view, long favoured by English and German 
 historians, that, when the last of the Apostles 
 died, a sudden lapse into Paganism followed, 
 infecting the visible Church, and leaving only 
 a hidden remnant who, by ways hardly dis- 
 cernible, continued through heretics like the 
 Paulicians to hand on the saving Faith. He 
 granted much — too much, it will be said by 
 careful critics — not to this early Protestant 
 reading of history, but to those who saw in 
 Gnostic ritual, art and speculation the Church 
 turned Pagan, accommodating itself to the 
 heathen world, and, like all-conquering Rome, 
 subdued by the Greeks. But still it was the 
 Church, rooted and founded in the New Tes- 
 tament, which inherited from Jesus the Divine 
 fire that burnt in its Holy Place ; from Peter
 
 196 Renan 
 
 its royal supremacy ; from Paul and James and 
 Luke its Sacraments in their primitive form, 
 and its episcopal order ; from John its rite 
 of perpetual sacrifice, shadowed forth in the 
 Apocalypse, and yet again its Logos, to whom 
 all wisdom, Greek as well as Hebrew, must be 
 ascribed. 
 
 By the charismata of unauthorized inspira- 
 tions, he argued, no Church could have held 
 together. Rome, with its genius for ruling 
 over chaos by hierarchy, sacraments, synods, 
 and public creeds, has tamed religious rebels 
 or cast them out, chosen between the good 
 and evil in Hellenic learning, and made the 
 Christian State possible. This was not the 
 corruption of the best ; it was the reconcilia- 
 tion in thought and practice of all that man- 
 kind had brought down on innumerable lines 
 out of a past which could never be recalled. 
 
 Nero had seen the growing power and 
 striven to consume it on a funeral pile ; he 
 was the Antichrist by his triumphant and enor- 
 mous vices. A hundred years later came Mar- 
 cus Aurelius, saint and emperor, who was 
 taught the sum of virtuous living by his father
 
 Paris and yerusa/em 197 
 
 Antoninus, but who, on this very account, 
 appears in Renan's last volume to be the rival 
 of Jesus. Wholly independent of dogma, re- 
 velation, and the supernatural, he is lay virtue 
 personified. These words, lay and clerical, 
 which exert on French politics a charm not 
 less deadly than the words Guelf and Ghibelline 
 exerted on Italian cities in the time of Dante, 
 suppose that men must be ranged in two hostile 
 camps. The laic is a votary of Reason, self- 
 sprung and self-sufficient ; he is a humani- 
 tarian who believes in no God, and whose reli- 
 gion is social service. But he is likewise the 
 unsleeping enemy of all who do not sign his 
 creed. In his eyes every true disciple of Jesus 
 is a traitor to civilisation. " Lay " virtue 
 breeds Jacobins ; it shuts up Christian schools ; 
 it puts down religious orders ; it sends priests 
 and nuns to the guillotine, as in 1794. It is, 
 in fine, a Church miHtant, with Inquisition, 
 secular arm, cord, stake, and axe, for all 
 those on whom it fixes the charge of incivisme 
 or disbelief in its dogmas. 
 
 Rcnan, to his credit be it spoken, always 
 defended the right of free association, which is
 
 198 Re?2an 
 
 in France cruelly hampered, and which in the 
 case of Catholics has been over and over again 
 suppressed. He could not bring himself to 
 apologize for the old Roman Law, whose 
 jealousy of private gatherings the French 
 jurist had copied only too well. Yet, when 
 he came to Marcus Aurelius, who in his own 
 person embodied that Law, the temptation to 
 set him up as the Christ of Rationalism proved 
 too strong for Renan's principles, and with 
 surprise we listen while a veteran among 
 Liberals pours out his eulogy of absolute 
 power. We call to mind other pages that im- 
 plore France to have done with Roman juris- 
 prudence, to learn from the free Barbarians 
 what liberty can achieve for a nation ; and 
 now we are told that the Stoics founded 
 that " Law of modern peoples " which is 
 winning its triumph, slow but sure, over 
 the Christian ideas. The Stoic, in Renan's 
 account of him, is not to be distinguished 
 from those French — energumens did he not 
 style them once ? — who, out of their seething 
 cauldron, would have drawn a regenerated 
 country, but could evoke only phantasmal hor-
 
 Paris a7td ye?^usa/em 199 
 
 rors. Making allowance for the complexities 
 of a vast subject, in which the point of view 
 changes with its field, we are still at a loss to 
 imagine how the author would reconcile his 
 love of freedom, which we cannot deny, with 
 his admiration for a Law that never suffered it 
 to breathe. 
 
 However, the contrast between Marcus, 
 who wrote his own Gospel, and Another whose 
 writing was the Cross, affords such a theme as 
 grandly to sum up the long debate of Church 
 and Empire, if not to bring about a reconcilia- 
 tion in which reason and faith might embrace. 
 The manner of this concluding volume is ex- 
 ceedingly fine wherever it touches on the Medi- 
 tations, that sad and subduing book, not rightly 
 termed by Renan the Layman's Vade Mecum, 
 for all its grace flows from submission to the 
 Divine Will, as revealed in the nature of things. 
 Marcus would not have made common cause 
 with Renan, though Renan strives to be at one 
 with Marcus. What fellowship has the Stoic 
 with the dilettante ? Who could be less of a 
 Puritan than our sauntering professor, led by 
 a " lively curiosity," as he tells us, to consider
 
 2 00 R 
 
 enan 
 
 the ways of men ? And who could be more so 
 than the Emperor, absorbed in his own spirit, 
 eaten up with scruples, always alone, sighing 
 like a Christian saint over the perversity of 
 human nature ? 
 
 At this distance from Renan's noviciate 
 we feel that his fears, long ago expressed 
 to the Abbe Cognat, were by no means un- 
 founded. " Even so, could I be sure of my- 
 self ! " he had written in 1845 ; " but how if 
 I came to lose by contact with them,'''' — he 
 means with irreverent Liberals, — " the purity 
 of my heart and my view of life ? — if they 
 succeeded in infecting me with their own 
 Positivism ? Who can know himself and not 
 be afraid of his weakness ? " Intellectual 
 weakness, which staggers to and fro like a 
 drunken man from one view to its opposite ; 
 moral weakness, which cannot discern the Stoic 
 who is hard upon himself from the Jacobin who 
 keeps all his austerity for others ; and, it must 
 be said, even weakness, in the handling of art, 
 since it betrayed the artist into a comparison 
 which exalts thc^Roman Emperor, who founded 
 nothing durable, above Christ and His Apos-
 
 Paris a7id yerusalefu 2 o i 
 
 ties, to whom mankind owes its salvation. 
 The drift of that specious argument is clear. 
 For the last time Renan was contending on 
 behalf of his Utopia which refused to be born. 
 The advent of science, or lay knowledge, lead- 
 ing up to a philosophy in the shape of ethics 
 founded on experience, without sanction from 
 God or hope of Heaven, was to have brought 
 in a social Paradise. How differently had 
 things turned out ! Wars and rebellions ; a 
 burning Paris ; a Republic of all the medio- 
 crities; asensibledecline from heroism to money- 
 making ; and " a fall in ethical values," which 
 portended misfortune still greater. Was, then, 
 the supernatural justified by facts ? He would 
 never believe it. He pointed to the Roman 
 Law which had given to Europe a golden 
 age ; he instanced the philanthropy of Marcus 
 Aurelius, who was tender to slaves, orphans, and 
 the helpless, though he persecuted Christians. 
 After all, what need was there of Revelation ? 
 Such is the lesson which this delicately- 
 wrought lay sermon inculcates through its 
 six hundred pages. A fruitful essay might be 
 attempted by one wlio bhould examine it with
 
 2 02 R 
 
 enan 
 
 Pater's romance, Marius the Epicurean, lying 
 before him as a statement on the other side, 
 equal to it in dainty phrasing, temperate and 
 calm, but more in earnest, and in its conclusions 
 more like the course of history. For while 
 the unhappy Emperor, " anima infelicissima," 
 could make martyrs at Lyons and Vienne, he 
 could not put down the gladiatorial shows, or 
 by his philosophy prevent his subjects from 
 being dedicated in blood to Mithras, or purify 
 the innumerable superstitions to which Apu- 
 leius, who knew them all intimately, bears wit- 
 ness. He might have been a blameless Con- 
 stantine ; he was in fact, but a nobler Julian, 
 proving by his own example how little the 
 Stoic reason can influence multitudes, and how 
 barren was the lay reform on which he had set 
 his heart. 
 
 But those Christians, we hear from Renan, 
 who is almost as indignant as the heathen 
 writers he is copying, bled the Empire to 
 death by their determination not to mix in 
 its business or its pleasures. Yet how could 
 that be, if the Empire had a vitality which its 
 Law sustained ? In granting so much — and
 
 Paris and jferusa/em 203 
 
 he repeats the charge when he is deaHng with 
 French Catholics — surely he is giving up his 
 case. It would appear, then, that neither 
 ancient philosophy nor modern science can 
 furnish an enduring foundation for society. 
 The Roman Empire fell because it accepted 
 the Gospel too late in its career ; the world is 
 now rocked by revolutions because it has sub- 
 stituted for that Gospel a law which has no 
 deeper sanction than use and wont. After the 
 Antonines, Pagan Rome lost its justification 
 to the moral sense. Christianity triumphed, 
 for it had in it the promise of the world to 
 come.
 
 Chapter VII 
 ECCLESIASTES, OR THE PREACHER 
 
 SCEPTIC, idealist, amused spectator of 
 all time and all existence, — these pro- 
 voking but not contradictory epithets 
 paint the Renan who, between 1871 and 
 1892, disputed first with Victor Hugo and 
 then with M. de Lesseps the distinction, what- 
 ever it was worth, of being the foremost French 
 celebrity. In his own thought he was an 
 Ecclesiastes, gay but without illusions, holding 
 all things to be vanity, yet enjoying them as if 
 they had savour and substance. His Philoso- 
 phic Dialogues date back, as we saw, to Ver- 
 sailles and the agony of the Commune in 187 1 ; 
 they were varnished, so to call it, for pub- 
 lication in 1875. They begin somewhat like 
 the Decameron during a season of distress, to 
 end ironically in dreams that are set down 
 by the dreamer as falsehoods which might 
 
 304
 
 Ecclesiastes^ or the Preacher 205 
 
 hereafter come true. Thanks to his " third 
 manner," one lobe of the brain might argue 
 for the affirmative, while another maintained 
 the negative. The play was to be rounded 
 off with a smile and a sleep ; for how could 
 the preacher dogmatize if he had no settled 
 beliefs, and who would take his word as 
 peremptory ? Dialogue, not dogma, was the 
 new form of assertion ; all systems in succession, 
 or, better still, all at once. Yet the general 
 effect was so unpleasant that a lady to whom 
 Renan showed his manuscript exclaimed, " Do 
 not print those pages ; they make one's heart 
 freeze." 
 
 Of course he did print them. He could 
 revise endlessly what he had written ; he seems 
 never to have destroyed any of it. " I am not 
 acquainted with a gay philosophy," said this 
 stroller in Vanity Fair, beginning his discourse ; 
 but why not cultivate good humour, the best 
 of all philosophies ? Nature was herself eter- 
 nally young. We had, indeed, come to a crisis 
 without way of escape, unless she should invent 
 one, as she had always done hitherto. The old 
 doctrines which helped men to be virtuous
 
 2o6 7?. 
 
 enan 
 
 had been rudely disturbed, and no others had 
 taken their place. Idealism would suffice for 
 the cultivated, who by instinct were well be- 
 haved, after the fashion of those creatures that 
 went on acting as if alive when their brains had 
 been removed. For the millions it was cer- 
 tainly not enough. 
 
 Such was the text of Kenan's preachment 
 to an unbelieving France. Had Pere de Mon- 
 sabre delivered it from the pulpit of Notre 
 Dame, the hosts of anti-clericalism would 
 have been up in arms against its cruel satire. 
 But, however else he swung to and fro, on this 
 chief point of a moral decadence Renan did 
 not change. The outrages on good taste in his 
 dramas, The Water of Youth and The Abbess 
 of Jouarre^ may be palliated, though not ex- 
 cused, by the strength of this conviction, which 
 in very curious ways they illustrate. Renan 
 was not only Ecclesiastes ; the heterodox 
 would have been warranted in calling him 
 Balaam, for he blessed the tents of Jacob when 
 desired to curse them altogether. He had 
 known absolute virtue in his young days at 
 Treguier and Issy ; the brilliant heathens with
 
 EcciesiasteSj or the Preacher 207 
 
 whom he dined in the Cafe Brehant could 
 never, he told them, imagine what it was like. 
 
 His " certitudes, probabilities, and guesses " 
 acquaint the reader with nothing new. Na- 
 ture is immoral ; to justify the ways of God 
 to men is a hopeless undertaking ; abstract 
 logic fails to show that He exists, and experi- 
 ence has never made Him known ; but the 
 heart reveals a category of the ideal, and why 
 not be satisfied ? Why not ? we rejoin. Be- 
 cause the lay preacher is himself not satisfied. 
 Take the proof. 
 
