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 Form No 513, 
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THE LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2013 
 
 http://archive.org/details/lifeofernestrena2346robi 
 
. OS 
 
 THE LIFE OF \ SV7 
 
 ERNEST RENAN 
 
 MADAME JAMES DARMESTETER 
 
 (A. Mary F. Robinson) 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
 1897 
 
To 
 
 MADAME JEAN PSICHARI 
 (No^mi Renan) 
 
 I DEDICATE THIS PORTRAIT 
 OF HER FATHER, 
 WHICH OWES TO HER DEVOTED HAND 
 ITS MOST LIFE-LIKE 
 TOUCHES 
 
 682677 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PART I 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 h Tr£guier ..... 3 
 II. Henriette . . . . .13 
 
 III. The Seminary . . . . . 22 
 
 IV. A Doubtful Vocation 34 
 V. A Great Resolution . . 48 
 
 VI. Dominus Pars ..... 57 
 
 PART II 
 
 I. New Ideas . . , . .71 
 
 IL 1848 . . . . . . 81 
 
 III. The Vale of Grace .... 97 
 
 IV. The Moral Philosopher . . . 111 
 V. Marriage . . . . .120 
 
 VI. A Mission to Phoenicia . . .129 
 
 PART III 
 
 I. The College of France . . .149 
 II. The Life of Christ . . . .159 
 III. The Origins of Christianity . . 169 
 
 vii 
 
viii 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 IV. Politics ...... 177 
 
 V. The War— Renan as Prophet . . 187 
 
 VI. The £lite .... . 196 
 
 PART IV 
 
 L The Antichrist .... 207 
 II. The Origins of Christianity : the Philo- 
 sophers . . . . .215 
 
 III. Souvenirs ..... 223 
 
 IV. ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY . . 230 
 
 V. The History of Israel . . .255 
 VI. Last Days ..... 266 
 
PART I 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 TRfiGUIER 
 
 ERNEST RENAN was born at Treguier, in 
 the Cotes du Nord, on the 28th of February 
 1823. For the third time in sixty years Brittany 
 gave birth to a man-child who should transform 
 and renew the religious temper of his times. 
 
 Chateaubriand and Lamennais were scarcely 
 past their prime when the young Renan first 
 went to school in Treguier. In him, as in 
 them, the racial strain is strong. Under the ex- 
 uberance of Chateaubriand, the revolt of Lamen- 
 nais, the sentiment and irony of Renan, we meet 
 the same irregular genius, mobile and sensitive 
 beyond the like of woman, yet, in the last 
 resort, stubborn as Breton granite under its 
 careless grace of flowers. 
 
 All these were great writers, but in their style, 
 as in their intellectual quality, they have small 
 share in that Latin order which is the birthright 
 of a Bossuet, a Racine, or even a Voltaire. 
 Their genius is a sort of hippogriff, as Renan 
 used to say of himself, belonging to no known 
 
 3 
 
4 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 race of mortal herds. Their style is a mid- 
 summer medley saved from incongruity by an 
 infallible grace. Romance and Antiquity meet 
 there, and the old world and the ultra-modern 
 — the harp of Tristan and the echo of Paris. 
 Celtic magicians, they see the world through 
 a haze of their own, at once dim and dazzling, 
 full of uncertain glimpses and brilliant mists, 
 like the variable weather of their moors. 
 
 There are men of genius whose birthplace is 
 of no moment. Who remembers that Shelley 
 was born in Sussex ? But Renan is as Breton as 
 Merlin himself. Those who know nothing of Celtic 
 places must find it hard to understand him. When 
 I write : " Renan was born at Treguier," I would 
 desire that my readers should call up, not neces- 
 sarily Treguier, but the grey steepness of any large 
 hill-town in Brittany, Scotland, Northumberland, 
 Wales, Ireland, or Cornwall. Let them remember 
 not only the gaunt and solitary aspect of the 
 place, but the kind of persons who dwell in these 
 small grey cities, at once so damp and so scantily 
 foliaged, under the incessant droppings of the 
 uncertain heaven. There is a great indifference 
 to worldly things. And the dreamer — we may 
 count him as ten per cent, of the population — be 
 
TREGUIER 
 
 5 
 
 he poet, saint, beggar, or merely drunkard — is 
 capable of a pure detachment from material in- 
 terests which no Buddhist sage could surpass. 
 There is a vibrating " other worldliness " in the 
 air ; the gift of prayer is constant ; religious 
 eloquence the brightest privilege, and religious 
 fervour a commonplace. Yet, all round, in the 
 high places and the country holy-wells, Mab and 
 Merlin, the fairies and the witches, keep their 
 devotees. And over all the grey, veiled, mel- 
 ancholy distinction, which first strikes us as the 
 note of such a place, there is the special poetic, 
 Celtic quality, the almost immaterial beauty which 
 has so lingering a charm. Many landscapes surely 
 are lovelier than these weatherbeaten moors of 
 wet heath and harsh gorse, of wild broom 
 and juniper. Look at them, overhung by the 
 wreathing hill-mists, traversed and seamed across 
 by the deep-sunken river valleys which hide such 
 unsuspected wealth of hanging woods. There is 
 scarce a tree on the upper level — a stunted pine, 
 perhaps here and there, or half-a-dozen lady- 
 birches, mixed with thorn, clustered round some 
 menhir by the yellow upland tarn. The keen sea 
 wind has torn and twisted the scanty trees and 
 blown their branches all one way. The purple 
 heather barely hides the rock which pierces the 
 sterile soil, as a bony arm frays a worn-out gar- 
 
6 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 ment. The ocean, the melancholy ocean of a 
 Celtic shore, bounds the horizon with its illimitable 
 grey. The Breton coast near Tr^guier is the 
 softest, the prettiest, of these typical Celtic land- 
 scapes. But even there the country wears a 
 barren grace. Yet what Norman pasture or 
 Burgundy vineyard can boast the strong attrac- 
 tion of the moors ? 
 
 The same quality — neither rich nor sound 
 but infinitely sweet — clings about the people. 
 The men in the fields gaze at you with stern dark 
 faces in an almost animal placidity. In Renan's 
 youth, they were still almost as wild as their 
 country, strange rude men, with flowing hair, 
 wrapped up in goatskins in wintertime. The 
 girls are charming — it is difficult to say why — 
 their slender and yet rough-hewn figures have 
 no more grace of curve than a thirteenth century 
 church saint in her niche. Their pale faces, with 
 down-dropped lids and delicate pointed chins, 
 have very little bloom. In their black dresses 
 and white coifs they have the austere distinction, 
 the demure reserve, of very young novices who 
 renounce they know not what. 
 
 This Breton race, apparently so severe, is one 
 of the most pleasure-loving, and one of the most 
 garrulous in France : a very storehouse of myth 
 and legend, of song and story, of jest and gibe. 
 
TREGUIER 
 
 7 
 
 These melancholy men and maids, visible emblems 
 of renunciation, are capable of mirth and wit and 
 passion. Fond of the glass, quick to repartee, 
 they glory in the gift of the gab, but only when 
 the door is shut on strangers. The extraordin- 
 ary strength of idealism, the infinite delicacy of 
 sentiment, which form the inmost quintessence of 
 the Celt, impose on him an image of seemliness, 
 a pure decorum, to which he incessantly con- 
 forms the old Adam rebellious in his heart. 
 Reserve and passion, prudence and poetry, are 
 equally inherent in him. The very sinner who 
 trangressed most flagrantly at last week's wake 
 or " Pardon," will show to-day in every act and 
 every word a serene tranquillity, a justness of 
 thought and phrase which is no more hypocritical 
 than was the passionate fantasy of his falling- 
 away. 
 
 Treguier is an ancient cathedral city set high 
 upon a hill at the confluence of two lovely rivers. 
 A solitary place whose quiet streets are bordered 
 with blank convent walls over which the garden 
 tree-tops wave at intervals. The steep and silent 
 city is crowned by a Gothic cathedral, an admir- 
 able structure whose simple lines soar upwards 
 from a broad and massive base, ever slenderer, 
 ever narrowing, till they terminate in a spire of 
 extraordinary delicacy and loftiness, a land-mark 
 
8 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 for many miles around. Beautiful cloisters, as 
 old as the church itself, surround the grassy 
 churchyard. But the glory of the cathedral is 
 the large tomb of St Ives which it contains. 
 The patron saint of Brittany, who is at once the 
 patron of Truth and the patron of Rhetoric, is 
 buried there. 
 
 Such is Treguier on the hill. Two steep streets 
 connect this " haunt of ancient peace " with the 
 seaport of Treguier, a busy place, yet opening 
 quietly, not on the full sport and hurry of the 
 ocean, but on a land-locked estuary folded be- 
 tween tranquil promontories wooded to the water's 
 edge. Treguier port traffics in fish and grain, and 
 the trading population centres round the quay. 
 But this stir of life is hushed as we mount the hill. 
 Only a few retired sea-captains, a sprinkling of the 
 local gentry, and the numerous clergy, find on that 
 peaceful summit an undisturbed asylum. 
 
 In the first quarter of the present century, a 
 certain Renan, of the fisher-clan of the Renans 
 of Goelo, having made some money by his 
 fishing-smack, bought and inhabited a pleasant 
 house on the hill, near the cathedral and the 
 desecrated Episcopal Palace. The house we speak 
 of is a tall, narrow, irregular building, no two 
 windows of a line, whose gable-casements com- 
 mand a pleasant view of hills and woods seen 
 
treguier 
 
 9 
 
 across an abrupt hill-side flight of steep-pitched 
 roofs. 
 
 " Captain " Renan (i.e., captain of his fishing- 
 smack) was a feckless, musing man, an obstinate 
 dreamer, convinced of his gift for practical affairs. 
 Yet a man of character, of a silent tenderness of 
 sentiment, with a strain of melancholy even in his 
 happiest affections. The name he bore was well 
 known in Treguier, for his father was one of the 
 most ardent among the Republicans of the place. 
 In those days, when Charles X. was on the throne, 
 Republican opinions were out of fashion ; but 
 Charles X. had no less devoted subject than the 
 elder Renan. He too was a sailor : it is the 
 Bretons who chiefly man the navy of France. On 
 the very morrow of the Coronation this obstinate 
 old skipper walked down Treguier High Street 
 adorned by an immense tricoloured cockade. 
 
 " I should like to know who will snatch these 
 colours from me ! " cried he. 
 
 " No one, Skipper ! No one ! " answered the 
 townsfolk of Treguier, and taking him by the 
 elbow, they led him home. For though party 
 passion ran high in Treguier — aye, even scaffold- 
 high ! — a general neighbourliness tempered preju- 
 dice ; and men who had threatened each other's 
 heads a short while back, showed a willingness to 
 render each other any kindly service, while fully 
 
io LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 aware that on the morrow the old political quarrel 
 might break out afresh. 
 
 In one of these hours of truce, the son of this 
 staunch old sailor, Captain Renan — a good 
 Republican himself — had married the daughter 
 of a respectable Lannion trader. She had 
 been reared in the religion of the altar and 
 the throne. Her mother's house had been, 
 throughout the Terror, the devoted hiding-place 
 of non-juring priests. But the brilliance and the 
 success of post- revolutionary adventure had left 
 Captain Renan's bride of a more modern way 
 of thinking. She was a Philippist — an Orleanist, 
 as we should say to-day : — a little lively gipsy of 
 a woman, black as a prune from Agen, and with 
 Gascon blood in her. She had ever a witty 
 answer ready, and knew how to defend her 
 opinions and bring the laugh on her side. Her 
 sharp brilliance formed the strongest possible con- 
 trast to the dreamy melancholy of her gentle 
 husband. 
 
 The Celt is not only religious and political, 
 he is also innately superstitious. There were 
 wonder-working saints and fairies, and wise-women 
 in plenty, on all the moors round Tr£guier. When 
 Ernest Renan was born, — a seven months' child, 
 — his anxious mother feared he could not live. 
 Old Gude, the witch, took the babe's little shirt 
 
TREGUIER 
 
 and dipped it in a country holy-well. She came 
 back radiant : " He will live after all ! " she cried, 
 " the two little arms stretched out, and you should 
 have seen the whole garment swell and float : he 
 means to live ! " The fairies loved the child, de- 
 clared old Gude, and had touched him with their 
 wand before his birth. 
 
 Wise old dame, she saw from the first the 
 strength and the charm of Ernest Renan ; a sort 
 of natural magic, a sort of immaterial grace. 
 There was the fairies' kiss ! Renan almost cer- 
 tainly exaggerated his debt to a Celtic ancestry. 
 But this much at least he owed them : this, and 
 that obstinate sweetness, that rare fidelity of his, 
 which contrasted so strangely with the liveliest 
 impressionability of the nerves. And some 
 whilom bard, most surely, bequeathed him the 
 peculiar music of his style, clear as the bell about 
 the neck of Tristan's hound, which rang so sweet 
 that whoso heard it forgot forthwith his cares and 
 all his sorrow. 
 