 Writing to M. Berthelot, in the letter that 
 George Eliot slighted, Renan moves from this 
 "pure idea" to an evolution, a world-making, 
 so comprehensive that it swallows up history 
 in the physics of the sun, and stretches out 
 beyond our widest human advance to an in- 
 definite future. Renan affirms that Deity is 
 not yet, but shall be ; and, while he denies 
 intelligence and moral attributes to the First 
 Cause, this eternal process, he believes, will 
 bring forth a God of goodness and mercy at 
 the end. No more glaring contradiction to 
 his own thought and to the nature of things
 
 2 o 8 Renan 
 
 was ever ventured upon than is here proposed. 
 The real is not the ideal, says our teacher, 
 but a vast outrage on it, and history a series 
 of defeats for the righteous ; which if you 
 grant, he will at once turn round upon you 
 and prove that an ideal, an inward teleology 
 as the Germans call it, is guiding the universe 
 along paths which cannot but issue in such a 
 millennium as the Prophets of Israel foresaw. 
 That Mr. Spencer should have held this 
 creed was sufficiently astonishing ; but he, 
 at all events, did not oppose history to science, 
 and both to philosophy, by way of premisses 
 to a scheme from which evil disappears. If 
 the Idea is not revealed in Nature, where can 
 it be found ? And if it governs Nature, how 
 is it not revealed ? Renan puts the question 
 to himself, " How reconcile such sentiments " 
 — as universal benevolence — " with an iron 
 law of things, with belief in the sovereign rule 
 of reason ? " He replies, " I do not know, 
 and I care as little. Benevolence does not 
 depend on theory." With a fervour not quite 
 reassuring he continues, " One thing is certain. 
 Humanity will draw from its own heart as
 
 Rcclesiastes^ or the P7'eache7^ 209 
 
 many illusions as it requires to fulfil its duties 
 and accomplish its destiny. It has not failed 
 hitherto, nor will it fail." In other words, 
 it can always be deceived by itself. 
 
 The cynic has had his jest ; the dreamer 
 follows it up. We may imagine the unity to- 
 wards which all things are moving as a sen- 
 sorium or " conscience " — to use the French 
 expression — and this again as shared by many, 
 or by few, or appropriated to himself by a single 
 individual. Science will surely be master of 
 this planet ; or, should earth perish in a catas- 
 trophe of the solar system, then of some other. 
 Will democracy prevail in that ordered world ? 
 It is not likely, answers Theoctiste ; culture, 
 discipline, progress, are incompatible with an 
 American suffrage. The leveller is'condemned 
 by Nature and Darwin. But might there not 
 come to pass a rule of the select, armed with 
 all-creating, all-annihilating knowledge, irre- 
 sistible as no Church or State ever was ? A 
 senate of gods would then dominate mankind. 
 Lastly, however, an omnipotent biologist, 
 emerging from his equals, might concentrate 
 in a life without end ^pleasure, wisdom and
 
 2IO R 
 
 efian 
 
 goodness, while the few and the many, ab- 
 sorbed in that great whole, would enjoy " by 
 procuration " their share of the universe. 
 Some one has called this the " monstrous image 
 of an infinite beast." Happily ! But now 
 a pantheistic vision, not without resemblance 
 to the Bhagavat Gita, though wanting its 
 tender pity, closes the scene. Is it a vision of 
 Something or of Nothing ? The seer himself 
 could not tell ; nor can we. 
 
 Style is Kenan's unfailing miracle. By their 
 cunning design, bold excursions into Chaos, 
 attacks on vulgar democracy, and even by their 
 sadness, the Dialogues won fresh glory for the 
 dissident from every school. But when he 
 talked of his "omnipotent biologist" in the hear- 
 ing of men like Theophile Gauticr, Homeric 
 laughter greeted him, nor could he help join- 
 ing in it. The old metaphysicians, it would 
 seem, were not so grotesque in their wild flights 
 as the latest amateur of science. Before many 
 years they were to take their revenge. By and 
 by Renan would be saying, " Let us not make 
 haste to arrive at the Truth. Who knows 
 whether it may not be something melancholy?"
 
 Rcclesiastes^ or the Preacher 211 
 
 The former dogmatist, who had put his faith in 
 religion only to renounce it, now went away 
 sad from the oracle of science after giving it 
 a trial. He wrapt himself round in illusion, 
 took the most comfortable stall in the theatre, 
 and gently applauded until, for him at any rate, 
 the play was played out. M. Seailles pictures 
 him as one that, from his days at the seminary, 
 had "lived in a mental intoxication." It is very 
 well said, and for an epigram it is true. Curi- 
 osity, observed Renan, reflecting on his own 
 tastes, will be always an entertainment, even if 
 this world should turn out to be nothing but 
 the dream of a sickly God. 
 
 For a moment, however, in these Dialogues 
 he put on the sable cloak of Schopenhauer. 
 He did what in him lay to be discontented with 
 existence and to rail at the Supreme. But the 
 iron had not entered deep enough into his 
 soul. A man who prospered evermore as 
 years went on, whose versatility afforded him 
 boundless amusement, and whose public was 
 the whole of educated Europe, admiring 
 even when it was most critical, must have 
 been haughtier than Diogenes if he did not
 
 2 12 R 
 
 enan 
 
 enjoy the sunshine which his Alexander 
 allowed him. 
 
 Travel was always his delight. In 1874 
 he took his wife to Lugano, Venice, Mantua. 
 A year later, in August 1875, he visited 
 Sicily, attending the scientific congress at 
 Palermo and racing, as he said, in a head- 
 long course over the island, being everywhere 
 received with speeches and what the news- 
 papers call ovations. He took it all very kindly. 
 The clergy themselves were polite to him, and 
 science won their applause. From Messina 
 he went on to Naples, making pleased acquaint- 
 ance with Ischia, the charming islet of this 
 self-styled Prospero, where he spent several of 
 his summer holidays. Famous but rheumatic, 
 middle-aged yet growing light-hearted, he de- 
 livered at Amsterdam in 1877 the comme- 
 morative address on Spinoza. Next year he 
 visited Constance, Innsbruck, and Venice. From 
 Florence he despatched a curious letter to 
 Berthelot, in which he tells his friend that the 
 rivalry of nations will prove not less mischievous 
 than did in former times the intrigues of dynas- 
 ties ; that patriotism after this fashion will not
 
 Ecclesiastes^ or the Preacher 213 
 
 last fifty years ; and that all is vanity except 
 science. " Even art," he concludes, " begins 
 to seem rather empty. My impressions of 
 twenty-five years ago have a touch of childish- 
 ness on them. At the point of view that we 
 have attained, no picture can teach us any- 
 thing. In short, these things were once living, 
 and that must suffice." 
 
 Persevering, not to say ambitious, he had be- 
 come member of the French Institute, Hebrew 
 professor, an author second to none, by sheer 
 hard work, tact and daring, and by a politic 
 though not servile attendance on the chiefs in 
 these various departments. He knew every- 
 body that was worth knowing in Paris. He 
 served the College de France with zeal tem- 
 pered by discretion, and was much liked for his 
 invariable kindness, which did not prevent him 
 from being firm or even unyielding on the fit 
 occasion. His courtesy, which he attributes to 
 St. Sulpice, made him a flatterer in conversation, 
 whatever the subject, provided that certain 
 views of his own were not assailed. For Renan 
 had his prejudices, and only the simple-minded 
 were taken in by his favourite expression, " Vous
 
 2 14 Re7tan 
 
 avez mille fois raison, Monsieur." He greatly- 
 disliked the reigning schools of literature and 
 painting in France ; but his opposition was not 
 violent, though it grew rather than diminished 
 as the ugly Realist flaunted his glaring or un- 
 clean exhibitions at every salon and on every 
 bookstall, with shameless impudence. 
 
 Praising the bewigged seventeenth century, 
 setting up Cousin for a model of grace and 
 measure when affectation was the order of the 
 day, this literary Girondin gave intolerable 
 offence to Goncourt, Gautier, Zola — men in 
 their several ways Jacobins who would have 
 guillotined Louis Quatorze. By instinct he 
 had felt long ago that to speak with commenda- 
 tion of Port Royal and the Jansenists was ex- 
 cellent policy. He did so, yet what could be 
 less to his liking than the sad-browed features 
 of Pascal, or St. Cyran's cast-iron dogmas ? 
 Now he had his reward. Among his friends 
 who leaned to that sterner view was M. de Sacy, 
 son of the well known Oriental scholar. And 
 to the influence of this gentle Jansenist, as we 
 learn, he owed the decorated coat which all 
 French men of letters rate as highly as English
 
 EcclesiasteSy or the Preacher 215 
 
 dukes rate the Garter. On April 3, 1879, he 
 read himself into the French Academy. 
 
 Believers were scandalized at this public 
 recognition of a man whose talents had been 
 spent in undermining the Gospel. Dupanloup, 
 Bishop of Orleans, and his early benefactor, 
 gave up his chair as an Academician. There 
 was an outcry almost as loud as when the Lije 
 of Jesus had first appeared. But honours, in a 
 Republic now decidedly turning from the toler- 
 ant traditions of 1848 to Secularist principles, 
 were destined for men who, like Renan, could 
 give it lustre by their adhesion, however quali- 
 fied. His nomination to the Academy was 
 among the spoils torn from Conservatives on 
 that fatal Sixteenth of May, which marked the 
 last failure of the Bourbons to conquer France. 
 He was no democrat. But in the motley array 
 of opponents to ancient Christendom, to priest, 
 altar, and revelation, he bore a standard, far- 
 shining as it moved. No one could mistake its 
 device, few as they might be who were able to 
 read it distinctly. 
 
 An air of supreme satisfaction, which only 
 just escapes the note of fatuity, reigns over
 
 2i6 R 
 
 enan 
 
 his inaugural address from the arm-chair 
 lately occupied by Claude Bernard. It is a 
 custom which often leads to situations trying or 
 ludicrous that the new Academician shall praise 
 the deceased who has obligingly made way for 
 him. That duty Renan fulfilled in a speech of 
 singular dexterity, in a style clear and strong, 
 adapted to the subject, while he was more 
 than commonly moved by a career which, 
 beginning like his own, in poverty, had been 
 exposed to trials far longer. He made light of 
 Bernard's confusion in thought when that 
 iEsculapius attempted to pass beyond experi- 
 ment and fell into a sort of metaphysics. The 
 well-worn axioms of Kenan's Hegelian system 
 danced their minuet once more ; contradiction 
 the mother of truth ; morals a lighthouse 
 with revolving signals ; the ideal and the 
 real, spheres that do not touch ; yet we are 
 invited to conclude that infinite benevolence 
 made the world and guides it onward. 
 
 Can we be surprised if plain men and acute 
 women found this whirlwind of atoms rather 
 provoking ? Renan sighed over the severity 
 of human creatures towards one another. He
 
 EccIesiasteSy or the Preacher 217 
 
 was not apologizing for what he had written ; 
 yet to those who possess the " sentiment of 
 affirmation," as Madame Daudet so admirably 
 termed it, this nerveless, effeminate resolution 
 of all truths into the vague, must have appeared 
 more dangerous than the Life of Jesus itself. 
 It was indifference cultivated as a fine art ; 
 and how could nations or individuals live 
 on such a Yea and Nay ? Voltaire, in com- 
 parison, was tonic. But Voltaire's eyes would 
 have gleamed when, with delicate mockery, 
 the new member told his associates that even 
 in their delays they were just. " One arrives 
 in your assembly," said he, " at the age of 
 Ecclesiastes, a charming age, most proper 
 to serene cheerfulness, when, after laborious 
 youth, one begins to perceive that all is vanity, 
 but that many a vain thing ought to be thor- 
 oughly enjoyed." 
 
 He prided himself on being a very clubable 
 man. Such, in fact, he was. Good nature 
 sustained by success, philosophic disdain, and 
 nerves not irritated by his dedication to 
 scholarship, made him welcome at every meet- 
 ing of the Forty, a guest much sought after in
 
 2i8 R 
 
 en an 
 
 drawing-rooms. He was, in short, Caliban 
 to look upon, but Ariel when he opened his 
 lips. 
 
 Not without a sense of mischief, he drew atten- 
 tion to the contrast between his genius and 
 his outward man which, at every turn, gave 
 so peculiar an attraction to what he said and did. 
 He became his own jester, shaking his bells and 
 cracking his whip about him gracefully. He 
 called himself " un pretre manque," whom the 
 secular dress would never fit. The public did 
 its best to spoil Renan ; but he, though playing 
 down to it like a finished actor, kept in ironical 
 reserve the principles that he had long ago 
 enunciated. Great writers, it had been said, 
 could only deal with the public as if it were a 
 child ; not so, he replied, you must deal with 
 it as a woman. His method was, in appearance, 
 flattering ; but we may be sure that when he 
 sparkled, and smiled, and, in a glittering phrase, 
 denied the existence of evil, he was throwing 
 into his part a dramatic fervour that vanished 
 as soon as the curtain fell. Unlike Voltaire in 
 so many ways, he was like him thus far ; the 
 habit of persiflage alternated with- a real and
 
 Rcclesiastes^ or the Preacher 219 
 
 deep sense of insecurity before the unknown. 
 Victor Hugo might have labelled Renan, 
 during his last twelve or fourteen years, as 
 " I'homme qui rit " ; it became his rubric, his 
 Leitmotif ; and, certainly, a moral dissolution 
 was setting in. 
 