 Seven hundred years ago the Celtic poets in- 
 vented a new way of loving. They discovered a 
 sentiment more vague, more tender, than any the 
 Latins or the Germans knew, penetrating to the 
 very source of tears, and at once an infinite aspira- 
 tion, a mystery, an enigma, a caress. They 
 discovered "l'amour courtois." Yesterday their 
 
12 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 descendant, Ernest Renan, would fain have in- 
 vented a new way of believing. . . . The " amour 
 fine " of Launcelot has passed from our books 
 into our hearts ; we feel with a finer shade to-day 
 because those Celtic harpers lived and sang. I 
 dare not say that Renan has done as much for 
 Faith— that he has transported it far from the 
 perishable world of creeds and dogmas into the 
 undying domain of a pure feeling. But, at least, 
 the attempt was worthy of a Celt and an idealist. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 HENRIETTE 
 
 T X 7E have spoken of fairies. The true fairy — 
 * * the guardian angel, rather — of Ernest 
 Renan's youth was his only sister, Henriette. 
 Henriette had already one brother, Alain, an 
 excellent lad of fourteen, sober, just, and silent. 
 She was twelve years old when Ernest was born, 
 a little woman already, troubled about many 
 things, dimly aware of the struggle for life and 
 able to understand her mother's tears, as she 
 watched her rock the baby on her knees, weeping 
 passionately over this second son, so long desired, 
 and now born, as it seemed, into a world of sordid 
 misfortune. Already the head of the family, in his 
 dreamy but obstinate unworldliness, had half ruined 
 the little household. Henriette, who inherited 
 her father's silent and tenacious character, bore 
 him a child's absolute devotion. She adored him 
 and understood his moody reserve, as ruin 
 gathered closer. She loved the vivacious mother 
 whom she so little resembled, and who showed 
 
 13 
 
14 LIFE OF ERNEST REN AN 
 
 the plain child but scanty tenderness. Above all, 
 she hugged to her inmost heart this new-born 
 brother, as though she felt that for him, through 
 him, and in him, she should attain to a completer 
 existence than any she had dreamed of hereto- 
 fore. 
 
 Henriette was neither quick nor brilliant. She 
 was not at all pretty, in the usual sense of fresh 
 country prettiness. We might say of her, as it 
 was said of the Maid of Siena, " speciositas 
 naturaliter in ea non inerat excessive? Her 
 delicate features were marred by a birthmark. 
 But she had eyes of the sweetest, long, white 
 beautiful hands, and even in childhood a bearing 
 of modest distinction. A sort of innocent dignity 
 was hers — a dove-like dignity made of mildness 
 and quiet and reserve. Nothing of the poetic 
 charm of her birth-place was lost upon the pensive 
 child. The shadow of the convent walls, the 
 stillness, broken at intervals by the clash of 
 church bells, the distant moan of the sea, the 
 half-understood Latin sentences which the good 
 Sisters taught her in the psalter, all were things 
 to be pondered in her heart, — subtle influences 
 to mould her tender nature. Her education, if 
 limited, was exquisite. As she grew out of 
 childhood, the noble families of Treguier, banished 
 by the Revolution, crept back, one by one, 
 
HENRIETTE 
 
 15 
 
 fatigued and penniless, to wither in their ruined 
 homesteads. Many single ladies of the most 
 authentic nobility, were glad to earn their bread 
 by giving lessons — a praiseworthy habit they had 
 contracted during the Emigration. One of these 
 impoverished damsels completed the training of 
 Henriette Renan, and added to her natural 
 sweetness that touch of good breeding which 
 enhances every grace. Henriette, sensitive to 
 every refinement, quickly caught the trick of 
 unspoken and apparently deferent authority. 
 While she was still a mere child, she was in 
 great request as a tamer of wild spirits, and the 
 young madcaps of the place yielded to her 
 tranquil charm. She was born to guide, to 
 soothe, and to educate. And when she was 
 twelve years old she began the education of 
 Ernest Renan. 
 
 "She attached herself to me with the whole 
 strength of her tender and timid heart, athirst for 
 love. I still remember my baby tyrannies ; she 
 never chafed at them. Dressed to go out to 
 some girlish party, she would come to kiss me 
 good-bye, and I would cling to her frock, beseech 
 her to turn back, not to leave me ! And she 
 would turn round, take off her best gown and sit 
 at home with me. One day, half in fun, half as a 
 penalty for some childish offence, she threatened 
 
16 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 to die if I would not be good, and thereupon she 
 leaned back in her arm-chair, closed her eyes and 
 made believe to be dead. I have never felt any- 
 thing so vivid as the pang of terror with which I 
 saw my dear one, immovable, absent — for our 
 destiny did not permit that I should watch her 
 last moments. Wild with grief I sprang at her 
 and bit my teeth in her arm. I can still hear 
 her scream ! But I could only say, in answer to 
 all reproaches ; 4 Why did you die ? Oh, will 
 you ever die again ? 9 " 1 
 
 When Ernest Renan was five years old and 
 his sister just turned seventeen, their father's ship 
 came into Treguier port without a skipper. None 
 has solved the mystery of the end of Captain 
 Renan. Did the sea wash him overboard ? Did 
 he seek in suicide the bitter remedy for his 
 troubles ? His body was washed ashore off the 
 sandy coast of Erqui. He died in debt. Not 
 mere anxiety, but real poverty, was henceforth the 
 portion of his little household. 
 
 Everyone at Treguier knew and respected the 
 Renans. The widow was left undisturbed in her 
 little home ; her creditors were confident she 
 would pay off, little by little, her heavy inherit- 
 ance. But it is difficult for an inexperienced 
 woman to earn, for the mother of three children 
 
 1 " Ma Soeur Henriette," p. 13. 
 
HENRIETTE 17 
 
 to save. I suppose they had some thoughts of 
 letting the little Treguier home, for after the 
 unhappy skipper's death, when Alain left to make 
 his way in Paris, Madame Renan, Henriette, and 
 Ernest removed to Lannion, where the widow 
 had the support and comfort of her own family, 
 respectable and well-to-do people of the trading 
 class. Neither Henriette nor Ernest liked the 
 change. 
 
 The country between the sea and Lannion is 
 the very cradle of romance. On the sandy shore 
 near Plestin, King Arthur fought the dragon ; at 
 Kerdluel he held his court. Scarce a gun-shot 
 from the coast there gleams the isle of Avalon. 
 But in the most romantic neighbourhood, the life 
 of a country town is essentially commonplace. 
 The uncles and aunts of the little Renans 
 had not much in common with Launcelot or 
 Enid. 
 
 These small shop-keepers, in their trivial and 
 difficult prosperity, these worthy Marthas troubled 
 about many things, had little in common, either, 
 with our two immature idealists. Henriette 
 especially felt the transplantation. Her delicate 
 and tender spirit seemed to soar ever upward, like 
 the distant spire of Treguier, further, further, from 
 this too solid earth. Home-sick for Tr6guier and 
 heart-sick for her dead father, Henriette Renan 
 
 B 
 
1 8 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 saw nothing in this world to tempt her from her 
 wish to enter a convent. Ernest was the confi- 
 dant of her vocation, and their happiest moments 
 were these winter evenings when they would slip 
 away to church together, the tall sister walking 
 briskly with little Ernest completely hidden under 
 the ample folds of her Breton cloak. Which was 
 the happier then ? She, God in her heart, the 
 child she loved at her knees ? Or the little lad 
 himself, delighted to move in this warm loving 
 darkness, clinging to his sister's skirts, crunching 
 under his feet the fresh, firm snow ? Long after- 
 wards, this would still be their relation, on the 
 one side a tender guidance, on the other a con- 
 fident and happy clinging ; and, as long as she 
 lived, the cloak of Henriette Renan comforted her 
 brother in this frosty world. 
 
 It was Ernest, after all, who proved the chief 
 obstacle to Henriette's vocation : Ernest's future 
 and her father's memory. The poor child, with 
 her delicate sense of honour, could not rest happy 
 till those debts were paid. How was her mother 
 to pay them ? Or Alain, in his 'prentice years ? 
 It was all very well for the creditors to be patient : 
 until the last sou was paid her father's name was 
 that of a bankrupt. And then, Ernest ! 
 
 One day Henriette noticed a certain careful 
 awkwardness in the gait of her little brother, 
 
HENRIETTE 
 
 19 
 
 always a slow and heavy child. Her attention 
 discovered his timid endeavour to hide an un- 
 seemly rent in his baby garments. Poor child ! 
 Such a humble little effort to be decent in 
 tatters, was too much for Henriette's vocation. 
 From that moment the convent was done with. 
 She burst into tears and vowed to devote her- 
 self henceforth to the welfare of this patient 
 brother, who, with delicate instincts, seemed 
 destined to cope unaided with the sordid struggle 
 for existence. 
 
 From that moment, Henriette Renan was the 
 head of the household. Young as she was, a 
 mere girl, inexperienced, she resolved to get the 
 better of ill-fortune. The resolve of a Breton is 
 a very dogged thing. Like that stone which a 
 Yorkshireman keeps seven years in his pocket 
 before he turns it, and then seven years more before 
 he flings it, the resolve of a Breton is a thing 
 which can bide its time. None of the British 
 Celts possess that union of a tenacious obstinacy 
 with a very sweet and tranquil temper which is 
 the strength of the Breton. To go on willing the 
 same thing for years, quietly, without making 
 yourself or other people unnecessarily miserable 
 about it, is, it must be owned, a great secret. And 
 if the Breton neither drank nor dreamed — if the 
 Breton cared in the least for success — there would 
 
20 
 
 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 be no pulling against him in the race. Henriette's 
 early efforts were all unavailing. First she at- 
 tempted the thing which lay to her hand : she 
 went back to Treguier with her mother and 
 Ernest and tried to set up a school in their old 
 home. Then in 1835, she started for Paris, as 
 governess in an establishment for young ladies. 
 Before leaving her dear Treguier on this desolate 
 adventure, she received an unexpectedly brilliant 
 offer of marriage from a man, much her elder, 
 who felt the charm and rare devotedness of this 
 fragile creature. But a hint that he did not 
 mean to espouse her relations alarmed the high- 
 strung Henriette and sent her off at a tangent on 
 her career of self-sacrifice. She felt, it seems, 
 some inclination for the kind and wealthy neigh- 
 bour who shared her tastes and who offered her 
 a Breton home. But, her father's debts — but, 
 Ernest's future ! How could she forsake the two 
 most helpless things in the world, the dead, and 
 a child ? She thought of them. As for the 
 happiness of Mademoiselle Renan and her estab- 
 lishment in life, these were very secondary con- 
 siderations. It was unfortunate, doubtless, that 
 she was so morbidly timid, so afraid of strangers, 
 so easily home-sick. She must try to overcome 
 these failings. So she packed her trunk, 
 pinned on her old green shawl, kissed a long 
 
HENRIETTE 
 
 21 
 
 good-bye to all she loved on earth, and, with a 
 last cruel wrench as she crossed the threshold, 
 she took her place in the Paris coach and watched 
 the spire of Treguier till it faded to a smoke-line 
 in the distance. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE SEMINARY 
 
 MADAME REN AN was no less religious than 
 her children. But she wore her religion 
 with a difference. A bourgeoise of Lannion, with 
 a quarter-strain of Gascon in her, she was less 
 dreamy than the family she had married into : 
 these Renans, obstinate, ruminating men — skip- 
 pers like her husband and her father-in-law, or 
 bards and vagabonds like Pierre, her brother-in- 
 law. Madame Renan's faith was, naturally enough, 
 a little different from her daughter's ; less a per- 
 petual elevation of the soul by thought and prayer 
 than a convenient guide to life and death, cheerful 
 on the whole, abundantly illustrated with all the 
 most agreeable legends. She was an excellent 
 churchwoman. She had brought up her eldest 
 son to trade, but the dear desire of her heart was 
 that her Benjamin — her last born gifted darling — 
 should become a priest. 
 
 Ernest was not six years old when first his 
 mother placed him under the protection of the 
 saints. When the child's father had been brought 
 
 22 
 
THE SEMINARY 
 
 23 
 
 home and buried, she took the little lad by the 
 hand and led him outside the town to the shrine 
 of St Ives. St Ives is the greatest saint in 
 Brittany — the advocate of all good Bretons in the 
 heavenly courts. Madame Renan confided her 
 fatherless son to the guardianship of the immortal 
 lawyer. With what feelings since then, we may 
 wonder, has St Ives surveyed the career of his 
 ward and fellow-townsman ? The point is nice ; 
 for St Ives, let us remember, is the patron saint 
 of truth. Saint Yves de la Verite may pardon 
 some heretical shortcomings to one who chose for 
 his epitaph Veritatem dilexi. 
 
 In 1829 Ernest Renan was six years old. The 
 child must be taught to read and write, and must 
 learn his prayers in Latin. Who so fit as the 
 priests of the seminary to educate the ward and 
 pupil of St Ives? When, shortly after 1830, 
 the Renans returned from Lannion to Treguier, 
 in order for Henriette to prosecute her scheme of 
 school keeping, Ernest was placed under the care 
 of the priests. There is an excellent seminary at 
 Treguier : Renan never ceased to commend the 
 virtue, the simplicity, the kindness, the intellectual 
 integrity of his earliest pastors and masters. These 
 ecclesiastics taught him mathematics and Latin ; 
 they taught him little else. The notes of the 
 teachers of Ernest Renan are still in the posses- 
 
24 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 sion of his family. They are excellent notes; 
 docile, patient, diligent, thorough, are adjectives 
 which recur. We read, however, that " Ernest 
 Renan is sometimes inattentive during service in 
 church." 
 
 Renan never ceased to extol the education 
 given him by the priests. " They taught me the 
 love of truth, the respect for reason, the earnest- 
 ness of life. And these are the one thing in 
 which I have never varied. I left their hands 
 with a soul so tried and fashioned by them that 
 the light arts of Paris could only gild the jewel : 
 they could not change it. I believe no longer 
 that the Christian dogma is the supernatural 
 epitome of the sum of human knowledge : but I 
 do believe, I do still believe, that our existence 
 is the most frivolous of things, unless we conceive 
 it as a grand and perpetual duty. Old and dear 
 masters, nearly all of you dead to-day, whose 
 image often visits my dreams — not as a reproach, 
 but as a mild and charming memory, I have not 
 been as unfaithful to you as you think ! At heart 
 I am still your disciple." 
 