 If we have not marked his three stages 
 already, let us mark them now. Religion, 
 founded on reasoning, had passed away ; science 
 could not establish the moral order ; perhaps 
 the frivolous were in the right. God, the soul, 
 virtue, were " good old words, rather heavy- 
 sided," which men might use until they in- 
 vented better. To be sure about them was 
 to proclaim oneself a possible dupe. When 
 Pasteur, who took them seriously, ventured to 
 hope that among the French Academicians 
 they might still claim a refuge, Renan warned 
 him that he was expecting too much. Pasteur 
 said, in his devout, scientific way, " He that 
 affirms the infinite, heaps up in that statement 
 more of the supernatural than all the miracles 
 of all religions." His polite but inflexible 
 adversary answered, " You go too far. Mon- 
 sieur." Littre, whom Pasteur succeeded (and
 
 2 20 Renan 
 
 who died a Christian) had shown that miracles 
 do not happen. But Littre, he granted, was 
 resigned to the inexorable laws of Nature ; 
 while Renan looked upon death as an outrage, 
 philosophy as a deception, and could not lay- 
 aside these bitter thoughts. 
 
 To console himself, he fell back on his recol- 
 lection of the days that were no more. He 
 would write his Reminiscences of Touth. More- 
 over, could he not, by means of a volatile spirit, 
 evaporate into dramas the philosophical Dia- 
 logues, where all things might be hinted but 
 nothing affirmed ? And since he had ex- 
 plained how Christianity sprang up, without 
 calling on any but natural influences to ac- 
 count for it, there was the History of Israel 
 awaiting his hand, to be dealt with on similar 
 terms. These exercises did not fill up all 
 his days. In 1882 he was chosen President of 
 the Asiatic Society ; two years later he became 
 Administrator of the College de France. He 
 delivered amusing speeches at the Breton 
 dinner, which was held near the railway-station 
 of Mont Parnasse. He accepted an invitation 
 from the Felibres. or Provencal Society. When
 
 Ecclesiastes^ or the Preacher 221 
 
 the Prix Montyon were to be distributed, his 
 allocution was in request. And at the breaking 
 up of the Lycee Louis le Grand he bestowed 
 their wreaths on the young competitors, with a 
 speech wherein he undertook to refute the 
 pessimism of Jouffroy and of the day, which 
 was always threatening to refute his own philo- 
 sophy and to justify religion. 
 
 Few events in a course now singularly smooth 
 can have given him more pleasure than the 
 proposal which he accepted from the Hibbert 
 trustees to lecture at Langham Place in April, 
 1 880. He crossed the Channel, and found Lon- 
 don somewhat like a " big village admirably clean 
 and well kept," while he judged South Ken- 
 sington to be the very pattern of an opulent 
 city. The enlightened circles which opened 
 their doors to him were the most charming in the 
 world. Progress in England, he told Berthe- 
 lot, was due to the upper classes, in great part 
 Liberal ; the masses were asleep ; Church 
 and State had no fear of attack. All this 
 reminded him of the French eighteenth 
 century before the Revolution. His own 
 France, just then, was committing an " enor-
 
 222 R 
 
 enan 
 
 mous offence " against the principles of free- 
 dom by driving out the religious orders, and 
 Englishmen did not approve. M. Berthelot 
 answered, not without asperity, that English- 
 men were talking at their ease ; if they ever 
 had Jesuits to deal with again, they would be, 
 as their foreign politics demonstrated, hard, 
 brutal, and illiberal. But he admitted that 
 Jules Ferry had not gone about his task in the 
 right way. 
 
 Kenan's lectures, which dwelt on the part 
 taken by Rome in founding Christianity, were 
 delivered to a choice audience, in accents so 
 clear and in a French so classical, that no syl- 
 lable of them could be lost. Their tone, con- 
 sidering where the lecturer stood, was perhaps 
 a calculated irony. For they made much of 
 the Petrine elements, the Papal tradition, and 
 what we might describe as the Catholic in- 
 fluences, to which, in Kenan's judgment, Christ- 
 endom owed its lasting form. On these things 
 whoever has dipped into his volumes will need 
 no instruction. The Lectures are a pleasing 
 mosaic, fragments not unskilfully taken from 
 works already in print ; but they hardly deserve
 
 EcclesiasteSy or the Preacher 223 
 
 a separate place among his writings as Confer- 
 ences in England. 
 
 The " masses " took little heed of an un- 
 believer who could not speak their language. 
 IVIax Miiller asked him to Oxford, where he 
 spent one Sunday. He was enchanted with all 
 that he saw, though compelled to hear a sermon 
 in St. Mary's and to be present at an " inter- 
 minable evensong." His reflections to Bcr- 
 thelot paint the man amusingly. " Oh, the 
 curious city ! " he breaks out ; " you must really 
 see it. It is the oddest relic of the past, the 
 type of death in life. Every college is an 
 earthly Paradise, but a Paradise forsaken. You 
 would say that life had gone elsewhere ; but 
 there is Paradise — planted, swept, weeded for 
 those who have left it. A poor outcome 
 altogether; a mere humanist and quite clerical 
 training, given to a gilded youth who attend 
 choir in surplices ; an utter absence of the scien- 
 tific spirit. A college may possess a million 
 (of francs) as yearly income ; the ' fellows ' suc- 
 ceed in proving that if they are to keep their 
 lawn in order, as the statutes oblige, they 
 must dispense with undergraduates, and they
 
 2 2 4 Renan 
 
 spend the revenues hunting or shooting in 
 all parts of the world." He 'was alluding to 
 All Souls ; but he did not suspect that Queen's 
 College, a few yards down the High Street, was 
 then producing an Assyrian scholar, whose Light 
 from the Monuments would contribute with 
 other English discoveries to make no small 
 portion of his own History of Israel obsolete 
 in not many years. 
 
 His holidays and his seldom intermitted 
 rheumatism, which was complicated by weak- 
 ness of the heart, took him to Plombieres in the 
 rainy August of 1880. There he revised the 
 Water of Touth, a sequel to Caliban^ written in 
 the frivolous vein which he mistook for humour 
 and genius. We will touch upon it when we 
 come to speak of his Dramas. He was also 
 translating Ecclesiastes on a new plan ; and 
 that book, which many have thought among 
 the saddest ever due to an inspired teacher, he 
 discovered to be amiable and amusing. These 
 are not precisely its qualities ; but Renan, who 
 could never forget himself, now saw his image 
 and likeness in every work which he admired. 
 
 We need scarcely undertake to analyse his
 
 Ecc/esiastes^ or the Pt^eacher 22 ^ 
 
 version of Koheleth, or to combat his Epicurean 
 approval of a good sense which passed by the 
 Law and the Prophets into its garden enclosed, 
 there to enjoy life at leisure. But certain 
 pages have attained great celebrity, as betoken- 
 ing the attitude which this veteran student of 
 Hebraism took up towards the Israelite whom 
 we now welcome within our gates. 
 
 Renan portrays, besides the enthusiast or 
 fanatic who heads revolutions — Lassalle, Karl 
 Marx, and their kind — the Sadducee, or man of 
 the world, animated like his prophetic brother 
 with unbounded confidence in himself — the 
 mood called tikva, which is trust in destiny, in- 
 solent and unconquerable — yet careless about 
 the coming of any Messiah. And in this 
 triumphant money-changer, who has inherited 
 whatever his people could grasp, Koheleth lives 
 again. He is pre-eminently the " modern 
 Jew." 
 
 Between him and Heinrich Heine, says 
 Renan, there is but a door to open. After 
 two thousand years, behold him an accom- 
 plished worldling ; he has no prejudices, either 
 feudal or dynastic ; he takes possession of a 
 
 15
 
 2 2 6 Renan 
 
 universe which he has not made. It is for him 
 that Clovis and the Franks have conquered. 
 He is, indeed, no democrat. His smooth skin, 
 nervous susceptibility, scorn of manual labour, 
 make of him a noble ; yet he is not given to 
 warlike feats. Though he carries an air of 
 distinction, he can stoop to the ground ; and 
 therein he stamps himself of the middle class. 
 Chivalry and asceticism are alike far from him. 
 " He has reached the perfect wisdom," con- 
 cludes this portrait-painter in a half-mocking 
 aside, " which is to enjoy peacefully, amid 
 works of delicate art and images of exhausted 
 pleasure, the fruit for which he has laboured. 
 Surprising proof that all is vanity ! Go to, 
 then ; trouble the world, compel your God 
 to expire on a cross, brave all tortures, set 
 your country on fire half-a-dozen times, 
 insult tyrants, throw down idols, that you may 
 die of spinal disease, in a luxurious mansion 
 of the Champs Elysees, lamenting that life 
 is short and pleasure fugitive. Vanity of 
 vanities ! " 
 
 We have all come across that modern Jew, 
 says Renan ; he means in Paris, under the Third
 
 Ecclesiastes^ or the Preacher 227 
 
 Republic, But was there not, in the critic 
 whom we watch as he transforms himself into 
 a tired satirist, more than one resemblance to 
 Koheleth ? Riches he did not seek, indeed. 
 When Madame Renan talked anxiously of house- 
 hold cares, he answered, smiling, that money had 
 never paid their house a call ; and we may be 
 sure that the volume he studied least was his 
 bank-book. He professed to be a minor in 
 worldly affairs, under the tutorship of M. 
 Michel Levy — Hebrew by his name — with 
 whose rendering of accounts he never quar- 
 relled. His ambition, from a child, had been 
 to write ; he did not imagine his thoughts could 
 be sold in the market. His various appoint- 
 ments brought an income which, even when 
 we add to it his literary gains, appears to have 
 been much smaller than we should have argued 
 from so immense a reputation. He did, of 
 course, enjoy his modest comforts ; he travelled 
 for amusement ; and in his last years he made 
 a country-house of the Breton manor called 
 Rosmapamon, close to delightful woods, down 
 by the sea which his ancestors had so often 
 sailed over. But he was never wealthy ; and
 
 2 2 8 Renan 
 
 his likeness to the Israelite now in fashion must 
 be looked for elsewhere. 
 
 When, then, he declares that for men 
 such as the " Preacher," no Messiah, no re- 
 surrection, no patriotism held out a lure, 
 whom is he describing but himself, as 
 books and conversations report him ? Who 
 is it that " ought to be impious," if he 
 obeyed his own logic, but is " touchingly 
 inconsequent," and on the brink of Material- 
 ism draws back ? Who is the amiable sceptic, 
 the resigned Schopenhauer, so much beyond 
 the hero of German drinking-bouts, the rea- 
 soner that will not cleave superstitiously to any 
 inference, the man that loves life though he 
 sees through it, and is an exquisite person 
 with manners which one cannot resist ? 
 Where should we seek him that " could not 
 be led astray by the delusion of the super- 
 natural " ; that was " supple yet proud towards 
 the powers that be " ; that scorned democracy 
 because he held by heredity, and that detested 
 conscription, the barracks, the battle-field ? 
 Who, again, could work, and enjoy, and expect 
 no to-morrow, and find his Heaven in the
 
 Eccksiastes^ or the Preacher 2 2g 
 
 beautiful things of which the world was full ? 
 Whether such a one answers to the name of 
 Solomon, or Heine, or Renan, we know him to 
 be a disenchanted idealist, whose voice, if it 
 sounded alone, would be fatal to the best that 
 is in us. 
 
 But the sceptic lives on a capital stored up 
 during the days when he believed. He is a 
 philosopher on half-pay. All that makes Renan 
 attractive came to him from his ancestors in 
 Brittany, his teachers in St. Sulpice, while the 
 never-ending debate between ideals which he 
 knew not how to reconcile — a debate carried on 
 in public by this accomplished tragi-comedian 
 — threw over each of his volumes the uncer- 
 tainty that men hate in life, but find enter- 
 taining in literature. At the stage where he 
 now was, keeping, as he remarked, a system by 
 double entry, to teach straight on had grown 
 impossible. He could only exchange confi- 
 dences with his readers, talk of old times, gently 
 criticize when the Republicans indulged their 
 appetite for adventure in Tunis or Tonquin, 
 and give his Reminiscences to the thousands 
 who had seldom travelled farther in their ex-
 
 230 Re72an 
 
 ploration of him than extracts from his most 
 notorious volume would permit. Autobio- 
 graphy is fascinating, and here was a past 
 master in the craft, though always on his 
 own terms. 
 