 Twice a day, regular as clockw r ork, Ernest 
 Renan might have been seen walking slowly 
 up the steep High Street to the college. The 
 years went by, the child of eight or nine became 
 a lad of fourteen, but the mien never altered, nor 
 
THE SEMINARY 
 
 25 
 
 the slow, sober gait, already a little rheumatic, 
 nor the amiable unremarking gaze lost in some 
 pleasant dream. Be sure that he took never a 
 glance nor a step more than was needful ; for this 
 child, so curious in all matters moral or intellectual, 
 was the least observant of mortals. Renan was a 
 gifted rather than a clever lad, more meditative 
 than brilliant, honest and profound rather than 
 quick or versatile. His lighter gifts and graces 
 came to him when youth was over. A certain 
 heaviness and slowness, always characteristic of 
 his appearance, appeared as yet to cling round his 
 intrinsic genius, like the protecting envelope about 
 the unripe burgeon. Laborious, conscientious, 
 eager to please, he was not only the gifted but 
 the good boy of the college. 
 
 No child was more studious, more docile, more 
 easily contented. When the day's task was done, 
 no game, no long walk, no birds-nesting or black- 
 berrying excursion tempted this odd schoolboy, 
 always difficult to stir and averse to movement. 
 He would take his book and sit in the inglenook 
 on winter afternoons, or in the summer he would 
 saunter round the cloister and watch the one 
 old cow tethered amid the thick grass of the 
 tombs. Life was full of interesting things. His 
 mother's narrow house contained treasures of 
 amusement. The child knew how to make a 
 
26 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 great deal of happiness out of little things. He 
 had brought back from Lannion wonderful archives 
 of old bills found in his grandmother's garret : the 
 quaint Gothic letterings of the headings filled his 
 baby-soul already with the true historian's feeling 
 for the Past. "There has been a deal of love spent 
 on these," he used to say. Then there were long 
 political discussions with Marie- Jeanne, the little 
 maid-of-all-work ; interminable musings over an 
 odd volume of the " Cantiques de Marseille"; best 
 of all there were the vast histories, the complicated 
 and intricate Breton souvenirs and legends which 
 would fall, hour after hour, from the lips of 
 " Maman " as she sat busy with her sewing or 
 her knitting. Beloved " Maman," gayest and 
 happiest of women, from whom the child inherited 
 his temper of serene contentment, I think she 
 taught him more, with her fund of myths and 
 legends, than the good fathers up at the college, 
 with all their Latin ! For here, in the peaceful 
 house - place, the future historian of religions 
 learned, as unconsciously as a child learns his 
 mother's tongue, how the unknown becomes the 
 supernatural in a rustic imagination, and how, in 
 another wise, a fact becomes a faith. 
 
 He learned other lessons which were to shape 
 his life no less. Every influence taught him the 
 duty of honour, the value of disinterestedness. 
 
THE SEMINARY 
 
 27 
 
 These qualities were not merely elemental virtues, 
 but the privilege of a superior intelligence. All 
 the boys at Treguier College who showed an 
 unusual aptitude were destined to the priesthood, 
 unless they happened to be nobles, born thereby 
 to certain other superior duties of their own, 
 based on the same foundation of honourable 
 disinterestedness. Commerce, money-getting, un- 
 inherited wealth, were the pursuits and the 
 compensations of men who had failed in their 
 studies. Had they been quicker at their Latin 
 grammar, they would certainly have chosen to be 
 priests. For the self-made man was an inferior 
 creature, half-educated, fond of gain, fond of his 
 own opinion, harsh to the defenceless, pushing, 
 and frequently discourteous ; doubtless useful 
 enough in his proper sphere, infinitely below that 
 of the priest or the noble. The man who seriously 
 respects himself must give his best labours to an 
 ideal cause, far removed from his own desires and 
 necessities, wholly unconnected with his personal 
 profit. No other life can be beneficent or noble. 
 . . . Such was the conviction formed in child- 
 hood which was to guide Ernest Renan 
 throughout his life. But in childhood he 
 translated this idea into the limited vocabulary 
 of his age. He looked round him : the most 
 disinterested, virtuous and studious persons of 
 
28 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 his acquaintance were the priests at the Treguier 
 Seminary. 
 
 His mother was enchanted, the good priests 
 smiled acquiescence, when this unpractical, deli- 
 cate, sedentary lad, who was always first in the 
 class-room and last in the play-ground, said, " I 
 mean to be a priest ! " Of course Ernest Renan 
 meant to be a priest : and, later on, Professor 
 at Treguier, and, later still, perhaps, Canon of 
 St Brieux. He would become the worthy emu- 
 lator of his teachers ; and, since he loved books, 
 — who knows ? — -he might compile or edit some 
 history in the style of Rollin. " Maman " would 
 live with him always, and keep his house, and 
 mend his cassock while she told him stories. 
 
 Man proposes. ... In the summer of 
 1838 Ernest Renan carried off all the prizes 
 at Treguier College. We can imagine the joy 
 of Henriette, withering and paling up in Paris 
 from sheer hard work and home-sickness. All 
 her heart was in her dear child. The news of his 
 triumph flushed her and expanded her, and 
 renewed her youth. The silent and reserved 
 young governess could not keep this wonderful 
 piece of news to herself. Her prophetic heart 
 foretold great things for Ernest ! The doctor of 
 the school where she taught was among the confi- 
 dants of her discreet and tender enthusiasm, and 
 
THE SEMINARY 
 
 29 
 
 the good man, touched by the unwonted fire of 
 this quiet creature, interested also in her Breton 
 Phoenix, spoke to some of his friends about the 
 marvellous boy of Treguier. 
 
 Among others he spoke to Monsieur Dupan- 
 loup, an elegant and brilliant — nay, the most 
 elegant and the most brilliant — Parisian eccle- 
 siastic. At that moment Monsieur Dupanloup 
 was superior of a Parisian seminary which he had 
 founded in order to give educational advantages, 
 of an altogether exceptional kind, to young nobles 
 and theological students. St Nicholas du Char- 
 donnetwas meant to be a hot-bed of Catholic fervour 
 and Catholic genius. Success, brilliance, talent, 
 were among the evangelical virtues specially culti- 
 vated there. In the eyes of Monsieur Dupanloup 
 the glory of God, the mysterious Shechina, was 
 a very visible and glittering light of a somewhat 
 superficial radiance. This Parisian recruiter of 
 Catholic genius was quite aware that good things 
 might come out of Brittany. . . . Chateaubriand 
 . . . Lamennais . . . When he heard of the Phoenix 
 of Treguier, " Send him to me at once ! " he 
 decreed. 
 
 Renan was fifteen and a half. 
 
 " I was spending the holidays wtth a friend 
 near Treguier. On the afternoon of the 4th of 
 
30 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 September a messenger came to fetch me in great 
 haste. I remember it all as if it were yesterday ! 
 We had a walk of about five miles through the 
 country fields, then, as we came in sight of 
 Treguier, the pious cadence of the Angelus, 
 pealing in response from parish tower to parish 
 tower, fell through the evening air with an inex- 
 pressible calm and melancholy. It was an image 
 of the life I was about to quit for ever. 
 
 " On the morrow I left for Paris. All that 
 I saw there was as strange to me as I had been 
 suddenly projected into the wilds of Tahiti or 
 Timbuctoo." 1 
 
 In Paris, at the seminary of St Nicholas du 
 Chardonnet, the Phoenix of Treguier appeared 
 but an awkward youth. Pale, sickly, ungainly, 
 his stooping shoulders crowned by a head dis- 
 proportionately large, the unprepossessing lad was 
 as dull in manner as plain of face. He went mus- 
 ing all alone, brooding ever in a solitary reverie, 
 his fine eyes seldom lifted from the ground, his 
 subtle, humorous, delicate smile extinguished in 
 utter homesickness. 
 
 Every now and then Henriette, in her old green 
 shawl that spoke of Treguier, would call to see 
 him in the parlour. And the rest of the time the 
 unhappy boy struggled and stifled in the Slough 
 1 " Souvenirs d'enfance et de Jeunesse," p. iju 
 
THE SEMINARY 
 
 3i 
 
 of Despond, where the foot sinks hourly deeper, 
 whence the soul, past hope, desires no escape. 
 The professors at the seminary must have been 
 sorely disappointed in their Breton prodigy. But, 
 one morning, the priest committed to read the 
 letters written by the pupils to their parents, was 
 struck by the profound, the yearning tenderness 
 and heartbreak of Ernest Renan's outpouring to 
 his mother. He set the letter apart and showed 
 it, in some surprise, to the director, Monsieur 
 Dupanloup. That evening contained the weekly 
 hour appointed to read out, in presence of 
 Monsieur, the list of the places taken by the 
 boys in their different forms. Renan was fifth or 
 sixth in composition. 
 
 " Ah ! " cried the director, " had the theme been 
 the subject of a letter I read this morning, Ernest 
 Renan would have been first ! " 
 
 From that hour he followed the lad in his 
 studies, guided, supported, bewildered, enchanted 
 him, and made the new interest of his life. Ernest 
 Renan was not to die of nostalgia, after all. But 
 something died in him all the same. " The 
 Breton died in me ! " he used to say. The 
 transition had been too brusque for his honest 
 heart, for his solid and logical mind. What was 
 there in common between the archaic faith of the 
 Treguier priests and this brilliant, decorative, 
 
32 
 
 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 literary and quasi-scientific Catholicism of Paris ? 
 Nothing which seemed important in the eyes of 
 Monsieur Dupanloup appeared supremely needful 
 to those Breton saints. How could the same 
 august and sacred name shelter two incompatible 
 spirits ? If the one were true, the other must be 
 false. If the one were false, the other might be 
 false. If both were true, then Truth was no 
 longer a thing one, simple and sole, but complex, 
 infinite, susceptible of variation. These were the 
 thoughts which darkened the mind of the young 
 seminarist. He repulsed them as temptations, 
 and redoubled his religious practices. 
 
 " He was," writes the Abbe Cognat, " one of the 
 most devout of us in his pious reserve : chorister, 
 writer of hymns, dignitary of the Brotherhood of 
 Mary. Nor was he without a touch of supersti- 
 tion in his piety : never, for instance, did he forget 
 to introduce a cross in the flourish which termin- 
 ated his signature." 1 
 
 If the Breton died at St Nicholas du Chardonnet 
 — and I, for one, stoutly deny that he died — " the 
 Gascon in me," wrote M. Renan much later, " saw 
 abundant reasons to live." 
 
 The atmosphere of St Nicholas was no longer 
 the still and humid air of Tr£guier cloister. 
 The breath of the boulevards penetrated through 
 
 1 Abbe Cognat : M. Renan. Hier et Aujourdhui. 
 
THE SEMINARY 
 
 33 
 
 a thousand fissures into the closed circle of 
 the seminary. Rollin was no longer the ideal 
 man of letters, for the students discussed with 
 passion Michelet, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, those 
 rising glories of the hour. 
 
 " I discovered that there was a contemporary 
 literature. I learned with stupor that knowledge 
 was not a privilege of the Church. My masters 
 at Treguier had been far more advanced in Latin 
 and mathematics than my new professors. But 
 they dwelt sealed in a catacomb underground. 
 Here, in Paris, the air of the outer world circu- 
 lated freely. New ideas dawned upon me. I 
 awoke to the meaning of the words, talent, fame, 
 celebrity. A new ideal swam into my ken. 
 This, perhaps, was what I had longed for so 
 vainly, so vaguely, in the dim cathedral aisles of 
 Treguier ! " 1 
 
 1 u Souvenirs," p. 185. 
 
 C 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 A DOUBTFUL VOCATION 
 
 T IFE, which already had set a dozen fatal 
 4 questions to germinate in Ernest Renan's 
 mind, had shaken the very foundations of the faith 
 of Henriette. Already at Lannion, on the very mor- 
 row of her vocation resisted, she had begun to doubt 
 of the truth of Christianity — a strange thing when 
 one thinks of the girl's age and her environment. 
 Unhappy as a governess, she no longer desired 
 to be a nun. The Paradise of her old dreams 
 appeared to her as a poor piece of man's work, 
 a projection of the human fancy ; and the 
 adorable Mary, the hierarchies of saints, nay 
 even the Good Shepherd, in whom she had 
 believed, seemed so many sacred and pitiful 
 ghosts. But out of the ashes of this old faith, 
 reverently lifted on to the high places of the soul, 
 there leapt a brighter flame, a new religion, 
 imprecise, without text or dogma, and almost 
 wholly moral : a belief in the vast order of the 
 universe, speeding through cycles of time towards 
 some Divine intent, and furthered in its grand and 
 
 34 
 
A DOUBTFUL VOCATION 35 
 
 gracious plan by every private act of mercy or 
 renouncement, by all the tendency of effort which 
 makes for righteousness. 
 
 Thus believing, however reverent towards the 
 faith which had nurtured and prepared her 
 soul, Henriette beheld with much misgiving her 
 brother's progress towards the altar. How should 
 a boy of fifteen appreciate the sacrifice demanded 
 of him ? The lips said : abrenuntio I but the 
 child knew not what he renounced. Most sisters 
 would have thought, first of all, that he cut himself 
 off from love, but I believe Henriette's instinctive 
 thought was that he cut himself off from liberty : 
 that the child bound the man to think as the 
 child, — that the child bound the man to obey as 
 the child, and bound him into an intricate and 
 inextricable fabric from which there could be no 
 subsequent deliverance save at such a cost of 
 good name, public respect, and ancient friend- 
 ship as made her pale to think of. But Henri- 
 ette was aware that the only fruitful change in 
 spiritual matters, is that which begins within. 
 Her meddling could do no good, only harm. 
 The child might take his vows and keep them all 
 his life long in perfect inner liberty, his heart 
 remaining in accordance with his rule. She said 
 nothing, therefore, only in silence vowed him her 
 devoted sympathy if this should not be the case. 
 