 The Reminiscences of My Youth appeared as 
 a complete book in 1883. " A race," he said 
 afterwards, " lives for ever on its recollections 
 of childhood." So he would live himself, and 
 through him the Bretons who were in him 
 summed up as their incarnate genius. This was 
 his thought, almost his expression. No French 
 biography, since Chateaubriand published his 
 Memoirs from the Tomb, had created a stir equal 
 to the sensation which now followed. Twenty- 
 two editions in half the number of years did 
 not exhaust a demand, everywhere felt among 
 the cultivated, for pages that might justify 
 Kenan's admirers or accusers, both eager to 
 learn his secret. 
 
 A volume, indeed, of Memoirs as the word 
 is understood at Mudie's, Renan neither could 
 nor would have given them. For dates, 
 scenes, incidents, the many-coloured story 
 which those who have played great parts
 
 Ecc/esiasteSy or the Preacher 231 
 
 dress up, and leave to be published twenty- 
 years after their funeral, he had no taste. 
 His education at the seminary made him 
 what he had proved to be as an historian, 
 whether he was rendering St. Paul, Marcus 
 Aurelius, or himself, in his faultless French. 
 Always interested, and interesting, he was yet 
 detached from his subject. Now the virtue of 
 detachment would be fatal to Rousseau ; it for- 
 bids self-portraiture except from a religious 
 point of view ; and Renan never had been, as 
 the spiritual writers name it, an interior man. 
 He looked at the world with his own eyes, but 
 the vision was not directed to feelings ; it 
 sought after facts as a clue to ideas. Upon 
 this moral quality the training which he 
 received in abstract systems, where philoso- 
 phers themselves appeared only as a set of 
 syllogisms to be sustained or demolished, 
 could not fail to react. And so the pictur- 
 esque died out for want of colour, and that 
 which M. Bourget has well termed the violent 
 energy of life was exhausted by an asceticism 
 of the imagination far more effective than 
 hair-shirt or knotted cords would have been.
 
 232 Renan 
 
 From that medium Renan, though struggling 
 valiantly, never got quite free. Though others 
 could not have written about his first years 
 unless he had shown the way, we must agree 
 with Turgenieff that he was never meant 
 for a story-teller. He was, indeed, a being 
 apart. Many Liberals felt it and did not 
 like him ; the orthodox were sensible of it in 
 another way — they shuddered as at an apostate 
 priest. He knew himself how little he could 
 compete with genuine poets, with Alfred de 
 Musset, for example, who is here suggested 
 by force of contrast, or with Heine, who was 
 much too sensuous ever to be a Koheleth 
 meditating upon the fatal sameness of things. 
 
 Thus the Reminiscences are not psychology, as 
 are Rousseau's Confessions. But they give the 
 history of an idea. Calm, with a tranquillity 
 born of science, to which persons only stand 
 for symbols, not for beating hearts and 
 passionate ecstasies of joy or sorrow, they tell 
 how the Christian became an unbeliever, and 
 in the voice we catch no sound of tears. " A 
 curious experience," the writer seems to say, 
 " of which I happened to be the subject."
 
 ERNEST RENAN, 1692. 
 From the painting; by Bonnat
 
 Ecc/esiastes^ or the P?^eacher 233 
 
 He dissects a corpse that had once, in some 
 previous avatar, been animated by his own 
 soul. This high impersonality, shocking to 
 the devout, is proper in a dissecting-room. 
 And it would be superfluous to imagine that 
 Renan kept back any part of the demonstra- 
 tion, so far as he had made it. However 
 mistaken, he was surely sincere. If we grant 
 that moral issues ought to be decided by 
 methods like these, all the anguish, fear, and 
 poignant grief which have accompanied 
 spiritual wrestlings in other men, who dreaded 
 lest they should lose their immortal treasure, 
 may be put aside ; they are unscientific. The 
 problem of eternity is seen to be a question 
 for grammarians ; not " What shall I do to 
 be saved ? " but " How do I read ? " sums up 
 and shapes the whole controversy. 
 
 Plausible as such a method appears — for is 
 it not objective and impartial ? — the deeper 
 sense of mankind refuses to act upon it. Men 
 will go by custom, inspiration, example — 
 nay, by simple guess-work — rather than trust 
 themselves to the " small conjectural sciences," 
 which, according to Renan, make our books
 
 2 34 Renan 
 
 of history and are themselves unmade in the 
 process. " The regret of my life," he writes, 
 " is that I chose to engage in researches 
 which never can be certified ; which must 
 ever turn on interesting considerations about 
 a vanished reality." The world, he thinks, 
 will in a hundred years be forgetting its 
 past. Do we want to know the secret of 
 existence ? Let us consult astronomy and 
 general physiology, and exchange the prophets 
 for Darwin. How we are to establish on a 
 doctrine of evolution thus restricted, any 
 morals but those of profit and loss in view of 
 the species, we shall not learn from our 
 teacher. But yet we know that the ideals of 
 life must somehow find their justification ; 
 and is not this sufiicient evidence that he has 
 taken the wrong path ? 
 
 His Reminiscences^ which begin so romanti- 
 cally, and yet are not a fiction, would possess 
 little charm had his scientific method been a 
 true one. It is the soul for which we are 
 concerned ; the experiment is fraught with 
 issues beyond the ken of star-gazers and general 
 physiologists. When he enters the lodge at
 
 Ecclesiastes. o?' the Preacher 235 
 
 Issy of " la Rcinc Margot," he bears in his 
 heart'something which dies before he leaves it 
 again, or which he murders — his faith, which 
 had lighted up the unseen and made it visible 
 as a divine world. However it comes about, 
 he is by that loss everlastingly poor ; though 
 he should exclaim, as he does, with the Italian 
 poet, that to be wrecked in such an ocean is 
 pleasant to him. The shipwreck cannot be de- 
 nied ; henceforth he floats on a raft, made 
 from its drifting spars. He is resigned, but 
 still he floats, without a compass, over seas 
 that promise him no haven. 
 
 We cannot, then, forbear to agree with AI. 
 Seailles when he tells us that, " The history of 
 one who was among the brilliant intellects of 
 our time leaves a profound impression of 
 sadness. From the heroism of the stripling, as 
 he throws himself resolutely into the life of 
 thought ; from his high ambitions when he 
 composed the Future of Science, impatient to 
 conquer the truth which sounded for him 
 alone its proud flourish of trumpets, to the 
 submission of old age, defeated by life, finding 
 pleasure in its very abasement, the fall is great
 
 236 Renan 
 
 indeed. That Renan should have been under- 
 stood, accepted, flattered, only when he fell, 
 can make no difference. Let who will admire 
 this vacillating mind, this impotence to affirm, 
 we know it to be the last term of decadence.'' 
 No one who feels kindly towards an amiable 
 spirit, or who has found pleasure in his capti- 
 vating ways of speech, but will be grieved on 
 assenting to this judgment. Its truth may be 
 hidden for many readers, seeking as they do 
 literary entertainment at the cost of tragedy, 
 and delighted with Renan's myrtle and jessa- 
 mine, while he takes them round his perfumed 
 garden. But even the enchanted ass of Apu- 
 leius could not feed exclusively on roses. It 
 would seem that eternal life must be bought at 
 a higher price. The awkward pensive student 
 holds us by the heartstrings ; when he gives up 
 his vocation, we suffer with him as in a catas- 
 trophe where the whole man succumbs. But 
 for the amused spectator of his own early strug- 
 gles, we are affected with a sense of pity not 
 altogether free from disdain. He has grasped 
 at everything and taken nothing. Yet he 
 does not perceive that his hands are empty.
 
 Ecclesiastes^ or the Preacher 237 
 
 Chateaubriand, with gifts more extraordi- 
 nary, was a dissolilte rhetorician ; his Memoirs^ 
 though superb in style, cannot furnish the 
 comparison we are seeking by which to esti- 
 mate a more modest, not a less important, 
 biography. If character be our aim, we might 
 lay these Reminiscences not far from the Words 
 of a Believer^ and dwell on the fiery zeal which 
 devoured Lamennais, the calm serenity which 
 tones down or effaces in Renan colours that 
 had never been overcharged. The hackneyed 
 word la nuance^ or shading, rises to our lips 
 when we contrast his subdued atmosphere 
 with a light so strong that it blinds its adorer. 
 But character is rooted in principle, and the 
 key to it is conscience. Let us ask again, 
 therefore, do we feel that conscience is but 
 the echo of our own voice, or is the voice of 
 God to which we must hearken ? All, we 
 may truly say, lies there, in that first and 
 deepest of distinctions. To judge the defence 
 of himself which Renan puts forward, let us 
 take another and an opposite, the A-pologia of 
 Cardinal Newman. 
 
 The difference goes deeper than logic ; it
 
 238 Renan 
 
 is not exhausted by writing in the margin 
 " temperament " ; for it holds of reason, will, 
 and whatever else is our innermost, our real 
 self. To Newman the world outside him 
 brought no message until he had interpreted 
 its lines from within. He construed it in 
 terms of personality, yet not simply his own ; 
 experienceVevealed to him one which possessed 
 the attributes of Justice and Holiness, which 
 was in the highest degree living and the law of 
 all things. But this inward vision it does not 
 appear that Renan ever enjoyed. Amazing as 
 the affirmation sounds to us, he came to believe 
 that no mind greater than the human existed 
 anywhere. To him, therefore, the moral law 
 was an acquisition, not from a Divine source, 
 but as literally manufactured as the Code 
 Napoleon by civic wisdom. Prayer, when 
 there is none to listen, cannot profit much ; 
 and so far from the thinker being less than the 
 universe, he is its superior, urging it forward 
 to a perfection it could never reach were he 
 not driving it, the only Phoebus Apollo in his 
 chariot of the sun. What, then, is religion ? 
 It is worship of the higher, ideal self . What is
 
 Ecclesiastes^ or the Preacher 239 
 
 conscience ? Surely the dream of a shade. 
 It can never be the voice of a God who has 
 not yet begun to be. Man is not " alone with 
 the Alone," he is alone with himself. 
 
 Hence the passionate pilgrimage of Newman 
 goes by prayer and self-discipline, along the 
 way of the cross, to a truth which is ever 
 becoming more of a service, and which ends 
 in a concrete, historical revelation. The 
 A-pologia is likewise a Theodicaea ; truly, it 
 justifies the ways of God to men. It vindi- 
 cates the Christian creed by showing how we 
 may live on its teaching. The conclusion is 
 highly practical, instant, not to be mistaken. 
 In the rudest of language it would be con- 
 vincing ; in the most refined it cannot be 
 more. The light thus gained opens a view into 
 eternity ; it is the seed which yields a harvest, 
 and is equal to endless developments. It 
 restores the inward sense of things ; it accounts 
 for the least by the greatest as due to an all- 
 encompassing design. Having overcome the 
 sting of death, it looks forward in hope to life 
 without end. And this would be, to a scientific 
 mind, its justification.
 
 2 \o Renan 
 
 Renan, when he ceases to be a pilgrim, can 
 hope no longer. He commits progress to the 
 infinite of hazard, which from Epicurus to 
 our own day has taken the dice-box and all it 
 contains for granted. But who can tell, he 
 inquires elsewhere, if the capital of which 
 Nature disposes may not run out ? Thus, 
 said a French wit, he leaves his ideal at the 
 mercy of the coal-measures. To sum up : if 
 chance reigns, how shall we prophesy ? And 
 if it does not, where can reason pause until it 
 grants creative Intelligence ?
 
 Chapter VIII 
 LAST DAYS, DEATH, AND EPITAPH 
 
 SUCH were the notes of interrogation 
 which Renan might have scattered 
 over his unpretending and, to so 
 many, delightful little book. It is easy to 
 read ; we shall not, however, learn its meaning 
 if we sunder it from his philosophic dialogues 
 and dramas, or his frequent soliloquies, which 
 round it off in unexpected fashion. These 
 are commonly bitter-sweet ; while the Remi- 
 niscences put on the tone of good society, 
 and are gay and genial. At no time could 
 Renan appropriate to himself " the diabolic 
 lucidity of Voltaire, the devouring flame of 
 Diderot." He was incapable of drawing 
 scenes or showing his life in action. He did 
 not observe in order to narrate ; but he took 
 a moral impression which passed over costume, 
 
 241 1 6
 
 2^2 Rena?i 
 
 figure, attitude, and all that makes a picture 
 as not to his purpose. Landscape he saw and 
 loved. For people he had not the eye of a 
 painter, though he knew, none better, how 
 they stood to him and he to them. Hence 
 the Reminiscences are written in a key of 
 sentiment, not of colour ; and thus we learn 
 why they were eagerly read, like the Lije of 
 Jesus, by many women ; for in literature 
 sentiment is Eve's Paradise, where she listens 
 to the serpent. 
 