36 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 Half hoping, half fearing, lest he should outgrow 
 the vocation so placidly accepted, she went 
 week after week to see him in the parlour of St 
 Nicholas, and let no word pass her lips that might 
 hasten the issue. 
 
 But there came an end to these visits. Henri- 
 ette found the struggle for life hard in Paris. 
 Few were the savings she could send to Treguier. 
 When Count and Countess Andrew Zamoyski 
 offered her a brilliant situation, amply paid, she 
 accepted. She went out into exile in Poland, 
 trebly far way in those days of post-chaise and 
 travelling-coach — into a climate peculiarly un- 
 suited to her fragile constitution — into a foreign 
 country which, among its population, contained not 
 one friendly face. Poor timid soul, the ten years 
 of her engagement, the last ten years of her youth 
 thus offered up in filial sacrifice, must have ap- 
 peared in the prospect longer than all her past. 
 Yet she set out, in 1840. Doubtless, when she 
 bid good-bye to the dear young brother whom 
 at their next meeting she should find a man, 
 she did not dream that, from the vantage 
 point of distance, she should become more 
 familiarly his confidant, far more intimately his 
 guide and true Egeria, than in the happiest days 
 of their companionship. All that Jacqueline 
 Pascal was to the great tormented soul of her 
 
A DOUBTFUL VOCATION 37 
 
 brother, Henriette was gradually to grow to 
 Ernest Renan. 
 
 Some short while after Henriettas departure, 
 Ernest Renan was promoted from the seminary 
 of St Nicholas to the more advanced college of 
 Issy, in the suburbs of Paris. There is no class 
 of philosophy at St Nicholas. In the French 
 University our fifth form corresponds to the 
 class of rhetoric, our sixth or highest form 
 to the class of philosophy, which is the direct 
 portal to the Sorbonne, the Ecole Normale, or 
 one of the various special schools of law, medi- 
 cine, engineering, and the art of war. Something 
 of this order is maintained in the seminaries. 
 After the class of rhetoric, St Nicholas sends 
 such of its pupils as are destined for Holy Orders 
 to study philosophy in the great diocesan seminary 
 of St Sulpice, which reserves for their accommoda- 
 tion its country house at Issy. Two years later, 
 the seminarists are received into the vast 
 establishment of the square St Sulpice at Paris, 
 where they are initiated into the mysteries of 
 theology. 
 
 Issy is an old French country house — a 
 small suburban palace which belonged from 1606 
 to 1 6 1 5 to Queen Margot of gallant memory. 
 The worthy fathers have since added a few 
 wings, a few aureoles, a blue mantle or so, to the 
 
38 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 mythological personages on the walls, and nothing 
 else has been altered in the pavilion of the Queen. 
 The long, low house looks on to a park planted 
 in the usual French fashion with clipped alleys 
 of lime and hornbeam enclosing wide irregular 
 lawns where the flowers spring and the hay grows 
 and ripens as nature wills. Not only in hay- 
 time, but right through the autumn and on sunny 
 winter days, Ernest Renan might have been found, 
 spending his hours of recreation on a stone bench 
 under the leafless limes, wrapt in a great houppe- 
 lande or French Inverness-cloak. There, imper- 
 vious to cold and damp, he read his book, without 
 a glance, without a word, for aught around him. 
 Every now and then M. Pinault, the reverend 
 professor of mathematics, would stop to gibe at 
 him : 
 
 " O, the dear little treasure ! Look at him, 
 don't disturb him. Now, pray, don't disturb 
 him. See how completely he has rolled himself 
 in his form ! Mon Dieu ! he will always be like 
 that ! He will study ! — study ! — study ! Poor 
 sinful souls will appeal to him for help. He will 
 go on studying. He will murmur : Leave me ! 
 Leave me ! I am just at such an interesting 
 point ! " 
 
 Ernest Renan would look up at his tormentors, 
 a little troubled by the acuteness of the shaft, 
 
A DOUBTFUL VOCATION 39 
 
 would heave a sigh, and would, in fact, go on 
 studying. 
 
 Renan had entered Issy with a passion for 
 Catholic scholasticism. The seriousness of his 
 intelligence was satisfied by the vast and solid 
 fabric of Catholic theology. Here was a subject 
 more to his mind than Monsieur Dupanloup's 
 course of rhetoric ; more to his mind even than 
 those first fevered readings of modern romantic 
 literature, though these had left an ineffaceable 
 impression on his talent. But now he had come 
 to the heart of things. " I had left words for 
 facts. I was about to examine the foundations, 
 to analyse in all its details, this Christian religion 
 which appeared to me the centre of all truth." 
 
 And hand in hand with the Catholic " philo- 
 sophy of Lyons," Renan studied the Scotch 
 metaphysicians. For some months Reid re- 
 mained his ideal : — " My dream was the peaceable 
 life of a laborious ecclesiastic — Reid or Male- 
 branche — attached to his duties, relieved from 
 his parish work on account of the value of 
 his researches. Not until later did I perceive — 
 with that degree of certainty which soon was 
 to leave my mind no room for choice — the 
 essential contradiction between these metaphysical 
 studies and the Christian Religion." 1 
 
 1 " Souvenirs," p. 217. 
 
40 
 
 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 After Reid came Malebranche, then Hegel, 
 Kant, and Herder. From the first page, these 
 more audacious and more universal thinkers 
 exercised on Renan's mind an irresistible attrac- 
 tion. " I studied the Germans," he has written 
 more than once, " and I thought I entered a 
 Temple ! " A temple, indeed, vaster than any 
 church. ... At the two remotest poles of human 
 thought there are situate two opposite conceptions 
 of the universe. Orthodox and traditional trans- 
 cendentalism shows us a definite act of creation, 
 a living God, a Providence which guides the 
 world, and the infinite army of the immortal 
 souls of men. At the furthest extremity of 
 metaphysical science exists the mystical doctrine 
 of immanence, which, in place of a definite 
 creation, explains the universe by the gradual 
 evolution of a germ. All Being is Becoming : an 
 eternal process, an infinite continuance, over which 
 an unconscious deity broods in the abyss. The 
 universe is animated by one single Soul, in whom 
 all living beings share, but of which, so to speak, 
 they only enjoy the usufruct, since they fade and 
 vanish like sparks that fly upwards, while It 
 remains eternal. Of these two creeds, Renan 
 was bound in honour to believe the first. Little 
 by little, he inclined towards the second. 
 
 The retentive and tenacious mind of Renan 
 
A DOUBTFUL VOCATION 41 
 
 let nothing slip of these early readings. All his 
 philosophy is there in germ. The mystical 
 pantheism of Herder, the Hegelian idea of 
 development, supplied him with the theory of 
 evolution — of a world perpetually in travail of 
 a superior transformation. Kant renewed for 
 him the impelling principle of Duty. And 
 Renan's theology is contained in a phrase of 
 Malebranche's — Dieu n'agit pas par des volontes 
 particulieres : God does not act by special pro- 
 vidences. 
 
 " I greatly like your German thinkers (he 
 wrote to his sister in September 1842), though 
 they be somewhat pantheist and sceptic. . . . 
 One's first impression of philosophy is that it tends 
 towards a universal scepticism. One is struck 
 by the uncertainty of human knowledge, the 
 slight foundation for all opinions save those based 
 on reason. What we had always taken for 
 Truth appears mere prejudice and error. . . . 
 Philosophy excites, and only half satisfies the 
 appetite for Truth. I am eager for mathe- 
 matics ! " 1 
 
 Nothing could be more characteristic of R.enan's 
 peculiar intellectual constitution than the manner 
 in which this very appetite for proof served to re- 
 strain his scepticism. He appears to have decided, 
 1 Ernest et Henriette Renan : " Lettres intimes," pp. 88, 96, 97. 
 
42 
 
 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 almost immediately, that the pure toil of the 
 human intellect in the void could produce no 
 solution of the eternal problem. He demanded, 
 not a system, but a proof ; and while continuing 
 to read Kant and Herder, and especially Male- 
 branche, he devoted no less a part of his time and 
 strength to the pursuit of mathematics and natural 
 science. " Who shall criticise the Eternal without 
 knowledge ? " he cried with Job. ... By a sort of 
 instinct which had not yet found its right outlet, 
 Ernest Renan sought in exact science an answer 
 to the terrible problems which philosophy had set 
 him, and which the approximative or historical 
 sciences were at length to resolve. 
 
 In this state of suspense, voluntarily imposed, 
 there were moments when Renan relinquished 
 all his doubts with the great cry of Faust : 
 Gefiihl ist alles ! His heart had never wavered 
 an instant in its absolute attachment to the 
 Catholic Church. If faith be a sentiment, if we 
 know God only by the heart, then Renan was 
 a Christian. No life to him appeared so beautiful, 
 so desirable, so true to the highest ideal, as the 
 life of a priest. " Even if Christianity be only a 
 dream," he writes to his sister in September 1842, 
 " Even if Christianity be only a dream, the 
 priesthood remains a divine type." Your true 
 vocation is revealed by a certain inaptitude for 
 
A DOUBTFUL VOCATION 43 
 
 any other career. Renan, with his passionate 
 love of study, his taste for seclusion, his complete 
 incapacity for practical affairs, — Renan, with his 
 vague and lofty aspirations towards the infinite, 
 seemed born to be a priest. From Issy, in 1843, 
 he wrote to Henriette : — " In fact I am only fit 
 for one sort of life — a life of study and reflection, 
 retired and tranquil. All the ordinary occupa- 
 tions of mankind appear insipid to me ; their 
 duties taste flat against my palate and their 
 pleasures are a weariness. The motives that 
 guide them are odious to me. It is clear that 
 I am not born for a life of action. 
 
 " A private life would be my happiness. But 
 that a man should live merely to himself taints 
 his retirement with egoism. Even if it were 
 possible that I should live so, and not be a 
 burden on those I love ! The priestly life offers 
 all I desire without any compensating disad- 
 vantage. The priest lives for his fellows : he 
 is their repositary of wisdom and good counsel. 
 He is a man of study and much meditation, and, 
 at the same time, a brother unto his brethren. 
 And this is in my eyes the ideal life. 
 
 " I am deep in philosophy and physics — deep 
 in Malebranche, the finest dreamer, the most 
 implacable logician who ever existed. Yet he 
 was a priest. More than that ; he was a monk. 
 
44 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 And he lived unmolested in an age when Rome 
 was jealous of her powers. See how man, by the 
 mere impetus of his own weight, is constantly 
 carried up the steeps of Hope ! " 1 
 
 But for Henriette, vehement and tender, he 
 would, no doubt, have given way. She, with her 
 piercing insight, her wide prescient outlook, her 
 innate incapacity for compromise in a case of 
 conscience, was for ever exhorting him, enjoining, 
 remonstrating. More than once his heart fails : 
 " Ah, Henriette, I am weak ! " She will have 
 no mercy ! She sees, she feels, all that is fatally 
 ignoble, hypocritical, and arid in the life, and at last, 
 in the mind even, of the unbelieving priest. That 
 vocation which Ernest beheld on its ideal side 
 only, she saw in all the formidable consequences 
 of its limitless subordination. Can an ecclesiastic 
 dispose of his own soul ? Is he not subject, even 
 in spiritual things, to the direction of his superiors? 
 Should he see the better part, is he always free to 
 chose it ? Is he not bound to follow in a track 
 made to suit the common herd ? Must not the 
 tyranny of custom and number drag down to the 
 level of the majority the rare devotees of an ideal 
 duty? Anxiously, eagerly, she entreats her 
 brother to assume no bond too soon, to wait until 
 he be of man's estate before he take upon himself 
 
 1 " Lettres intimes," p. 118. 
 
A DOUBTFUL VOCATION 45 
 
 the vows and service of a man. " Above all, do 
 not think of us — of our family well-being ! There 
 is no true claim there. I can suffice ! " She pro- 
 poses to him other prospects. As a professor or 
 as a public schoolmaster he might live the life of 
 study he desires, and be useful to his fellows — 
 and yet be free ! She promises to find some 
 sure solution — not, no doubt, the ideal of his 
 dream. " But that ideal does not exist, I fear, 
 upon our work-a-day earth. Life is a struggle. 
 Life is hard and painful. Yet, let us not lose 
 courage. If the road be steep we have within us 
 a great strength ; we shall surmount our stum- 
 bling-blocks ! It is enough if we possess our 
 conscience in rectitude, if our aim be noble, our 
 will firm and constant. Let happen what may, 
 on that foundation we can build up our lives." 
 
 Meanwhile, at Issy, other influences, no less 
 determined, no less sincere, were concentrated 
 upon the unstable soul of Renan. In June 
 1843, Renan, towards the end of his course at 
 Issy, was informed that he was among the chosen 
 few admitted to the tonsure. The young man 
 implored a delay, immediately granted : " But 
 keep this affair," said his director, " separate from 
 the question of your vocation. They are distinct, 
 and you know my opinion as to the second." 
 
 " And would you believe," writes Renan in- 
 
46 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 genuously to his sister, " that I too am now much 
 more assured of my vocation. All my directors 
 are convinced of it. . . . As for the question 
 of intellectual liberty, I have answered myself : 
 there are two sorts of independence ; the one 
 presumptuous and bold, railing at all that is 
 respectable, — this is indeed denied me by 
 priestly duty : but in any case, my conscience 
 and my desire for truth would forbid me such 
 audacities ; of this sort of independence, there 
 can, therefore, be no question. There is, however, 
 an independence of another fashion, wise, sage, 
 respecting what is worthy of respect, despising 
 neither beliefs nor persons, examining all things 
 calmly, in good faith, using reason as a divine 
 gift, and neither accepting nor rejecting any 
 conclusion on the mere sanction of a human 
 authority. Such independence is open to all 
 men, and why not to a priest ? It is true that 
 in the case of a priest this liberty is subject to 
 a certain restriction from which other men are 
 free. The priest must know when to be silent ! 
 He must place a guard upon his lips. He must 
 not scandalize the weaker brethren ; for their 
 name is legion who take umbrage at that which 
 they can not comprehend. But, after all, is it so 
 hard to keep one's mind to oneself in solitude? 
 It is often a secret movement of vanity which 
 
A DOUBTFUL VOCATION 47 
 
 leads us to communicate our opinions. The law 
 of silence ought, perchance, to be the chosen por- 
 tion of the lover of peace. ' We must have a 
 silent opinion at the back of our mind/ said 
 Pascal, ' which is our secret standard in all things, 
 while we speak the language understanded of the 
 people/ " 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 A GREAT RESOLUTION 
 
 T N this frame of mind Renan left the seminary 
 at Issy, and proceeded in due form to the 
 great College of St Sulpice, in order to take his 
 degree in theology prior to entering the Church. 
 Here he began to study Hebrew. From the first 
 he displayed a singular gift for Semitic philology. 
 And this appeared to simplify his career. It seemed 
 so obvious that Renan was destined to be professor 
 of Oriental languages in a Catholic seminary. 
 But in reality, every month of study led him 
 further and further from the Church. Here, in 
 these questions of date, in this patient study of those 
 inflections which serve to prove a date, — here was 
 that certainty, that proof positive, for which he 
 had so vainly craved in the throes of his doubts. 
 Renan, by natural gift, was not a pure thinker, 
 but a historian. The proofs of history were, in 
 his eyes, the only authentic proofs. And these 
 were all against the Church. No impartial philo- 
 logist can maintain that the second part of Isaiah 
 is due to the same hand as the first. The Book 
 4 8 
 
A GREAT RESOLUTION 49 
 
 of Daniel is clearly apocryphal. Who can sup- 
 pose that the grammar or the history of the 
 Pentateuch date from the period of Moses? 
 Admit one error in a Revealed Text and you 
 incriminate the whole. In another order of facts 
 it is clear that many a dogma of the Church 
 reposes on the erroneous translations of the 
 Vulgate. The Church, like the Scriptures, was 
 therefore fallible ! 
 
 Meanwhile, St Sulpice laid the accent on 
 philology, insisted on Renan's peculiar gift, 
 and gave him every possible advantage. A 
 special permission allowed him to follow M. 
 Quatremere's course of Hebrew and Syro-Chaldaic 
 tongues at the College of France. In 1844 he 
 was intrusted w r ith a preparatory class of Hebrew 
 grammar at St Sulpice. At twenty-two years of 
 age the young professor applied to the Semitic 
 languages the system which Bopp had recently 
 deduced from the comparison of the different 
 Indo-European tongues. Renan's General History 
 of Semitic Languages was to spring from this class 
 at St Sulpice. 
 
 The young scholar tried to stifle his doubts, to 
 apply himself relentlessly to exact studies, to pay the 
 least possible attention to his religious convictions. 
 A professor in a seminary would not need the living 
 faith of the simple parish priest. Alas, his exact and 
 
 D 
 
So LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 patient mind assimilated all the knowledge afforded 
 him by the College of France, and by his masters 
 at St Sulpice, and found therein new material 
 for disbelief. But while his reason disengaged 
 itself day by day from the authority of the 
 Church, his heart found every day some new 
 reason to be grateful. Rome has never dis- 
 regarded the talents of her servitors. In our 
 time she is especially tender to such of them 
 as show a superior capacity for science : since 
 at that outpost she is most frequently attacked. 
 The directors of St Sulpice were not at all in- 
 clined to under-rate their pupil, they were ready 
 to make almost any sacrifice in order to keep 
 him where his talents were so greatly needed. 
 They hoped also, doubtless, that science would 
 prove a derivative, a happy counter-irritant, likely 
 to allay the excess of German metaphysics — and 
 this shows their sincerity : they could not suppose 
 the truth upon the other side ! Who can blame 
 their zeal ? They were not only wise and prudent, 
 according to their generation ; they were charitable 
 with an eternal charity. Their work of faith and 
 rescue was, to thern, none the less a work of faith 
 and rescue, because it was accomplished with 
 an ulterior aim and an extraordinary diplomacy. 
 
 It was of no avail. Renan was honest, and at 
 the other end of Europe there was Henriette 
 
A GREAT RESOLUTION 51 
 
 ceaselessly exhorting him to honesty. In his 
 experience, science had confirmed the doubts 
 aroused by speculation. He knew what was 
 the essential minimum of Catholic belief: and 
 he knew that he did not possess it. In this 
 mood he returned to Treguier in 1845, to spend 
 the summer vacation with his mother. 
 
 " Ah, dear Henriette, the future fills me with 
 fear. I, so weak, so inexperienced, so lonely, so 
 unsupported, — with only you, five hundred leagues 
 away, to help me — how am I to shatter bonds 
 so mighty, and to wrench myself from a path 
 whither a superior power has led me ! I tremble 
 when I think of it ; but I shall not fail. And 
 then — do you think I tear my faith out of my 
 heart without a pang? Do you think I quit, 
 without reluctance, these projects which for so 
 many years have made up my life and my happi- 
 ness ? And all this world of mine, in which I 
 was so at home, will cast me out for a renegade ? 
 And that other world — will it accept me ? The 
 first loved me, and made much of me : what does 
 it not promise even to-day ? Henriette, my good 
 Henriette, keep me in heart ! Oh, how sad and 
 barren life appears to me in these moments ! . . . 
 Oh, my God, into what a snare hast Thou led 
 my feet. I can only free myself by piercing my 
 mother's heart. Oh, mother ! Mother ! I do 
 
52 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 all I can to paint the future, to cheer her as best 
 I may, to soothe her fears. . . . How often have 
 I resolved to cast my doubts and scruples to the 
 winds and go straight ahead ! She is there, two 
 paces away ! God knows if I love and revere 
 her : it is but a torture the more. 1 
 
 " Her endearments break my heart ; her day 
 dreams — which she is for ever repeating, and 
 which I never find the cruel courage to gainsay — 
 are a continual grief. Ah, if she only understood ! 
 I would sacrifice everything to make her happy — 
 everything except my conscience and my duty. 
 Ah, why was I not born a Protestant in Germany! 
 Herder was a bishop, and he was barely a 
 Christian. But in the Catholic Church there is 
 no room for heresy. 
 
 " My German philosophers are my resource. 
 There I behold the continuation of Jesus Christ ! 
 What sweetness and what strength ! Christ 
 will come from the North at His Second Ad- 
 vent. . . . 
 
 " I still believe. I pray. I repeat the Pater 
 with rapture. I love to be in church. Pure, 
 simple, artless religion touches me profoundly 
 in my lucid moments : then I feel the perfume of 
 1 " Lettres intimes." 
 
A GREAT RESOLUTION 53 
 
 God. Yes, I am pious, fervidly pious, sometimes, 
 in spite of all my doubts, I think I shall always 
 remain pious in any case. Piety has surely a 
 value of its own — be it merely subjective. 
 
 " Here they take me for a good little seminarist, 
 very religious, very gentle. God forgive me, it is 
 not my fault ! How could I make them under- 
 stand ! I could never put so much German into 
 the heads of my honest Bretons. 
 
 " There are moments when I think I will 
 amputate my reason, and live only for the mystic 
 life. Except my judgment, except the faculty 
 which weighs and criticises, the Catholic Church 
 responds to every function of my soul. I must 
 therefore sacrifice either the Church or my judg- 
 ment ... a difficult and cruel operation, but 
 God knows I would perform it if I could think 
 it His will. Ah ! how I dread the end of the 
 vacation ! When it comes to practice, what 
 shall I decide ? " 1 
 
 This young Hamlet of the Inner Life was none 
 the less a Breton, with a spring of resolve in him 
 on which he did not count enough. More than 
 once in his career the man who — in the phrase 
 of Montaigne — was among all others " undulating 
 and diverse," was to exhibit this same admirable 
 obstinacy for conscience' sake. He left Treguier 
 
 1 Letters to the Abbe Cognat : " Souvenirs," p. 382 et seq. 
 
54 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 on the 9th of October 1845, and returned to 
 St Sulpice prepared to temporize and dally, far 
 from certain of his future choice. A sort of 
 innocent duplicity made the constraint of pious 
 practices not entirely odious to him ; a certain 
 artless macchiavellism, which he never lost, made 
 the difficult and mortal game he played rather 
 interesting, than merely cruel, or repugnant. 
 Moreover, the beauty of Catholicism satisfied 
 his artistic instincts, his tender sensibility. And 
 his education had fostered in him his natural 
 optimism, so that he still sometimes envisaged, as 
 quite practicable, heaven knows what chimaeric 
 fusion between an inward sincerity and an out- 
 ward observance of the Noble Lie. But his religious 
 education had also fostered in him an extraordin- 
 ary strength of conscience — backed at the last 
 extremity, as we have said, by the Breton's 
 doggedness. 
 
 It was evening when Renan arrived in the 
 square of St Sulpice. A surprise awaited him. 
 The directors, who had dallied and gone saunter- 
 ing long enough, thought the moment had come 
 for a brusque tightening of the rein, for a flying 
 leap over the hedge. Renan found himself no 
 longer a pupil of the seminary. During his 
 absence he had been appointed professor in the 
 Archbishop of Paris's new Carmelite College. 
 
A GREAT RESOLUTION 55 
 
 To accept was to give a pledge of good faith to 
 the Church. To refuse so honourable a position 
 was inexplicable. Renan sought his superiors, 
 explained his whole position, his doubts, his 
 scruples, which, instead of diminishing, in- 
 creased with every month. Once at bay he 
 stood firm, refused to temporize, and showed 
 the obstinate grit in him. The Fathers im- 
 mediately gave way ; their bonds apparently 
 fell from him. The same evening, with- 
 out any sort of scene or storm, desperately 
 alone, but not outcast, the young seminarist 
 crossed the threshold of the seminary, traversed 
 the square, and entered a small semi-clerical hotel 
 at the north-western corner of it. 
 
 " A man of much talent said once of M. 
 Renan : — 
 
 " ' Renan thinks like a man, feels like a woman, 
 and acts like a child/ " 
 
 " Did he act like a child, the poor young 
 Breton who fled from St Sulpice aghast because 
 he no longer thought the lessons of his masters 
 all quite true ? It was, perhaps, a piece of 
 childish folly to renounce the splendid future 
 which awaited him in his chosen path, to affront 
 extreme poverty, without resources, without pros- 
 pects, sustained by the sole impossibility of 
 living for aught else than a conviction. Those 
 
56 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 who think that the hall-mark of a man is his 
 sincerity in regard to the world and his own soul, 
 will grant that on that occasion the child showed 
 himself twice a man." 1 
 
 1 James Darmesteter : Ernest Renan. " Critique et Politique," 
 p. 63. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 DOMINUS PARS 
 
 Paris, Rue du Pot-de-Fer 
 October i^th, 1845. 
 
 " A T last, my Henriette, my dearest friend, I 
 can pour out all my heart, I can tell you 
 all the trouble which corrodes my soul ! The 
 last few days count in the record of my life ; 
 perhaps they are the most decisive, certainly the 
 most painful I have experienced. So many 
 events have crossed each other in this narrow 
 space that the mere recital of them will imply all 
 my feelings. And it will console me to tell you 
 everything, for here, now, my isolation is terrible, 
 and my lonely, tired heart finds an infinite sweet- 
 ness in resting upon yours. 
 
 " Only one word first, dear, of this last vacation ; 
 a sweet and cruel time for me. My position was 
 of the strangest. To enjoy the companionship of 
 my kind mother, to wait on her, caress her, cheer 
 her by my day dreams, is so delightful a pastime to 
 me that I believe there is no trouble, no anxiety, 
 
 57 
 
58 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 that I could not forget in her society. And then, 
 a peculiar indefinable sense of well-being hangs 
 about my native place. All my childhood, so 
 simple, so pure, so heedless, survives in its at- 
 mosphere, and this revival of my past charms me 
 almost to tears. The life of that country is but 
 a common, vulgar life, I know. But there is a 
 repose about it, a quiet well-being, in which 
 thought and feeling, when not prisoned in the 
 narrow circle of our daily round, are able to 
 exercise their sweet gift of healing. Ah, how I feel 
 to the core that vanished sweetness ! I am weak, 
 my dear Henriette. I sometimes think I could 
 be quite happy in a simple, common life which I 
 should ennoble from within. Then I think of 
 you and I look higher. 
 
 " Yet in this mild and calm atmosphere of 
 Treguier, you can easily see how difficult was my 
 position with regard to mamma. She had but the 
 faintest suspicion of my state of mind, and she 
 tried to trace my secret thought under the least of 
 my words and actions. And I was afraid to let her 
 see the truth and yet I felt I ought not to conceal 
 it. Think how I suffered ! The necessity of 
 telling her all, the fear of her cruel disappoint- 
 ment, led me, hour by hour, into almost contra- 
 dictory courses. And our good mother, with a 
 disastrous cleverness, interpreted them all accord- 
 
DOMINUS PARS 
 
 59 
 
 ing to the desire of her heart. She would take 
 no hint, no mere suggestion. At last one day — 
 one hour — which I shall never forget, I was 
 forced to be more explicit. I said clearly that 
 my vocation was doubtful . . . that I must exact 
 a delay. Well, from that hour she had been more 
 calm. She is less afraid when I speak of study- 
 ing in the Paris University, when I speak of a 
 possible journey to Germany. I knew how to 
 turn all these projects in harmony with her dearest 
 scheme — our meeting, the progress of my studies, 
 &c. Do not mention to her that I am at an inn ! 
 Ah, dear mother, how dear she is to me — my 
 greatest happiness but also my greatest trouble. 
 I should hate to be vulgar in any part or parcel 
 of my inner nature ; but I am sure that I am not, 
 in my love for her ! 
 