 Perhaps we have now arrived, by a way we 
 were not looking for, at an explanation of the 
 strangely elusive genius, who was, beyond 
 question, more subtle than any freethinker 
 among his contemporaries. When he is not 
 scientific he becomes sentimental ; these are 
 the positive and negative poles round which 
 the current of his being circulates. Sentiment 
 defies analysis and laughs definition to scorn. 
 It may clasp the universe, calling itself cosmic 
 emotion ; and in that mood Renan employs 
 the language of piety which, in strict logic, he 
 ought to have discarded. Again, it may 
 frankly admit the limitations of physical
 
 Death a7ic{ F^pitaph 243 
 
 science, turn from knowledge to passion, and 
 write the Abbess of Jouarre. Instinct, long 
 kept under, may claim its revenge. The 
 laggard Cupid, says Madame Darmesteter, 
 with an allusion to this last book^ that 
 flitted round the hammock in which Socrates 
 lay philosophizing at fifty-three, provokes a 
 smile. But did not Renan, with unwonted 
 lack of civility, declare in his Reminiscences 
 that " the more a man increases in under- 
 standing, so much the more does he seek rest 
 at the opposite pole, in complete ignorance, 
 or the woman who is nothing but herself " ? 
 He adds prettily, " The innocence of a child 
 who knows not that she is beautiful, and who 
 sees God clear as day, is the great revelation 
 of the ideal." 
 
 So the wheel has turned round. He, the 
 stern Jacob wrestling with God's angel, full of 
 syllogisms and unpolished school-terms, confi- 
 dent that by questioning he could find a key 
 to every door, talks like a mystic, and puts love 
 instead of knowledge. True, the genuine 
 mystic, at least if a Christian, denies himself 
 earthly love that he may attain the heavenly ;
 
 244 Re7tan 
 
 while with advancing years Renan bestowed 
 a plenary indulgence on the faults of youth, 
 in which he had never been entangled. Once 
 he had spoken severely of the " Gallic spirit, 
 vulgar, prosaic, without elevation, which under- 
 stands morality as the art of getting on." 
 French laughter, French ballads, were his 
 abomination ; " prurient vice, coquettish im- 
 propriety, making evil attractive — look," he 
 said, " there is the French sin -par excellence^ 
 the absurdity which a Frenchman thinks to 
 escape by his easy air and his eternal smile." 
 He loathed Beranger, who was the poet of all 
 these ineptitudes. " Let us remember," he 
 had explained, " that sadness alone is the 
 mother of great things ! " The frivolous, the 
 superficial man was the real atheist. 
 
 It has been well said that in Renan's earlier 
 writings we may light upon the condemnation 
 of whatever in his last days we should wish 
 unwritten. Himself a rare example of hard 
 work, sober, studious, moderate, decorous, 
 whose life hid nothing of which he need be 
 ashamed, he followed after the multitude, not 
 to sin as they did, but in flowery phrases to
 
 Death and Epitaph 245 
 
 condone their sinning. He affirmed, on this 
 hand, that French democracy was " the most 
 energetic dissolvent of virtue the world had 
 ever seen." And on that he spoke an apology 
 for intemperance, loose living, and the Caliban 
 who personifies the triumphant Republic. 
 " As a piece of satire, a showing up of the 
 drunken Helot," we shall be told. Not in any 
 way. Renan is quite serious. That he would 
 not choose to live under the sway of Caliban 
 we knew long ago ; he made no secret of it. 
 Republicans, when true to principle, are 
 reformers ; but he thinks the masses cannot 
 be virtuous, and ought to be amused. Let 
 them drink on their Saints' days, as in the 
 'pardons of Brittany. An intoxicated " Sab- 
 bat " is good enough for them. 
 
 This Caliban^ with its sequel, TZv Water of 
 Touthy leads up to a lugubrious but powerful 
 imagination, The Priest of Nemi. Unless we 
 turned to these dramas, we should hardly be 
 aware of a certain skill which Renan possessed 
 in dialogue ; not the stage-repartee, but the 
 cut and thrust of real ideas ; neither should 
 we be able full}' to measure the " frightful
 
 2^6 Re^ian 
 
 incoherence " that a golden style elsewhere 
 conceals. 
 
 He has made very free with Shakespeare. 
 The quaint or exquisite creations of The Tem- 
 fest are not to be looked for in scenes which 
 border on pantomime, or in types so transparent 
 that the abstract notion out of which they 
 sprang could scarcely be more foreign to flesh 
 and blood. One may conjecture that Renan 
 was little versed in English books. He never 
 quotes from them. He began, but could not 
 go on reading Macaulay, whom Taine thought 
 superior to most of our men of letters, while 
 to M. Brunetiere he seems our only prose 
 classic. Shakespeare, then, may be left out of 
 comparison, luckily for Renan. The plays are 
 parables. Prospero is modern science, analytic 
 and synthetic ; Caliban represents drunken 
 democracy ; the Inquisitor, baffled by freedom 
 of worship and unlicensed printing — we need 
 not ask for whom he stands ; while the musi- 
 cian, Ariel, is religion or Idealism. The stage, 
 Milan, may be France, Paris, any centre of 
 revolutionary strife. Prospero is dethroned 
 on a gala-day by the people ; Caliban — say
 
 Death a7id Rpitaph 247 
 
 Gambetta — seizes the vacant chair ; and lo, 
 the ruffian, to his own surprise, undergoes 
 transformation. By instinct he turns Con- 
 servative. He guarantees private property, 
 becomes a patron of the fine arts, enters into 
 alliance with Rome, which is ready to crown 
 and consecrate him. But Prospero, safe in 
 his Certosa of Pavia, shall not be made a 
 holocaust. " Pardon's the word for all." No, 
 not for Ariel, who cannot breathe in this 
 dense medium, and who dies on a lingering 
 chord of his own music. 
 
 There is something bitter and not feigned 
 in Renan's contemptuous homage to a Govern- 
 ment which he and his aristocracy of talent 
 could not overthrow. He took leave to mock 
 it as a thing most brutish, praising with a 
 cynic gesture its toleration for such men as 
 himself, the Prospero whom a French Academy, 
 founded by a Roman cardinal, sheltered from 
 the mob. Science had permission to exist in 
 the Republic, and, if it knew how, was en- 
 couraged to compound an elixir of life. 
 
 Not so did the Church reason in her palmy 
 days, according to the philosophic dramatist.
 
 248 Renan 
 
 The Water of Touth transports us to Avignon, 
 with its famous bridge, palace, and French 
 Pope, the luxurious Clement VI. Prospero 
 has been arrested in the disguise of Arnold, a 
 heretic and innovator, whose distilling of magic 
 liquors cannot but trouble good Christians. 
 In spite of the enlightened Clement, to say- 
 nothing of Brunisscnde — and the less said of 
 her the better — death is the penalty of his 
 too copious knowledge. Prospero, wiser than 
 Socrates, puts by the hemlock to quaff the 
 elixir which brings him deliverance. He has 
 invented a method of painless suicide, or, as 
 the Greeks have it, euthanasia. The dying 
 philosopher is consoled by love ; Ariel revives, 
 and, in his turn, consoles Celestine, a young 
 person whom we need not describe, for she 
 has little in common with Miranda. And the 
 play finishes with dancing on the bridge of 
 Avignon, where it began. 
 
 These doubtful satires, not altogether wel- 
 come in lay company, to which Renan appeared 
 as a sort of priest, recall what he had written 
 concerning Lamennais. They were " bold 
 blasphemies," such as have been familiar at all
 
 Death and Epitaph 249 
 
 times to apostates, and are characteristic of 
 them. It was even said that he went beyond 
 Voltaire, by transposing the language of devo- 
 tion to antichristian uses. At all events, it is 
 only in French literature that we come upon 
 so sustained and deliberate a parody of holy 
 things, the " flowers of evil " which a man 
 grown aged by midnight lamps and studies 
 should have refrained from planting. Was not 
 this also vanity ? 
 
 Fantasies, without the salt of life in them, 
 miracle-plays dedicated to science, are among 
 the Senilia which in a famous career we would 
 willingly forget. The Priest of Nemi commands 
 a deeper interest. It moves about Renan, its 
 undoubted hero, and France in a period of 
 eclipse, religious or political. Every one has 
 heard the story as told in the Lays of Ancient 
 Rome. A most learned and ingenious com- 
 mentator, Mr. Frazer, has made of it, in his 
 Golden Bought the text on which to embroider 
 infinite folklore from all ages and nations. 
 Turner's sunlit picture flings over it a radiance 
 that almost transfigures the horrible romance. 
 Diana's priest, tlic " King of the Woods,"
 
 250 Renan 
 
 armed with his drawn sword, lurks to this day 
 among the enchanted trees above the Lake of 
 Nemi — 
 
 Those trees in whose dim shadow 
 The ghastly priest doth reign, 
 
 The priest who slew the slayer 
 And shall himself be slain, 
 
 Renan, who had often passed by it, de- 
 scribed the Lake and its fringe of sylvan 
 foliage, as the " most amazing bit of fairy- 
 land " he had ever seen. Priest, therefore, has 
 slain priest time out of mind, succeeding by 
 this awful rite to the Arician sanctuary. Thus 
 far Ovid, Statius, the Latin historians. Now 
 comes our modern with his lesson for the age. 
 Antistius ouo-ht to have murdered Tetricus ; 
 but he spared that ruffian, who died of grief, 
 and was himself elected priest by a popular 
 vote. He puts down human sacrifice, con- 
 verts the oracle to a pulpit, teaches the Sibyl 
 Carmenta his doctrine of light and purity, 
 declines to make a gain by imposture, and 
 foretells the greatness of Rome. It follows 
 that he is hated of his mother-city, Alba 
 Longa. The people call him atheist ; the
 
 Death and Kpitaph 251 
 
 soldiers charge upon him their own defeats. 
 Ganeo, profligate and coward, expresses public 
 opinion in one way, Metius, the aristocrat, in 
 another ; but they agree that Antistius ought 
 to be removed. In the end Casca slays him ; 
 the old ritual of blood is set up once more, and 
 order reigns in Alba Longa. Yet Carmenta 
 prophesies in a frenzied strain that Rome will 
 triumph. For Alba Longa read France, for 
 Rome Germany, and draw the conclusion. 
 
 But Antistius, the Liberal, what good has 
 he done his country by preaching the truth, 
 nay, by suffering martyrdom in behalf of it ? 
 Has he not been righteous overmuch ? " Yes," 
 he cries, " a truth benefits only the soul that 
 discovers it ; one man's meat is another man's 
 poison. Ah, be thou accursed, light which I 
 have loved ! Thou hast betrayed me. I was 
 eager to reform the race of men ; I have 
 led them astray. O joy of life, thou spring of 
 greatness and affection, to these wretches thou 
 art become the source of all that is degrading ! " 
 
 Here it will be worth while to quote M. 
 Bourget, who for years was Rcnan's close 
 follower. Akin to him in sensitive refinement,
 
 252 Rena72 
 
 in a certain elegance bordering on effeminacy, 
 and in the culture of exotic literature, he 
 deserved to wear Elijah's mantle. But M. 
 Bourget it is who asks whether in the moral 
 agony of this revolutionary priest we ought 
 not to recognize the master's act of contrition. 
 
 " In painting the Christ as he saw Him," 
 observes the gentle critic, " he has helped to 
 draw away from the Church numbers who 
 understood in his books simply their negations. 
 In giving himself up to the pleasing reveries of 
 a philosophic fancy, he has spread abroad the 
 latest of social diseases ; I mean, that dilettant- 
 ism which combines with rarest gifts of intellect 
 a paralysis of the will. Assuredly, he did not 
 intend his works to have these consequences. 
 But he cannot deny them. How, then, should 
 he not ask himself whether the things he has 
 handled did not deserve to be respected, even 
 at the cost of his own silence ? " 
 
 Renan has anticipated the question, as is 
 clear from the drama ; but while he resolves it 
 in one way when the priest of Nemi speaks 
 he gives another and an opposite solution 
 when he speaks himself. For he is always the
 
 Death a7jd Epitaph 253 
 
 oracle which we may interpret as we please. 
 " No," he exclaims in the preface, " I have 
 not been among the timid who believe that 
 truth needs a penumbra." He almost contra- 
 dicts a wise old French proverb when he goes 
 on to tell us," Toute verite est bonne a savoir." 
 And, as we saw not many lines previously, he 
 has put the exact reverse of this affirmation 
 into the mouth of Antistius. Moreover, rejoins 
 M. Bourget, is every passing opinion, be it 
 called science or history, a truth ? Is it not, in 
 Kenan's own words, one thing to opine, another 
 to be certain ? If a man struggling towards 
 the light is edifying to all who mark his heroic 
 efforts, what could be more dangerous than 
 the self-indulgent mood which comes to no 
 conclusion ? Against that form of Nihilism, 
 even because it caresses and beguiles, M. 
 Bourget lifts a warning voice. But he would 
 fain perceive in Antistius the martyr whose 
 blood is the seed of victory, rather than a 
 disheartened and despairing reformer. 
 