 " I arrived in Paris on the 9th of October, in 
 the evening. That same night I slept at the hotel. 
 The next days I passed with all due gravity and 
 decorum in terminating my connection with St 
 Sulpice. I was charmed by the esteem and the 
 affection which the fathers showed me. My 
 Hebrew professor has promised to recommend 
 me very warmly to M. Quatremere: he holds to 
 me as to his favourite pupil. I could not have 
 imagined so much broadness of view in the 
 strictest orthodoxy. They are persuaded that I 
 
6o LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 shall return to St Sulpice, and, — would you believe 
 it, dear Henriette ? — I like to think so myself, 
 and was enchanted to hear them say so. Accuse 
 me of weakness if you like. I am not of those 
 who take a side, and never lose hold, whatever 
 they may think, whatever Science prove. And 
 Christianity is so large a thing, a man may well 
 hold more than one opinion concerning it, accord- 
 ing to the different degrees of his instruction. 
 Still, at this moment, I do not see how I can in 
 conscience become a Catholic priest. 
 
 " I have seen Monsieur Dupanloup : he was 
 delightful ! He granted me an interview of an 
 hour and a half — a thing he never does. How 
 well he understood me at once ! He did me so 
 much good ! He replaced me in my lost high 
 sphere, whence these practical preoccupations 
 had caused me to fall in some degree. I 
 was quite frank and explicit with him, and he 
 was very pleased with me. I recognised the 
 superior mind in his advice, so clear and to 
 the point. He promised to do his utmost for 
 me. . . . 
 
 " You must let me assure you, dearest, that, say 
 what you will, I cannot spend all this year at 
 your expense. I have quite decided to accept 
 some post which will not encroach too much upon 
 my time and may even be useful to me. . . . 
 
DOMINUS PARS 
 
 61 
 
 u I have been to see the directors of Stanislas 
 College. I had the best of references. Some of 
 my old comrades are there and had spoken of me. 
 I allow that I should like, best of all, to enter as 
 a teacher at Stanislas. There, my dear, I should 
 be treated honourably and morally. Perhaps you 
 do not like the prospect, as the college is directed 
 by ecclesiastics ; but it is formed exactly on the 
 model of the University. And I have been most 
 frank. I have explained to the provisor the 
 reason of my leaving St Sulpice. And think 
 what an admirable transition ! No one would be 
 astonished to see me pass from St Sulpice to 
 Stanislas, and no one would be astonished to see 
 me move on from Stanislas to another college 
 of the university ! And mamma would be de- 
 lighted : it was one of her ideas." 
 
 Stanislas is in fact a Jesuit college participating 
 in the examinations and other advantages of the 
 lay public schools of Paris. In the touching and 
 honourable engagement which the venerable Order 
 of St Sulpice was fighting with an inexperienced 
 governess in Poland for the soul of Ernest Renan, 
 the last rally had not yet been sounded. The 
 Church did not by any means despair of her 
 acolyte. And he, perhaps, had never felt more 
 drawn towards the House of God. 
 
 " I spend my evenings in the church of St 
 
62 
 
 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 Sulpice," he wrote to his friend, the Abbe Cognat. 1 
 . . . There is no more happiness for me on earth. 
 . . . I remember my mother, my little room, my 
 books, my dreams, my quiet walks at my mother's 
 side. . . . All the colour seems to have faded 
 out of life." 
 
 It is probable that the Fathers counted on this 
 reaction and were well aware that the towers of 
 St Sulpice never look more noble than from the 
 other side of the square — from the windows, say, 
 of Mademoiselle Celeste's stuffy but respectable 
 small clerical hotel. Nor can we wonder at their 
 error. They knew their pupil in his sweet 
 humour and his docility, in his attachment to 
 themselves and to the Church : they knew him 
 as an imaginative, serene, and hopeful child ; they 
 did not recognise as yet that granite resistance 
 which underlay this graciousness of disposition, 
 and which it was impossible to undermine. Un- 
 impassioned, sincere, curious above all things of 
 the truth, Ernest Renan was not to be led in 
 any path but that he saw before him. Even 
 while the reverend ecclesiastics of Stanislas and 
 St Sulpice were putting their heads together in 
 a charitable purpose of friendly circumvention, 
 Renan was writing to his sister concerning " the 
 
 1 Renan's letters to the Abbe Cognat, during the years 1845-6, 
 are reprinted in the Appendix to his <£ Souvenirs de Jeunesse." 
 
DOMINUS PARS 
 
 63 
 
 singularity of his relations with them, which 
 afforded him the opportunity of making the most 
 valuable psychological observations." He was 
 interested, and touched, and sceptical, and heart- 
 broken, with equal sincerity. The fathers, 
 strangely enough, knew little of his religious 
 scruples : Monsieur Dupanloup alone asserted that 
 they amounted to a total loss of faith. Prompted 
 by a reserve which made him dread to exhibit in 
 public his inmost wound, — and, perhaps, inspired 
 by that morbid horror of the commonplace which 
 haunted Renan throughout his youth, — he kept to 
 himself the moral and philosophical origin of his 
 doubts, and put forward only his scientific scruples. 
 He was acutely conscious (the theme recurs again 
 and again in his letters), that the recalcitrant 
 seminarist is rarely a heroic personage. If he 
 had to doubt, at least he meant to doubt with 
 distinction and originality. 
 
 So he spoke to the astonished Fathers of the 
 inexact philology of the Vulgate, or the erroneous 
 date assigned by the Church to the Book of 
 Daniel. St Sulpice knew how to deal with the 
 mere sensuous backslider; it knew how to deplore, 
 to deprecate, and if need be to imprecate, the 
 torments of revolt, the passionate despair, of a 
 Lamennais. It could not take these niceties of 
 scholarship so seriously — a mitigated contact 
 
64 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 with reality would soon, it opined, bring the 
 fancies of a dreamer within bounds. 
 
 And doubtless St Sulpice counted also on the 
 contrast between the warm kindness of the Church 
 and the shrewdness of the world, ever suspicious 
 of the unfrocked clerical. Monsieur Dupanloup 
 offered his purse to Renan. He can not have 
 been quite pleased to hear that, out of her savings, 
 Mademoiselle Renan had already sent her brother 
 a sum of eight and forty pounds. Moreover, by 
 some prodigy of feminine ingenuity, the little 
 governess at Zamocz had obtained for her brother 
 letters of introduction to the most eminent scholars 
 of the day. She had thus made Renan in some 
 measure independent of the Church. 
 
 The worst of his trial was now, in truth, over 
 for Renan. His great act of resolution had, as it 
 were, cleared the air. There was no more com- 
 promising. Like many naturally undecided per- 
 sons, Renan pursued tenaciously a course of 
 conduct once adopted, knowing in what an eddy 
 of ceaseless irresolution he would be flung by 
 another change of front. Those who met him 
 at the moment of his secession from St Sulpice 
 observed in him none of the poignant anxiety of 
 the Christian who feels his faith slip from him. 
 He had the look of a young philosopher, calm, 
 resolute, smiling, who sees new immense horizons 
 
DOMINUS PARS 
 
 65 
 
 open before him. For the moment he was pre- 
 occupied by his practical affairs which he took 
 seriously, although not tragically. 
 
 It is characteristic of Renan's complex, curious 
 and quiet-tempered nature that his change of 
 opinion provoked in him no aversion towards his 
 lost ideal. He did not desire to burn what he 
 had once adored. He went on adoring with a 
 difference. He maintained his fealty to M. Le 
 Hir as a spiritual superior and chose him for his 
 confessor — for this strange apostate continued to 
 confess himself and to receive absolution. "It 
 does me good, and is a great consolation. I will 
 confess myself to you when you are in orders," 
 he writes to his friend. He was on terms of 
 intimacy — almost of unction — with the Abb& 
 Gratry, the Superior of Stanislas. For Renan 
 entered Stanislas, as St Sulpice intended him 
 to do, much to the distrust and discomfort of 
 Henriette. The young usher, at six-and-twenty 
 pounds a year, admitted to terms of such flattering 
 familiarity with his directors, saw Stanislas at 
 first through rose-coloured spectacles. . . . Henri- 
 ette's fears are a mythical survival, interesting to 
 the scientific observer. 
 
 " Because it is a College of Jes — - . . . Oh, my 
 dear Henriette, is it possible that a clever woman 
 in the nineteenth century can amuse herself with 
 
 e 
 
66 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 such nursery tales? In truth, I myself am no 
 partisan of the Society : in all the force of the 
 term, I do not love it. But from the bottom of 
 my heart I laugh at the fantastic imagination 
 which sees in it a sort of ogre-scarecrow to frighten 
 babes with. It is a really remarkable item of 
 psychology, a product of the faculty which 
 gave us Bluebeard and other tales of wonder, 
 Tis the love of mystery, the human need of the 
 fantastic which has produced the legend of the 
 Society of Jesus." All the same, a few days later 
 our young psychologist left Stanislas, as he had 
 left St Sulpice. He had been very happy with 
 the Jesuits. But his lucidity saw through their 
 judicious wiles. " Tis a duty to go. I have 
 made a great sacrifice : it would be absurd to 
 hesitate before a small one." 
 
 When, therefore, Renan was required to wear 
 a cassock and conform, merely in outward things 
 of course, to his ecclesiastical environment, he 
 sighed — but went away. " They were very nearly 
 taking me again in their net," he wrote to Henri- 
 ette. But he left them, shut upon him with a 
 pang of regret the door of the House of the Lord, 
 and sought that world of laymen which appeared 
 to him so sordid, almost immoral, and unfriendly. 
 " For I need an atmosphere of moral feeling," he 
 remarked to his sister. What he needed still 
 
DOMINUS PARS 
 
 67 
 
 more was an atmosphere of independence, in 
 which to work out his own salvation. That at 
 least he found in the school for young gentlemen 
 where he was admitted as parlour-boarder — or 
 rather as a sort of pupil-teacher, since he received 
 his board in return for the lessons he gave. 
 
 The house was in a steep street of the Montagne 
 Sainte Genevieve, known to-day as the Rue de 
 l'Abbe de l'Epee. In those days it was called 
 the Rue des deux Eglises. Renan must often 
 have smiled as he read the name. For God 
 had led him indeed into the Street of Two 
 Churches, nor was the second, in his eyes, less 
 holy than the first. 
 
 " Long ago," he writes to the Abbe Cognat, 
 " already when I went up to the altar to receive 
 the tonsure, I was tormented by terrible doubts. 
 But my superior urged me on, and I had always 
 heard that it was my duty to obey. So I 
 went up, but God is my witness that in the 
 intention of my heart, I took for my portion that 
 Truth which is the hidden God ! I dedicated 
 myself to her quest, for her sake I renounced all 
 profane motives and ambitions — nor shall I con- 
 sider myself false to my vow until, abandoning 
 my soul to vulgar cares, I content myself with 
 the material aims which suffice to worldly men. 
 Till then, I can repeat, Doniinus pars. . . . Man 
 
68 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 can never be sufficiently sure of himself to swear 
 unwavering fealty to a given system, though at 
 the moment. of his vow he hold it true. All he 
 may do is to dedicate himself to Truth, whatso- 
 ever she be, wheresoever she lead him, no matter 
 what the sacrifice she may demand." 
 
PART II 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 NEW IDEAS 
 
 TN the first days of November 1845 Ernest 
 Renan entered on his duties at M. Crouzet's 
 school. They were not stimulating, they were 
 not inspiring, but they left him his whole day 
 free for work. During some two hours, of an 
 evening, he superintended the studies of seven 
 youths who followed the classes of the Lyc6e 
 Henri IV. In return, without diminishing his 
 sisters little store, he received a place at table 
 and a small room to himself. His wants were 
 supplied, his liberty was complete, his leisure was 
 ample ; save for his state of mind— but that is 
 everything ! — he might have been happy. Alas, 
 he was dull and sad. The world, in his eyes, 
 appeared terribly mediocre : a desert, tediously 
 overpopulate, a shabby wilderness of fifth-rate 
 souls. He felt numb and shaken as one who 
 has had a great fall. A month ago he had been 
 almost a priest, belonging by implication to a 
 superior order. He had been appointed professor 
 
 71 
 
72 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 in the Archbishop's College." He had been re- 
 cognised as a Semitic scholar. And behold, he 
 was little better than an usher in M. Crouzet's 
 school. 
 
 For more than two months he kept his situa- 
 tion a secret from his mother. By a pious 
 fraud he continued to " paint the future," to speak 
 of Stanislas. But too many persons counted 
 on Mme. Renan's influence over her devoted 
 boy for his position to remain a secret. Poor 
 loving woman, she did not attempt to persuade 
 him ! She wrote him heart-broken letters. He, 
 her delicate lad, her pride, her darling, to think 
 he was " on the streets ! " for so she phrased it. 
 " You know, dear, even a mouse in your room 
 used to keep you awake. You were never used 
 to hardship ! 
 