 M. Seaillcs is not so lenient. Bv choice of 
 names and force of contrast, he declares. The 
 Priest of Nemi announces that French civilisa-
 
 2 54 Renan 
 
 tion will be swept away in a Teutonic flood. 
 Renan, he truly says, hated war ; his counsels, 
 however bravely meant, implied surrender. 
 All had been flung into the melting-pot — 
 property, patriotism, religion, family life, in 
 Alba Longa, while Rome was building up a 
 new society and writing its immortal Code. 
 Antistius, by the lips of Carmenta, pleads for 
 those Germans who in the nineteenth century 
 had every kind of wisdom, against the elegant 
 but corrupt French who had none. Thus far 
 M. Seailles, the most independent of critics. 
 
 A parallel may here be suggested which often 
 recurs to the mind as we turn over Renan's cor- 
 respondence. The singular, nay, the unique 
 and baffling element in all he writes, is that 
 every thought calls out its contrary. Feeling 
 on this side, reason on that, hold a dialogue 
 which comes to no reconcilement, for want 
 of common terms between the persons of the 
 drama. Obedient to reason, cold and neutral, 
 this man had forsaken his Church and 
 stripped the Redeemer of divine attri- 
 butes ; but still he worshipped Jesus, he felt 
 the charm of Apostolic Rome. Once more
 
 Death a7ic{ Rpitaph 255 
 
 The Priest of Netni exhibits him as divided 
 between his mother-country — " la belle 
 pecheresse," in the strong figure which some 
 one has employed — and the German con- 
 queror, whose weapon, like that of Achilles, 
 heals where it wounds. Again he loves, but 
 loses heart, gives up what is dear to him, 
 yet lingers by the deathbed which he cannot 
 console. 
 
 He had done his utmost. France needed a 
 reformation in its governing ideas. " Woe to 
 that generation," he had told his countrymen 
 before the evil days fell upon them, " which 
 takes life to be idle rest and the arts to be 
 mere enjoyment ! " But his own courage was 
 failing. " Let us neither affirm nor deny," he 
 said with a helpless gesture, as of one sinking 
 into an opium-dream. Yet he added, " An 
 immense moral debasement, nay, perhaps an 
 intellectual one, will set in as soon as religion 
 disappears." By way of enforcing this salutary 
 lesson, he put his hand to a work which Madame 
 Darmesteter, his enthusiastic friend, calls " an 
 aberration of the moral instinct," and which 
 lowered him in the eyes of Matthew Arnold,
 
 256 Renan 
 
 whose theological writings echo more than one 
 of Renan's principles, but do not sacrifice to 
 " the great goddess Lubricity," 
 
 The Abbess of Jotiarre is offered to readers 
 who welcome Platonic myths in modern 
 French. It is not an edifying story. The 
 nun who breaks her vow in presence of death, 
 when condemned to the guillotine by revo- 
 lutionary France, is not only grotesque, but 
 ignoble ; her accomplice, D'Arcy, is an odious 
 and cold-blooded reasoner, of the worst 
 eighteenth century type ; and if, as M. 
 Seailles insists, they are both pupils of Renan, 
 we pity the schoolmaster. But the moral of 
 this performance is even more astonishing than 
 its execution. " I often imagine," says the 
 author placidly, " that if mankind knew for 
 certain the world would come to an end in two 
 or three days, love " — he calls it love — " would 
 break out on all sides with a sort of frenzy ; 
 for that which restrains love is the limit put 
 upon it by the need of keeping society intact." 
 These universal Saturnalia would be " high 
 adoration " and " perfect prayer," comparable 
 to the ecstasies of primitive Christians.
 
 Death a7i(l Epitaph 257 
 
 Perhaps Mr. Arnold's comment on the spirit 
 which dictated so peculiarly Gallic a rendering 
 of the Last Day will suffice here. It was written 
 before the Abbess had come on the boards, 
 which makes it, if possible, more apposite. 
 " Even though a gifted man like M. Renan," 
 he observed in his American Lectures of 1883, 
 " may be so carried away by the tide of opinion 
 in France where he lives, as to say that Nature 
 cares nothing about chastity, and to see with 
 amused indulgence the worship of the great 
 goddess Lubricity, let us stand fast and say 
 that her worship is against nature — human 
 nature — and that it is ruin." He drives the 
 lesson home in words equally to our purpose : 
 " The Eternal has attached to certain moral 
 causes the safety or ruin of States, and the 
 present popular literature of France is a sign 
 that she has a most dangerous moral disease." 
 
 This, too, is the witness of M. Taine, whose 
 candid studies led him to conclude that Chris- 
 tian virtues arc the wings which bear up 
 civilized society. " Ever and always," he 
 affirms in a well-known passage, " for eighteen 
 hundred years, so soon as those wings droop 
 
 17
 
 258 Renan 
 
 or are broken, public and private morals de- 
 cline. In Italy during the Renaissance, in 
 England under the Restoration, in France 
 under the Convention and the Directory, we 
 see men turn Pagans as in the first century of 
 our era. By the same token they became what 
 they were in the days of Augustus and Tiberius, 
 voluptuous and hard. They misused others 
 and themselves. Selfishness, brutal or cunning, 
 had got the upper hand. Cruelty and sen- 
 suality flaunted their colours, and society was 
 converted into a den of thieves or a house of 
 shame." 
 
 Certainly, it may be rejoined, but the 
 Abbess denies none of these things. To which 
 we answer that, if the Abbess means what 
 Renan had always in view — not an imagined 
 Last Day, but " France where he lived " — his 
 play condones decadent morals and sets the 
 future on a hazard. " The century in which 
 I have passed my time," he said when summing 
 up his recollections, " will probably not turn 
 out to be the greatest, but surely it will be 
 reckoned the most amusing of ages." And 
 elsewhere he judges a period of national decline
 
 Death and Epitaph 259 
 
 to be the pleasantest for men like himself. 
 
 Not, then, shame or repentance, but a plenary 
 indulgence, of which no good works were a 
 condition — to accept one's disease and enjoy 
 it — is the supreme duty, as we learn it from 
 the Abbess of Jouarre. The pride of science, 
 which had at one time inspired him with a 
 vision of the last wise man, still reasoning 
 amid the shock of worlds, has given place to a 
 sensual curiosity. There is no longer an aim in 
 life or knowledge. Carried away by the flood 
 of phenomena, Renan loses in his work its ideal 
 unity, in his busy days any definite scope ; 
 he wanders more and more astray from the 
 goal which he had set himself at starting. 
 " Dulcia vitia ! " he would tell us in the words 
 he addressed to Jules Sandeau. But is it not 
 rather the breaking up of a great intellectual 
 empire into rebel provinces, where the desert 
 invades and ancient cities fall to ruin ? We 
 cannot but see in all this the dissolution of a 
 soul which was originally destined to enlighten 
 the world. 
 
 His last undertaking, the History of Israel, 
 was completed before he died, but only in part
 
 2 6o 7? 
 
 enan 
 
 revised. These five volumes need not detain 
 us long. Style and thought could not be 
 wanting to them ; passages of rare subtlety- 
 call up the enchanter we have known ; but he 
 comes after men like Ewald, who were deeply 
 religious and inherited something of the pro- 
 phetic spirit ; or like Kuenen and Wellhausen, 
 original explorers, in whose light his literary 
 displays grow dim. For half a century he had 
 been occupied with Hebrew lore ; his atten- 
 tion had been drawn to the possible results in 
 that province of epigraphy ; but he discovered 
 little and suggested nothing new. 
 
 Moreover, while he followed the latest of 
 the chorizontes, who broke up the sacred text 
 until it showed as many colours as the rainbow 
 wherever one opened it, a conservative reaction 
 was approaching. The monuments were build- 
 ing up what the philologists had pulled down. 
 Babylon was already furnishing a commentary 
 upon Genesis which earlier sceptics had never 
 dreamt of, and which their descendants could 
 not resist. The amazing revelations of Tel el- 
 Amarna were soon to transform our whole view 
 of Assyrian and Egyptian relations at a highly
 
 Death a?id Epitaph 261 
 
 significant period for believers in Scripture. 
 Archaeology, in the words of Professor Sayce, 
 was tending to " substantiate the historical 
 trustworthiness of the older records of the 
 Hebrew people and the antiquity of the docu- 
 ments which contain them." A 'priori con- 
 jectures, ingenious emendations of the text, 
 " all carved out of the carver's brain," must 
 give way to actual and contemporary evidence. 
 It had become more entertaining to read 
 Lenormant, Brugsch, Pinches, Schrader, and 
 their fellow-workers, than to listen while a 
 fatigued man of letters polished up his favourite 
 sarcasms, handled David somewhat in the 
 manner of Voltaire, and betrayed his want of 
 acquaintance with primitive folk-lore. 
 
 In spite of his Oriental learning, his travels in 
 the East, and his boundless curiosity, we feel 
 something in Renan which will not let him 
 enter, as deeply as his subject requires, into that 
 ancient world. He is too Greek or too French. 
 Imperfect sympathy creates a barrier between 
 this dainty, over-refined Western and the rude 
 greatness of the Biblical heroes. All that he 
 could tell us about his own thoughts, hinted
 
 262 Renan 
 
 in eloquent paragraphs, will not serve instead 
 of the power which he was unable to wield. 
 When he comes down to the age before Chris- 
 tianity, and Alexandria becomes the meeting- 
 place of Hebrew and Hellene, as in Philo, his 
 magic staff recovers its virtue. But the Israel 
 of the Old Testament, for which he always 
 cherished an aversion, did not inspire him. 
 The Prophets themselves were " violent tri- 
 bunes of justice " ; and their visions of the 
 supernatural could be to him only the baseless 
 fabric of a dream. 
 
 Thus he was drawing near the end, never 
 idle, calm and cheery, much loved, flattered, 
 and even spoilt by an indulgent France. 
 After his Reminiscences came out, he went 
 down in August, 1884, to Treguier, on which 
 he had not set eyes during some forty years. 
 The Bretons are fervent Catholics ; but they 
 were willing to see in this unfrocked seminarist 
 a man of their race and language whom the 
 great world adored. He made up his mind to 
 live among them ; and at Rosmapamon dis- 
 covered the house, " parva sed apta mihi," as 
 he told Berthelot, smiling, which became his
 
 Death and Epitaph 263 
 
 summer resort onwards from 1 885 . He planned 
 a new journey to the East. But he never went 
 thither again. His grandchildren were a joy 
 and entertainment to the scholar, who had 
 always been something of a child himself. He 
 presided at Breton dinners, lifted his glass in 
 homage to Beranger, rebuked the growing 
 sadness of youth, and taught the philosophy of 
 Hedonism. 
 
 We read in St. Paul that there are many 
 graces, but one spirit who gives them. 
 Renan parodies the sacred words. " The means 
 of salvation," he writes in his Loose Leaves 
 (the English title fits them on this occasion), 
 " are not the same for all. To one virtue is the 
 means ; to another, pursuit of truth ; to 
 another, art ; to yet others, curiosity, ambi- 
 tion, travel, luxury, the fair sex, riches ; on 
 the lowest grade morphine and alcohol. The 
 most dangerous mistake, as regards the morals 
 of human society, is to put down pleasure on 
 system." 
 
 His own pleasure, if not sanctified by the 
 high mark at which he had ceased to aim, was 
 in its kind not ignoble. As administrator in
 
 264 Re7taii 
 
 the College de France he did his duty ; and 
 he continued his lectures in spite of illness, 
 until he had almost to be carried into his chair. 
 The rooms assigned him were narrow and un- 
 comfortable. " I have had a good deal to put 
 up with," he wrote in a private memorandum 
 found among his papers, " sometimes even 
 downright poverty, but never, never was I so 
 wretchedly lodged as in the College de France." 
 He made no public complaint. Berthelot and 
 Renan looked with disquietude on incidents 
 like the adventure of Boulanger ; the debase- 
 ment of France was setting in more strongly 
 than ever. " Our incurable etourderie, our want 
 of organization, our illusions, frighten me," 
 said Renan to his friend in 1888 ; " but we 
 are old. The just measure of life has been 
 vouchsafed us ; we have had our five acts ; we 
 should be unfair did we protest too much. It 
 is not an ill condition, nor does it lack a 
 certain charm, to behave as a dying man, 
 mori turns. ^'' 
 
 The last long expedition which he undertook 
 was to the Riviera towards the end of 1891. 
 He was always correcting the proofs of his
 
 Death and Epitaph 265 
 
 Israel^ fearing if another did it by and by that 
 he should suffer more on that account in pur- 
 gatory. His rheumatic pains never left him. 
 In July 1892 he was at Rosmapamon, whence 
 his last letter to the friend of his youth is dated. 
 " How well we did," he writes, " to choose our 
 philosophy of life when we were young and 
 strong ! How late it would be to think of 
 these things when the end threatens and we 
 must expect a removal ! All that is not new 
 to mc. To end is nothing ; I have almost 
 fulfilled my life's plan ; I could make good use 
 of some years yet ; but I am ready to go. It 
 is hard, I grant, that one should be the cause 
 of grief to others, and should trouble the lives 
 of those who are dear to one. In that matter, 
 a reasonable euthanasia^ guided by sound philo- 
 sophy, could do much." 
 
 In his Reminiscences he had provided against 
 what he considered the accidents whereby 
 Augustin Thierry and Littre had given the 
 lie to their former opinions. " I protest in 
 advance," he declared, " against the foolish 
 things (les faiblesses) which softening of the 
 brain might lead me to say or to subscribe. It
 
 2 66 Renan 
 
 is Renan whole in mind and heart, as I am this 
 day, not Renan half the prey of death, as I 
 shall be if I am slowly to break up, for whom 
 I desire credit and attention. I abjure the 
 blasphemies which one last hour of weakness 
 might elicit from me against the Eternal." 
 
 He was not to be tempted. A sudden failure 
 of the heart warned him that his days were 
 numbered. " Take me back to the College," 
 he insisted ; and his devoted wife obeyed. 
 There, among friends and kinsfolk, he died 
 without suffering on October 2, 1892. " That 
 great intellect," says the Livre d'Or^ compiled 
 by his admirers, " which had reflected so many 
 aspects of human thought, expired in peace 
 and in absolute negation." 
 
 The French Republic, though he had never 
 loved it, gave him a State funeral. Before his 
 cofHn, M. Bourgeois, Minister of Education, 
 and many others, held orations in the College 
 vestibule. Senators, deputies, generals, judges, 
 delegates from learned societies, officials of 
 every rank, students, professors, diplomatists, 
 all came flocking to do him honour. The 
 Grand Orient of France sent a wreath for his
 
 Death and Rpitaph 267 
 
 coffin, which was hidden by the floral crowns 
 cast upon it. During its passage to the grave 
 a detachment of infantry accompanied its 
 march, thousands of spectators lined the streets. 
 It had been proposed that Renan should find 
 a resting-place under the dome of the Pan- 
 theon, formerly Ste. Genevieve, which was 
 secularized to make room for the relics of 
 Victor Hugo not many years previously. But 
 difficulties arose, and the body was committed, 
 by Madame Kenan's wish, to the vault of her 
 own family, the Scheffers, at Montmartre. 
 His wife survived him less than two years, 
 dying on May 22, 1894; his son Ary, who was 
 winning distinction as a poet and a draughts- 
 man, and who seems to have been of a very 
 amiable character, died on August 4, 1900. 
 Madame Psichari, Renan's daughter, lives with 
 her children in the country house of Rosma- 
 pamon. 
 
 By anticipation the man himself sketched his 
 own epitaph, not on the walls of a cemetery, 
 but, as was fitting, during a banquet at Tre- 
 guier, when he first went back thither in 1884. 
 It is Renan's A-pologia fro Vita Sua, which in
 
 268 R 
 
 e7ian 
 
 justice ought not to be passed over. " I 
 should like," he said, " to have written on my 
 tomb — ah, if it could be in the midst of that 
 cloister, but the cloister is the Church, and 
 the Church, mistakenly enough, will have 
 nothing to do with me — but I wish to have on 
 my tomb these words, Veritatem dilexi. Yes, 
 I have loved the truth, sought it, followed 
 whither it called me, without regard to the 
 sacrifice entailed. I broke the links that were 
 dearest to me that I might obey it. And I 
 am sure that I did right. Let me express my 
 meaning. No one can be certain that he 
 understands the riddle of the universe ; the 
 infinite that clasps us round escapes from all 
 the lines and formulas we set upon it. But one 
 thing there is that we may affirm : sincerity of 
 heart, devotion to truth, the consciousness of 
 what we have given up for its sake. That wit- 
 ness I will hold, high and firm, above my head 
 on the Day of Judgment." 
 
 Who could find it in his heart to gainsay 
 these passionate words, or to question whether 
 Renan believed what he uttered so resolutely ? 
 But the Latin proverb warns us, " Exitus acta
 
 Death and Rpitaph 26 c) 
 
 probat," and a tree is known by its fruits. 
 M. Seailles, contemplating the teacher's whole 
 course, affirms that he " mistook indecision 
 for sincerity " ; that when he quitted St, 
 Sulpice it was not only the enthusiasm of a 
 truth-seeker which moved him, but terror lest 
 he should be committed beyond recall by ad- 
 vancing to the priesthood ; and that his love 
 of " the Truth " ended in a defeat which had 
 nothing to boast of but its resignation. 
 
 Another has observed, in view of the philo- 
 sopher's last achievements, intended to win 
 applause from an unreformed world, " saltavit 
 et placuit," he danced to a music which his 
 better sense condemned as lascivious and 
 obscene. In a gentler mood Alphonse Daudet 
 likened him to a cathedral which has been 
 desecrated to profane uses, but where amid 
 the hay, straw, and stubble, while the choir is 
 turned to a messroom, and the stalls are a 
 stabling for horses, it is impossible to forget 
 that the building was once a church. And 
 yet another saying, uttered in fierce wrath by 
 Ludovicus Vives against the Arabian sceptic, 
 Averroes, may be applied to this versatile
 
 270 R 
 
 enan 
 
 teacher, " He must needs grow impious and 
 atheistical who is vehemently given to the 
 study of thy writings." Such, at all events, 
 was the opinion held by those French public 
 men who saw in his State funeral a protest 
 against all religion and against the Christian 
 in particular. 
 
 How now, we may further ask, will the 
 epitaph look which we have cited above, when 
 set in a parallel column with another passage 
 equally authentic ? " We stake our nobility," 
 says Renan, with pride, " on an obstinate 
 affirmation of duty. But," he continues, 
 " there are almost as many chances that the 
 opposite may be true. It may be that these 
 voices within us are the consequence of sin- 
 cere delusions, kept up by habit, and that the 
 world is an amusing transfiguration-scene 
 which no god has in his care. We must then 
 so arrange as on either supposition not to be 
 entirely in the wrong. We ought to mind 
 those higher voices, but in such a way that if 
 the second hypothesis turns out to be a fact, 
 we shall not have been altogether duped. " 
 Here is the clean contrary of what was said
 
 THE STATUE OF ER^ES^T hENAN AT IKIlUllK.
 
 Death and Epitaph 271 
 
 at Treguier. But we may write on the same 
 page even a third quotation, no less genu- 
 ine " Rehgion, which sums up man's ethical 
 needs, — virtue, modesty, disinterestedness, and 
 self-sacrifice, — is the voice of the universe." 
 
 Astonishing vitality, boundless incoherence, 
 these were Renan's qualities and defects. 
 Nature had refused him the graces ; but 
 his " leonine " head, his features marked with 
 a penetrating intelligence, his eyes lighting 
 up under slow eyelids, could never have 
 suited with a common man. His voice had 
 many tones in it, strong, flexible, caressing, 
 always, however, self-controlled. His robust 
 and healthy make, his temperance, and his very 
 studies, which for years led him into libraries 
 rather than where men debated for their lives, 
 or artists hung feverishly over their canvas, 
 brought him past the age of temptation. All 
 this gave him power and inclination to attempt 
 the chief enterprise by which he is known ; it 
 saved him when old and somewhat frivolously- 
 minded from pitfalls in which other literary 
 heroes had lost their character. At all the 
 turning-points in life he showed energy as well
 
 272 Renan 
 
 as decision. Except from his sister Henriette 
 he seems never to have asked advice. Early 
 and late he took his own way. He acknow- 
 ledged in Augustin Thierry a " spiritual mas- 
 ter " ; but he was not familiar with Thierry 
 when he changed his course in 1845. In- 
 tellectual ancestors he had none outside books ; 
 and if disciples came, he did not seek them. 
 
 His place in French literature is a lonely one, 
 more than Balzac's or even Flaubert's. And 
 his manner of speech is inimitable. M. Bour- 
 get tells a pleasant story of the critic who could 
 analyse every great style and lay bare its secret ; 
 when the talk fell on Renan, he shook his head. 
 " Ah, that man's phrase," he exclaimed ; " one 
 sees not how it is made." In fact, it was not 
 made. Touches, no doubt, of infinite delicacy 
 brought out the required expression. The 
 master was never weary of correcting himself. 
 His manuscripts abound in erasures ; his 
 printed revisions went on for months. But 
 the character of his phrase may be ascribed to 
 a vitality which fostered the inward sense, to 
 exercise in the logic of the Schools, to much 
 reading in classical authors, and to the self-
 
 Death and Epitaph 2']'^ 
 
 denial which would not allow his pen easily to 
 run after Chateaubriand or Hugo, landscape- 
 painters whom he could not rival and would 
 not stoop to imitate. His richness, or depth 
 of allusion, an uncommon quality among 
 French writers, was no trick. It was the spon- 
 taneous pouring out of knowledge ; the dis- 
 covery of new horizons consequent on his 
 travels through the learned world, which men 
 of letters in Paris did not explore. To unite 
 culture with science, erudition with life and 
 poetry, views the most diverse with a tem- 
 perament which had always been " gay yet 
 resigned," was to create a genius entirely novel, 
 and the corresponding expression could not but 
 follow in due season. 
 
 Renan maintained that he had no need to use 
 any words except those which he found in the 
 seventeenth century. Gautier and St. Victor 
 replied that the ideas which he uttered in them 
 flung over those words a modern air and seeming. 
 His critics were surely in the right. Neverthe- 
 less, one reason why he charms and subdues so 
 many, is the dressing up in perfect but unpre- 
 tending French of thoughts which arc bold 
 
 i8
 
 2 74 Renan 
 
 to the point of revolution. Anarchic, subtle, 
 perverse, dissolving as a poison they may prove 
 to be ; but they are always elegantly attired, and 
 as insinuating as music which lulls to sleep on 
 a much loved rhythm. To this effect his 
 citations from the Latin Vulgate, his fondness 
 for devotional terms, his pretty " peal of 
 church bells," as he calls it himself, added ex- 
 traordinary power. Never was a certain verse 
 of Shakespeare about quoting Scripture for a 
 purpose more strikingly illustrated. 
 
 By such handling the sacred became all the 
 more profane ; Holy Writ was made its own refu- 
 tation ; and Judas betrayed his Master with a 
 kiss. To smile was deadlier in its office than to 
 sneer. Sympathy turned out to be the sharpest 
 criticism. But how irresistible its advances ! 
 For who could be deaf to the voice of this 
 charmer ? He did not argue or contend ; he 
 suggested, like faint echoes among the hills, 
 your own thoughts to you, until they died 
 away in a tingling silence. But something 
 was gone out of them, and you could not 
 believe any more. Whatever delights us in 
 Renan comes from the past with which he
 
 Death a7id Epitaph 275 
 
 had broken. All the secret bitterness, and 
 despair in the end, he has added from his 
 own stores. He is a magician who reverses 
 the rod of power when illusion is at its height. 
 That disenchantment he terms philosophy ; 
 the reversed rod is modern science ; and 
 for the divine Prospero we must put up with 
 Caliban, who will, perhaps, not rend us in 
 pieces until the drunken fit seizes him once 
 more. 
 
 If a better interpretation of Renan's wisdom 
 can be found, it shall be welcome. Mean- 
 while, history has provided a contrast. The 
 man who shared with him an influence over the 
 rising French generation as great as Stuart 
 Mill's had been in England between i860 and 
 1880, was Hippolyte Taine. Pupil and pro- 
 fessor of the Normal School, Taine had re- 
 nounced his Christian parentage, given to 
 Hegel a literary form and pressure which made 
 him a prophet side by side with Rousseau in a 
 land not his own, and declared thought to be a 
 secretion of the brain, free will a figment, our 
 most certain experience a " fixed hallucina- 
 tion." If not atheist or materialist by force of
 
 276 Renan 
 
 terms, he was both in the popular judgment. 
 Assuredly, no writer in the Journal des Debats 
 carried more weight ; none was a greater enemy 
 of the " clerical " opposition. Yet, in mid- 
 course, Taine, and not another, undertaking 
 from documents and evidence to deal with the 
 French Revolution on its merits, saw him- 
 self obliged, as a candid historian, to condemn it 
 more severely than Carlyle had ever done ; nay, 
 to repeat in sentences crowded with facts un- 
 deniable the language of Edmund Burke. 
 
 Taine went a step farther. In the Christian 
 creed and ceremonies ; in its catechism and its 
 ideals ; this determined agnostic, as for thirty 
 years he had appeared in all his writings, now 
 perceived the source of French greatness. The 
 religious idea, the stay and foundation of society 
 during fifteen hundred years, had been anni- 
 hilated by Jacobins, who vainly strove to put 
 in its place their lay education, lay church, lay 
 ethics. But all they had accomplished was to 
 ruin the ancient building, after which they 
 took refuge in Napoleon's barracks. For his 
 own part, Taine, though he did not become a 
 Catholic, found in Christian teaching the only
 
 Death and Epitaph 277 
 
 hope, and submitted his once recalcitrant 
 spirit to its guidance. He cast from him the 
 Revolution in every shape^ whether as unbe- 
 lieving science, militant atheism, or State 
 monopoly ; but he did so in the name of 
 unanswerable witnesses, — the dead who had 
 spoken by their acts and monuments which 
 every one could examine for himself. 
 