 " O Joseph, mon aimable 
 Fils affable, 
 Les betes t'ont devore ! 55 
 
 In those first dull November days at M. 
 Crouzet's school, something of the melancholy 
 which had tarnished all things for the young 
 seminarist of St Nicholas hung again over Ernest 
 Renan, and menaced him with that creeping 
 nostalgia so deadly to the Breton. His letters 
 to Henriette are steeped in disappointment. . . , 
 
NEW IDEAS 
 
 73 
 
 " Now that I see them at close quarters, men 
 are less refined, less intellectual than I had 
 imagined them. ... I feel lost in this cold 
 world, incurious of the Divine. . . . Since Chris- 
 tianity is not true, nothing interests me or 
 appears worth my attention/' What was the 
 use of striving and struggling in this unim- 
 portant throng of mortals ? " faime mieux ne 
 pas mentir et caresser ma petite pensJe" he wrote 
 to the Abbe Cognat in a phrase too charming 
 to translate. 
 
 Renan had no longer any hope of regaining 
 his faith. . . . Faith is a sentiment, and, once 
 lost, there is no regaining it by evidence. . . . 
 Doubt is an act of reason in which evidence is 
 everything. Once we judge religious history by 
 the ordinary rules of scientific criticism, the 
 authenticity of Catholic tradition can no longer 
 compel our assent. Renan continued to read the 
 Scriptures. But the Bible, read as any other 
 book, appears merely a collection of Oriental 
 masterpieces, beautiful as poetry, valuable as 
 history, but holding no peculiar promise for 
 our souls. He looked into the empty heavens, 
 saw no Christ on His throne there, and brooded 
 with an obstinacy which had a sort of pleasure 
 in it over the completeness of his desolation. 
 
 This delectatio morosa is dangerous to a con- 
 
74 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 templative temperament. That way, if not mad- 
 ness, melancholia lies ; the disease is potential in 
 many Celtic constitutions. F'or some weeks, 
 Ernest Renan, so like his mother, felt his father's 
 dull and sluggish blood stir ominously at his 
 heart. But a fortunate circumstance shattered 
 his lethargy. A new friendship absorbed him. 
 The oldest of his pupils, a young M. Berthelot, 
 some eighteen years of age, was studying ad- 
 vanced mathematics and philosophy at Henri IV. 
 They lodged on the same landing. 
 
 " It was in November 1845 that I first set eyes 
 on Ernest Renan. He was four years older than 
 I, but he had, perhaps, even less experience of 
 life — if such a term may be used of young men, 
 the one eighteen, the other two-and-twenty. He 
 had just left the Seminary— not without some 
 vague inclination towards a possible resumption 
 of the sacerdotal cloth. His gentle, serious bear- 
 ing, his taste for things intellectual and moral, 
 pleased me at once, and we became friends." 1 
 
 " We had the same religion," says Renan 
 simply. 2 " And that religion was the worship of 
 Truth." 
 
 Truth is a diamond of many facets, and the 
 
 1 Correspondance Berthelot — Renan. Revue de Paris : 1 5 Juillet 
 1897. 
 
 2 Discours et Conferences, p. 231. 
 
NEW IDEAS 
 
 75 
 
 young men had seen her at different angles. 
 Each knew most things the other did not know. 
 Renan was already expert in theology, philosophy, 
 philology and history. But young Berthelot re- 
 vealed to him a new world of vaster vistas and 
 more precise perspectives : — the magnificent certi- 
 tudes of physical and natural science. Forty years 
 after those first conversations in their attics of the 
 Rue des Deux Eglises, fragments and echoes of 
 those midnight marvels linger still in the mind of 
 Renan. 
 
 " How infinitely the atomic theories of the 
 chemist and crystallographer surpass that vague 
 notion of Matter, which verifies scholastic philo- 
 sophy ! . . , 1 
 
 " Think of knowing that our earth is a ball 
 some three thousand leagues in diameter . . , 
 that the sun, up there, is thirty-eight millions 
 of leagues away, and that it is one million 
 five hundred thousand times larger than the 
 earth ! " 2 
 
 If Spinoza was a God - intoxicated man, 
 Renan was a man intoxicated by the splendour 
 of the universe ! There are stars whose 
 light falls through space ten thousand years 
 before it reaches us, falling at the rate of over 
 
 1 Discours et Conferences p. 16. 
 
 2 Feuilles D£tach£es$p. 156. 
 
76 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 thirty millions of leagues in seven minutes ! 
 There are suns, larger than ours, and perhaps 
 whole solar systems, in the formless white blurs 
 that film the skies on cloudless nights. The 
 heavens proclaim, indeed, the glory of the 
 Eternal ; and Renan knew how great a tempta- 
 tion Job resisted when he cried, " I have seen the 
 moon advance in her majesty, O God, and I 
 have not bowed the knee ! " 
 
 As the last shreds of his faith fell from before 
 him, lo ! in their place he discovered the whole 
 unspeakable mystery of the Cosmos. So, with the 
 first elements of astronomy and physics, Renan 
 learned that passionate devotion to the universe 
 which engrosses the whole mind, and makes all 
 private sorrow a thing of slight account. Already 
 he might have exclaimed with Marcus Aurelius, 
 " All that suiteth thee, O Cosmos, suiteth me ! " 
 He was in very truth a " citizen of the great 
 city," a conscient atom of the whole. The world 
 was too vast, our span of years too short, the 
 sum of science attainable too tremendous, for life, 
 however sad, to be adjudged a failure. Yes, in 
 1846 he was already the Renan who, years later, 
 wrote of Amiel : " The man w T ho has time to 
 keep a private diary has never understood the 
 immensity of the universe. There is so much 
 to learn ! In face of this colossal piece of work 
 
NEW IDEAS 
 
 77 
 
 how can we stop to consume our own hearts, to 
 doubt, to repine? . . . My friend M. Berthelot 
 would have his hands full, had he a hundred 
 consecutive lives, nor find in any one of them 
 the time to write about himself! . . . Everything 
 has to be done, or done all over again, in natural 
 and social science. When we feel ourselves 
 called to labour at this infinite task, we are too 
 busy to pause and brood over the little private 
 melancholies we may fall in with by the way." 1 
 . . . " When I think of the unique pair of friends 
 we were," he says elsewhere, " I see before me 
 two young priests in their surplices, walking arm 
 in arm. We should have blushed to have asked 
 each other a favour, or even a piece of advice. 
 Neither of us was greatly occupied with himself, 
 and neither of us was greatly occupied with the 
 other. Our friendship consisted in what we 
 learned together." 2 
 
 Indeed they learned many things together, but 
 they learned many things apart. As time went 
 on M. Berthelot was drawn more and more 
 exclusively into the sphere of physics, and especi- 
 ally of chemistry, as we all know, to our admira- 
 tion. Semitic philology continued to engross 
 M. Renan. He wrote to his sister : " I have 
 
 1 Feuilles Ditachies^ p. 359. 
 
 2 Souvenirs^ p. 339. 
 
78 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 so many new and just ideas ! I am throwing 
 all my heart into my work — all I know and all 
 I am — and I have the instinct of success." 
 
 His canvas was the series of lectures which he 
 had delivered the preceding year at St Sulpice, 
 and which the Abbe Le Hir strongly urged him 
 to publish. The book was to be a Hebrew 
 grammar. But, in the hands of this ardent 
 young thinker, philology became a new instru- 
 ment of psychology. For the character of a 
 nation is transfixed in its language, and a Hebrew 
 grammar is a diagram of the Semitic soul. In 
 the speech of the Jew or the Arab, as in his 
 nature, you will find something irreductible and 
 stubborn, a dignified simplicity, a non-existence 
 of the finer shades ; a something monotonous, 
 which recalls the desert in its immense unifor- 
 mity. So theorised young M. Renan, in that 
 general history of Semitic languages which was 
 to introduce him to the world of science. 
 
 The first sketch of this important work, 
 presented in manuscript to the Academy of In- 
 scriptions in 1847, by a young man of four-and- 
 twenty, a pupil-teacher in a school for boys, 
 obtained the Prix Volney, one of the most 
 important distinctions awarded by the Institute 
 of France. 
 
NEW IDEAS 
 
 79 
 
 Thus, barely two years after leaving St 
 Sulpice, Renan saw a new career open before 
 him. He continued to pass his University ex- 
 aminations : he was successively Bachelier and 
 Licenci6. In 1 847 he took his degree as Agr6ge 
 de Philosophie, that is to say, Fellow of the Univer- 
 sity, and, in consequence, he was offered the Pro- 
 fessorship of Philosophy in the Lycee of Vendome. 
 Here, and later, — during the long vacation at 
 St Malo, — Renan occupied his leisure by a thesis 
 on Averroes which was to procure him his doctor's 
 degree. Half convinced by so much success, his 
 mother let herself accept some consolation. Her 
 " fils affable " was still her " fils affable " : amiable, 
 studious, gifted, as of old. He had come back to 
 live with her. His grave morality seemed almost 
 orthodox. No scandal had attended his secession 
 from the priesthood. " My mother shows the 
 truest liberality of mind," Renan wrote to M. 
 Berthelot in 1 847 ; "she fully approves my system, 
 which is never to express, by word or deed, either 
 affection or antipathy for the profession which 
 might have been my own. I soon brought her to 
 see my point of view. And indeed we have many 
 a piquant conversation on this head." But despite 
 the charm of home, despite his native air, Renan 
 was not happy in the narrow provincial circle 
 
8o LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 which he had re-entered. He missed the intel- 
 lectual stimulus of Paris. He was glad when 
 a small temporary appointment, — as assistant 
 master in the Lycee of Versailles — permitted him 
 to return to the capital and resume his interrupted 
 studies. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 1848 
 
 THE father of M. Berthelot was a doctor, an 
 intellectual man, above all, a benevolent 
 man. His practice was in a poor neighbourhood ; 
 of modest origin himself, he was interested in 
 many philanthropic schemes. He was a firm Re- 
 publican. " The first I had seen," wrote Renan, 
 who barely could remember his father and his 
 uncles. Opposed to the bourgeois spirit of the 
 Monarchy of July, an enthusiastic believer in 
 the Socialist transformation of society, Dr 
 Berthelot influenced his son and, through him, 
 the ever-impressionable Ernest Renan. . . . Yet 
 all through the beginning of '48, immersed in his 
 studies, the young scholar had listened to his 
 friend's gospel with a somewhat vacant ear. He 
 was engrossed by an essay on the study of Greek 
 in Mediaeval Europe, which appeared to him more 
 immediately important. In all things, always, 
 he found it hard to take a side. He distrusted 
 extremes. His sense of the relativity of appear- 
 
82 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 ances debarred him from a passionate conviction in 
 politics no less than in religion. Moreover, if he 
 was by opinion a Liberal, by temperament Renan 
 was Conservative. A natural love for the Past, 
 a natural dread of innovation, hampered him in 
 the sphere of political reform : 
 
 " I shall never break many lances for this sort 
 of thing," he wrote to M. Berthelot, in September 
 1847. 
 
 Then the Revolution broke out in February. 
 The King and his family went into exile. There 
 was a riot in May. One morning Ernest Renan 
 had to climb a barricade in order to reach the 
 College of France. He climbed it and arrived in 
 due time at the Sanscrit lecture-room ; but there 
 was no lecture that day, and behold ! the College 
 was full of soldiers ! The young scholar sighed 
 and continued his walk, in order to study Sanscrit 
 at M. Burnouf s private house. Civil war reddened 
 the streets in June. Ernest Renan awoke in 
 earnest and turned all his mind to the prob- 
 lems of Socialism. 
 
 I know no page in Flaubert's Education Senti- 
 mentale which gives a more vivid picture of a 
 political massacre than we find in some of 
 Renan's letters to his absent sister. The dreamer, 
 startled from his dream, sees the dreadful reality 
 before him with a horrified acuteness. 
 
1848 
 
 33 
 
 2$th June 1848. 
 " Frightful sight ! The whole day we heard 
 nothing but the whistling of bullets and the clang 
 of the tocsin. . . 
 
 2&J1 June. 
 
 " The evening and last night were worse than 
 ever. There was a massacre at the Gate of St 
 Jacques, another at the Fontainebleau Gate. I 
 spare you details. The St Bartholomew offers 
 nothing like them. There must be in human 
 nature something naturally cannibal which bursts 
 out at certain moments. As for me, I would 
 willingly have fought with the Garde Nationale 
 until, in their turn, the guards became the 
 murderers. No doubt they are guilty, these 
 poor mad insurrectionaries who shed their blood 
 and know not what they ask — but are they not 
 guiltier who, by system, have deadened in them 
 every human feeling ? " 
 
 1st July. 
 
 "The storm is over, If in such a state of 
 things it were permissible to appeal to the artistic 
 sense, I would call the Paris of these last days 
 the strangest, the most indescribable of great 
 sights. A few hours after the fighting was over I 
 visited the field of the combat. Unless you 
 
84 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 have witnessed such a thing, my dear, you cannot 
 imagine the great scenes of humanity. In the 
 Rue St Martin, in the Rue St Antoine, and in 
 the Rue St Jacques, between the Pantheon and 
 the Quays, there was not a single house but was 
 riddled with cannon-ball. Some of them were 
 perforated to sheer open work ! The fronts of 
 the houses, all the windows, were pierced through 
 and through with bullets — wide streaks of blood, 
 broken and abandoned guns, marked the places 
 where the fight had been the fiercest. Built with 
 a marvellous art, and constructed, not as they 
 used to be with heaps of cobblestone, but with 
 the large flagstones of the footpath, the barricades, 
 with their projecting and retreating angles, had a 
 look of fortresses. There was one every fifty 
 paces. The Place de la Bastille was the most 
 frightful chaos : all the trees cut down or bent 
 and twisted by the cannon balls ; on one side 
 whole houses demolished or still in flames ; on 
 another, veritable towers of defence, built out of 
 beams of timber, overturned carriages, and heaps 
 of stones. In the middle of all that, a crowd, 
 dizzy and half out of its mind ; soldiers worn out 
 with fatigue, asleep on the pavement, almost 
 under the feet of the people. The rage of the 
 vanquished disguised under an affected calm ; the 
 disorder of the conquerors opening a path through 
 
1848 
 
 85 
 
 the demolished barricades — the public pity craving 
 alms and lint for the wounded ; all combined in 
 a spectacle of the sublimest originality, in which 
 the whole gamut of humanity was heard in 
 an admirable discord : man, face to face with 
 man, naked, without disguise, with nothing but 
 his primitive instincts." 
 