 The six volumes that describe the Origins of 
 Contemporary France were at once an indict- 
 ment and a censure. They were received with 
 shouts of amazement, then with silence ; but 
 they never have been refuted. In this " terrible 
 book " we may study the consequences of a 
 philosophic system which Renan, despite his 
 ingenuities and ironies, could not escape from. 
 He was no Jacobin, politically speaking; but 
 Robespierre and his acolytes carried into exe- 
 cution the ideas that everywhere lie hidden 
 beneath Renan's graceful persiflage. He, too, 
 had indicted the new order of tilings, almost 
 as decidedly as the historian now did ; but 
 he had yielded to its sway because, after all, 
 what in him was a timid and refined sentiment, 
 starting back from its own shadow, in the
 
 278 Renan 
 
 Convention had become a deadly logic, armed 
 with sword and axe for the destruction of its 
 foes. 
 
 A benevolent critic, M. Lanson, tells us that 
 Renan has " for many minds rendered faith 
 impossible, and equally impossible the war 
 against faith " ; he has made an end of the 
 Voltairian spirit, says M. Lanson, and delivered 
 those who cannot be Christians from being 
 anti-clerical. " Neither believers nor enemies, 
 nay rather sympathisers with belief, conscious 
 that faith is morally good for those who can 
 hold by it, such is what Renan has made of us." 
 Taine will prove to the observant reader how 
 empty, if how amiable, is that delusion. In 
 the world of which we form part, indifference 
 to a creed is hostility so victorious, that it does 
 not know the grave in which its conquered 
 enemy lies buried. Renan was in religion what 
 the Gironde was in French politics, flowery, 
 inconsequent, the slave dragged behind a 
 triumphal chariot which he had helped to set in 
 motion. His Lije of Jesus may be summed up 
 in the famous expression of Vergniaud, presid- 
 ing at the trial of Louis XVI : " I regret to
 
 Death a7id Epitaph 279 
 
 declare that by a majority of votes Louis Capet 
 has been judged worthy of death." It is the 
 headsman's eloquence, while Christianity lies 
 bound on the scaffold, waiting until the axe 
 shall fall. 
 
 In everything the confirmed dilettante is a 
 prey to his own dramatic fancies ; the real, the 
 lasting abides far from him. Of religion, philo- 
 sophy, love, heroism, he may counterfeit the 
 semblance ; but he can boast no more. He is 
 Ixion enamoured of a cloud. He plays a part 
 on the stage ; woe to the charmed spectator 
 who mistakes it for something real. In Ernest 
 Renan the reality was a wide and curious 
 erudition, hung round with shining jewels 
 from all possible systems ; but the jewels were 
 paste. His creed may be brought down to a 
 single negation, " The supernatural does not 
 exist." When we inquire of the oracle, " What, 
 then, shall we do to possess everlasting life ? " 
 he answers, " Do as seems right in your own 
 eyes." All differences are swallowed up in the 
 gulf of a fundamental unity. Nero and Paul, 
 Judas and Jesus, arc chords in one great or- 
 chestra. How, indeed, should it be otherwise
 
 28o R 
 
 enan 
 
 when we have reduced the personalities, which 
 make men each to be himself and incommunic- 
 able, to scientific expressions with a common 
 measure ? 
 
 The whole tangled web of Kenan's contra- 
 dictions unfolds itself when we follow this 
 clue. He brings us down to the abstract, imper- 
 sonal element which in Hegel, or Averroes, or 
 Spinoza is the One Everlasting. And our 
 universe of spirits or monads is borne along the 
 stream of tendency, always passive, though not 
 always inobservant. A wise man will often 
 smile at the turn which things are taking, but 
 he never resists. Why should he ? The 
 intellect is one thing, the will another ; and 
 except for the will how can there be a differ- 
 ence between good and evil ? To the 
 philosophic mind all phenomena which it 
 can perceive must be agreeable, since all are 
 equally objects of its contemplation. 
 
 Here, then, we reach our last analysis. Life, 
 art, religion, divorced from will, distilled into 
 atomic formulas, have had taken out of them 
 spontaneity, the free personal initiative — that 
 which in morals is virtue, in thought judgment,
 
 Death arid Rpitaph 281 
 
 in enterprise faith, in act resolution. The 
 attempt to view all things as if the mind which 
 views them did not count, is intellectual 
 suicide. One half of our nature, and that the 
 more important, is thereby suppressed. The 
 real unity, to which every man refers as to a 
 centre all his doings, is sacrificed to a fictitious 
 ca^put mortimm called science, where its faculties 
 lose their meaning and are no longer recog- 
 nizable. In that unity, secret and deep as life 
 itself, the primal truths spring up which, on 
 entering into contact with experience, make us 
 sure of our own existence as self-conscious 
 beings, of the world outside us, and of the laws 
 under which we are bound to live. 
 
 Will it be said that there are no such laws ? 
 But if that be inconceivable, and if science, 
 as defined by Renan, cannot discover them, 
 what is the inference ? Surely that " science," 
 handled upon this method, is inadequate and 
 misleading. Though it should break down, 
 the problem of duty remains as imperious 
 as ever, and therefore cannot be insoluble. 
 Another method, a calculus of the spirit, must 
 be applied ; or we shall judge like the man born
 
 282 R 
 
 enan 
 
 blind that colours do not exist, like the un- 
 taught savage that letters have no meaning. 
 Kenan's enormous negative which, in denying 
 the supernatural, swept away all that we live 
 by — God, conscience and immortality — sets, 
 therefore, the seal on his incompetence as a 
 great teacher. Why incompetent ? Because 
 he had taken as ultimate criteria of the 
 truth physics masquerading in the shape of 
 history, sentiment for first principles, imagina- 
 tion for judgment, and a dead, or half-dead 
 stream of tendency, for the Love which a 
 greater than he has celebrated : — 
 
 That moves the sun in heaven and all the stars. 
 
 Remarkable as was Taine's conversion from 
 that unsound philosophy, and decisive the 
 proofs which he brought against it, considered 
 in the light of an experiment lasting now more 
 than a hundred years, while France was dying 
 in the moral vacuum it had created, a yet more 
 complete overthrow was inflicted upon it by one 
 before whom Taine veils his crest as a thinker — 
 we mean, of course, Cardinal Newman. Sin- 
 gularly impressive is the contrast, in every
 
 Death a7id Epitaplj 283 
 
 stage conspicuous, between the Oxford divine 
 and the Parisian dilettante. Agreeing as they 
 did in their conception of literature, in devotion 
 to Greek and Roman antiquity, in disdain of 
 the applause which is caught by picturesque 
 language, in their superb isolation from 
 the crowd, and in their gifts of irony and 
 brilliant humour, they set out from contra- 
 dictory premisses to arrive at opposite conclu- 
 sions. 
 
 Newman is a Mystic, Renan a Rationalist. 
 To Newman his conscience makes known a 
 present Deity ; but to Renan it is a human 
 invention without echo in the heights or the 
 depths. The one enlarges on the " ventures 
 of faith " ; by the other we are warned not to 
 be the dupes of our better feelings. Prayer 
 is the philosophy on which Newman feeds his 
 mind ; to Renan prayer has become absurd, 
 for what is it more than talking to one's self ? 
 Reverence, adoration, shame and holy fear 
 betoken that the one is face to face with a 
 Supreme Judge, in whose kindness he revives, 
 under whose frown he wastes away. The other 
 sees no intellect superior to his own ; reveres no
 
 284 Renan 
 
 divinity ; suppresses the idea of sin ; loses the 
 delicacy of feeling which protects all exquisite 
 virtue ; and writes his page in the scandalous 
 chronicle of French letters. With Newman 
 learning, style, eloquence, are but means to a 
 nobler end ; he is always intent on religion, 
 even where he comes down to a schoolmaster's 
 exercises. But Renan, who began at the same 
 starting-point, turns all this another way. The 
 lowest knowledge is the only real truth ; art 
 loses its former interest ; religion is a pretty 
 make-believe, ethics a lottery, life itself an en- 
 tertainment. Thus, to the meditative Newman 
 things eternal grow more and more vivid ; as he 
 lealizes the Divine Attributes, man takes on 
 him grander proportions, becomes the heir of 
 infinite hopes, and is called to heroic deeds. 
 This golden key of personality unlocks doors 
 which remain obstinately barred when the Pari- 
 sian science beats upon them. In such a way 
 is absolute negation met by no less resolute 
 assertion. But the denials that scatter Kenan's 
 philosophy to the four winds, leaving him the 
 wreck of his own fancies, cannot have much to 
 command them, since all his wonderful endow-
 
 Death a7id Epitaph 285 
 
 merits do not avail to save him from incoherence 
 and despair. In one word, Newman has found 
 Jesus ; Renan has lost Him. 
 
 Such was the experiment, such the outcome 
 of two lives, rich in their powers and oppor- 
 tunities, that, filling the nineteenth century 
 with their fame, have left to after ages a picture 
 of themselves, and bear on to a future day the 
 undying strife between light and darkness. 
 How much of either will survive ? We cannot 
 tell. But not on arts of literature, equal in 
 both, will the issue depend. If men turn 
 sceptics ; if society cultivates decadence as a 
 pastime ; if the bands of Orion are loosened, 
 and Pagan ethics drive out Christian from the 
 bridal-chamber, the schools, the printing-press, 
 to say nothing of the market and the exchange, 
 to this movement of dissolution Renan will 
 have lent a powerful hand. For by denial or 
 by surrender he has made these things possible. 
 
 Should, however, a creative breath renew 
 the world, and man become once more the 
 being of transcendent worth which he thought 
 himself at all heroic eras, not much will be left 
 of Renan except his memory as an artist, and
 
 2 86 Renan 
 
 specimens, carefully chosen from forbidden 
 volumes, to illustrate that marvellous gift. 
 The incalculable quality which, for want of a 
 better name, we call genius, and which is, at 
 last, personality carried to its highest power, 
 will never be denied him. As -a master of his 
 native tongue, limpid, unforced, enchanting, 
 whose only fault was even too great a dexterity, 
 the Breton remains worthy of a place beside 
 Chateaubriand, over against Lamennais, in- 
 spired by the charm of that French idiom which 
 in those eloquent preachers sounded tragic and 
 sombre, but from his pen flowed in a smiling 
 stream. In history, little that he attempted 
 will be remembered. As a thinker he does not 
 count. Who would name Renan amid the 
 senate of philosophers, German or Greek r 
 But he had something of that which, in his 
 forerunner, Abelard, cast over the man of 
 letters, the Parisian professor, the classic yet 
 romantic medieval doctor, a gleam of imperish- 
 able renown, Abelard opened the way to an 
 alliance between the Church and Aristotle by 
 his very aberrations ; Renan stated, though he 
 could not resolve, the problem of Scripture-
 
 Death and Epitaph 287 
 
 criticism. From the day when his Lije of Jesus 
 appeared the Bible has become for clergy no 
 less than laity a modern book, the most 
 momentous in living literature. 
 
 On August 30, 1902, the town council of 
 Treguier voted, by a majority of eleven to five, 
 that a monument should be erected to Renan 
 in one of its public squares. A committee was 
 formed, including, besides French celebrities, 
 foreign names like George Meredith, Ibsen, 
 Maeterlinck, Galdos, Brandes, Gerard Haupt- 
 mann, and Mommsen. The bronze seated 
 figure, above which rises Athena to signify the 
 ideal which he worshipped, is now in its place. 
 But, by way of protest, the Catholic Bretons 
 have set up an image of Calvary over against 
 it. " To give Renan a monument," said M. 
 Anatole France, " is to erect one to science and 
 wisdom." Renan himself has written, " A 
 beautiful work is that which represents, under 
 finite and individual traits, the infinite, the 
 everlasting beauty of human nature." He said 
 also, " Error founds nothing ; no error can 
 last very long." By those sentences let him be 
 judged.
 
 288 R 
 
 enan 
 
 In the Suppliants of Euripides, three lines 
 occur which a believer may well apply to the 
 French iconoclast — 
 
 AXX ri (ppovrjcri^ Tov Oeou jueJ^ov rrOei'eiv 
 Tw^^, '7"t> yitvpov oev (ppecTiv KeKTtjfxevoi 
 SoKOVfj.ei' elvai vaifxovon' aocpwrepoi. 
 
 A sentiment of which the drift would perhaps 
 be expressed in English as follows — 
 
 Our thought presumes to scan the mind of God 
 And finds it wanting ; thus, with pride possessed, 
 Wiser than angels we esteem ourselves. 
 
 That epitaph, inscribed on Ernest Renan's 
 tomb, would shadow forth a mind which, 
 looking out into the universe, saw nothing 
 to worship but its own powers, and which 
 ended in absolute negation. The faith it had 
 given up held for others the light of life ; but 
 in the knowledge to which it aspired it found 
 only darkness visible. 
 
 THE END 
 
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