 16th July, 
 
 " Horror of exact reprisals ! I am always for 
 the massacred, even though they be guilty. The 
 National Guard has been guilty of atrocities I 
 scarcely dare recount. 
 
 " After the battle was over, posted on the 
 terrace of the Ecole des Mines, they amused 
 themselves by " potting M at their leisure, as a 
 form of recreation, the passers-by in the adjacent 
 streets, where the thoroughfare was still open. 
 That may have been the last flicker of the fury 
 of the fray. But what is awful to think of, is the 
 hecatomb of prisoners sacrificed several days later. 
 During whole afternoons I have heard the cease- 
 less firing in the Luxembourg Gardens — and yet 
 the fighting was over ! The sound and the 
 thoughts it suggested, exasperated me to such 
 a degree that I determined to see for myself, so I 
 went and called on one of my friends whose 
 windows overlook the gardens. It was too true. 
 
86 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 If I did not see the murderers with my own eyes, 
 I saw what was worse, what I never can forget, 
 and what, if I did not try to lift myself above 
 personal sentiments, would leave in my soul an 
 everlasting hate. . . . The unhappy prisoners 
 were packed in the garrets of the Palace, under 
 the leads, in the stifling heat of the roof. Every 
 now and then one of them would thrust his head 
 out of the dormer window, for a breath of air. 
 Each head served as a target for the soldiers 
 in the garden below — they never missed their 
 aim ! After that, I say the middle class is 
 capable of the massacres of the Terror ! " 
 
 ist July. 
 
 " I am not a Socialist. I am convinced that 
 none of the theories of the hour is destined to 
 triumph, in its actual form. A system — a narrow, a 
 partial thing by its very essence — can never realise 
 itself. The system is a burgeon which must 
 burst its sheath in order to become a truth, 
 universally recognised, universally applied. . . . 
 I am a Progressist, that is all. ... I persist in 
 believing that from petty passion to petty passion, 
 from personal ambition to personal ambition, 
 through misfortune, through crime and bloodshed, 
 we are none the less in the act of a great transfor- 
 mation for the greater good of humanity." 
 
1848 
 
 8 7 
 
 \6th July, 
 
 " The great births of humanity should be seen 
 from afar. We see the apparition of Christianity 
 as something exclusively pure, sacred, and super- 
 natural. . . . And yet what sects, how mad, 
 monstrous, and immoral ! — accompanied, and were 
 even confounded with that white and beautiful 
 doctrine ! . , e We also have our gnostics ! " . . . 
 
 2nd August. 
 
 " Adieu, dear, excellent Henriette ; think often 
 of your brother. Never despair of France ! " 1 
 
 I know no more curious moment of psychology 
 than the book in which Renan attempted to 
 answer the problems posed by the movement of 
 1848. The immense volume is as young as a 
 primrose, full of the joy of life, full of energy, 
 charity, hope — above all, full of faith. The 
 crowded, living, voluntary pages stretch out their 
 hundred arms to the future like some monstrous 
 Indian god, who needs innumerable hands to 
 bestow with and to beckon, to bless with and 
 to curse, and in whom the vital principle is too 
 abundant for symmetry or grace. UAvenir de 
 la Science, is our young priest's first sermon, 
 heavier, more crammed with matter than those 
 1 Lettres de 48. Revue de Paris, 15 Avril 1896. 
 
88 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 we are accustomed to from his golden lips ; full, 
 not only of his own ideas but of the theories of his 
 time and his environment. The multiple, hetero- 
 geneous masterpiece takes for its text the mystic 
 words of the gospel, Unum est necessarium. But 
 this one thing needful is the Infinite — the Ideal, 
 identic in its essence, whatever be the form in which 
 it appears to us: — philosophy, science, poetry, art, 
 moral beauty, moral strength, or mere natural 
 loveliness, no less divine. To recombine these 
 different elements — to trace these divergent rays 
 to their common centre, which is God, should be 
 the chief end of knowledge. The future of 
 science is a new religion, to be founded, not 
 on abstract reasoning, not on any pretended 
 revelation from on high, but on the most 
 patient, the most critical, the minutest study 
 of all the material profusely strewn around 
 us. Penetrate matter to find the secret soul in 
 it ! The study of science is still the service 
 of God. Such is the teaching of LAvenir de 
 la Science. 
 
 " I am convinced there is a science of the 
 Origin of Man which will be constructed one 
 day, not from mere ratiocination and hypothesis, 
 but from the results of scientific research. He 
 who shall contribute to the solving of this problem 
 — though his test be imperfect, will do more for 
 
1848 
 
 8 9 
 
 true philosophy than he had achieved by fifty 
 years of metaphysics." 
 
 Even while Renan was writing these lines a 
 young naturalist of much the same way of think- 
 ing was classing his specimens and comparing his 
 notes. Some ten years later, we read the Origin 
 of Species, A reaction against the vague and void 
 official spiritualism of his day, inclined philosophy 
 to draw its conclusions from the exact results of 
 science. The tide has now turned so far in this 
 direction that we forget the originality, in 1848, of 
 doctrines which at present appear the merest com- 
 mon-sense. In 1897 all our young philosophers 
 are historians, or philologists, or physiologists, or 
 students of natural or social science. But, fifty 
 years ago, Philosophy was much too great a lady 
 to do any useful work at all. She broidered 
 her metaphysics in an ivory tower among the 
 clouds. 
 
 " Believe me," said Renan, " your true philo- 
 sopher is the philologist, the student of myths, 
 the critic of social constitutions. By the subtle 
 study of speech we remount the stream of time 
 till we reach almost the source, till we come 
 within hail of primitive man. By comparative 
 grammar we touch our first ancestors ; by com- 
 parative mythology we understand their soul, 
 by social science we watch their development. 
 
90 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 Every speech, every myth or legend, every form 
 of social organisation from the humblest to the 
 most august, ought to be compared and classified. 
 The man who could thus evoke the origins of Chris- 
 tianity would write the most important book of the 
 century. How I envy it him ! Should I live and 
 do well, I mean that book to be the task of my 
 maturity." 1 
 
 Science is thus an instrument of religion, nay, 
 more, a religion in herself, modest but veracious, 
 never going back from her word. The faith of 
 the chosen few, must she remain incommunicable 
 to the mass ? How can a religion exclude nine- 
 tenths of mankind ? If intellectual culture were 
 but a grace the more, but an added enjoyment, 
 it might well remain the privilege of the elect, for 
 man has no right to happiness. But once we admit 
 that science is a religion — a temple where faith 
 and truth join hands — how shall we forbid the 
 threshold to those who chiefly need a religion ? 
 Shall we look upon the poor barbarians as a 
 necessary refuse of waste matter? Shall we 
 consider only them human who know ? "I have 
 seen the massacres of June. I have repulsed in my 
 own heart the instinctive wish that the barbarians 
 might perish. Shame on such a thought! There 
 must be no more barbarians ! 
 
 1 Avenir, p. 278. 
 
9i 
 
 " Yet it is not easy to see how the many are to 
 be induced to work out their own salvation. How 
 shall we make a turbulent majority choose the 
 better part when, as a matter of fact, it does not 
 prefer it, thinks it tiresome, prefers the pothouse 
 and the barricade ? The ancients had convenient 
 means to this end : augurs, oracles, Egerias, who 
 arranged the truth in a way understanded of the 
 people. Others have had recourse to armies. . . . 
 It is very clear that Science will none of these. 
 It is much less clear, however, by what miracle 
 she is to descend upon and illuminate the recal- 
 citrant mass of the ignorant. . . . 
 
 " Above all let us never dream that Science must 
 descend to the level of people. A cheap science, 
 an easy science, a popular science, is the most 
 useless of catch-words. Science must be serious, 
 difficult, comprehensible only to her own adepts, 
 in her more abstruse and secret recesses. But 
 by the diffusion of a sound elementary instruction 
 all may be made capable of understanding the 
 value and the gist of these researches — all may 
 follow them in their outer circuit ; all may be set 
 upon the sacred track. If you object that to 
 attain such cultivation, the working class must 
 receive more money for less work, in order to 
 secure the time for study, I reply : so be it ! Let 
 us simplify our lives. I have no objection to 
 
92 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 the socialistic phalanstery, nor even to a salutary 
 reign of terror. These do not interfere with 
 Science. The artless life of a community where 
 none would be rich or poor may even be favour- 
 able to her development, Genius lives on simple 
 things, and Spinoza contemplated the divine 
 substance in no palace while he polished the 
 lenses which brought him bread. Democracy has 
 no terror for Science. Let us all be brothers, in 
 truth, in simplicity, in generous and confident 
 human sympathy." 
 
 Such, in effect, is the gospel which Ernest 
 Renan caught amid the gun smoke and the 
 ominous fusillades of 1848. It is easy to see 
 how much of these theories is natural to the 
 author, the result of his real convictions and his 
 peculiar temperament, and how much is due to 
 the influence of the milieu and the contagion of an 
 epidemic enthusiasm. All Renan's later work is 
 based on that psychological interpretation of facts 
 obtained by a patient scientific method which he 
 advocates in his earliest book. His most fantastic 
 philosophy has ever a solid piece of sober erudi- 
 tion at the base. He often reads too much into 
 his text, between the lines, but he starts from his 
 text, and never evolves out of his own brain a 
 system independent of historic proofs. He applies 
 to the history of religion and to the problems of 
 
1848 
 
 93 
 
 exegesis, the experimental method of a student in 
 physics or natural history. Thus, in all essentials, 
 the Renan of the Avenir de la Science \ is already 
 Renan. True, the Renan of the future was to be 
 no democrat. But his turn of mind, infinitely 
 aristocratic, infinitely jealous of the rights of the 
 minority, was never subject to the powers that 
 be. The aristocracy which Renan commended 
 was an aristocracy of personal merit, an upper 
 house of virtue and intelligence. Spinoza and 
 the fishermen of Galilee were the high barons of 
 his heraldry. It is impossible to read the tender, 
 human, fraternal pages of the Apostles and St 
 Paul without perceiving how much of the great 
 dream of '48 lingered in the mind of Renan. 
 The day was to dawn when, mournfully, he was 
 to admit that the barbarians are, in truth, a 
 necessary refuse. But his barbarians were not 
 merely the unpossessing classes : they were the 
 selfish, the dull, the mean, the narrow, in every 
 class, high or low, rich or poor, one with another. 
 
 L Avenir de la Science is an example of the 
 subjective quality of Renan's imagination. He 
 has sympathy in abundance — the subtlest, the 
 most penetrating, the most sensitive of any writer 
 of his time — but he has not a particle of dramatic 
 imagination. He interprets all things by himself. 
 If he desire to save Society, he will adjure Society 
 
LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 to quit the seminary, turn philologist, and set 
 itself to study the origins of Christianity. In the 
 Avenir de la Science, Renan projects his own 
 sensibility and his own experience into Contem- 
 porary Society, just as later on he was to project 
 them into Jesus Christ and Marcus Aurelius. No 
 man ever lived more resolutely in the whole ; but 
 in the whole, as he sees it, he puts a reflection of 
 himself. He has the extraordinary gift, attributed 
 by physicians to certain nervous patients, of ex- 
 teriorising his own sensibility. 
 
 By the time Renan had finished his book, '48 
 was over, the fever of democracy had passed : the 
 young author could only regard his socialistic pro- 
 jects as curious examples of the mythopoetic 
 faculty. No doubt they interested him from this 
 point of view also. Every mode and phase of his 
 own and the world's development impassioned his 
 eager intelligence. It was all matter for study. 
 What though one star fell out of the myriads 
 in heaven? What though your perfect demo- 
 cracy proved a poet's day dream ? The universe 
 teemed with other problems, other mysteries, 
 equally important, equally engrossing. 
 
 In 1849, M. Renan obtained from the French 
 Government one of those travelling scholarships 
 which, across the Channel, are dignified by the 
 name of missions. He was to seek in the 
 
1848 
 
 95 
 
 libraries of Italy certain documents required by 
 the Academy of Inscriptions for its Histoire 
 Litteraire de la France; he was also to com- 
 plete his own thesis on Averroes. For eight 
 months Ernest Renan remained in the Peninsula. 
 
 Suddenly freed from the bracing influence of 
 his environment in Paris, Renan rapidly regained 
 his natural bent : dreamy, idealizing, poetic. More 
 than once his letters from Rome must have exas- 
 perated his democratic correspondent. 1 There is so 
 much religion in them, so much art, vague piety, 
 sentiment reflected from the Roman landscape ! 
 " Tell me less about the monuments and more 
 about the condition of the people" answers, in 
 substance, Marcel Berthelot. In vaim ; Renan 
 has fallen under the sway of the Past. 
 
 "This journey had the most remarkable in- 
 fluence on my mind. I knew nothing of Art, and 
 lo ! I beheld her, radiant and full of consolations. 
 A faery enchantress seemed to whisper me the 
 words which the Church, in her hymn, says to 
 the wood of the Cross : — 
 
 " ' Flecte ramos, arbor alta, 
 Tensa laxa viscera, 
 Et rigor lentescat ille 
 Quern dedit nativitas.' 
 
 A sort of soft breeze relaxed my native rigour. 
 1 Correspondance Renan- Berthelot, Revue de Paris, 1 Aout 1897. 
 
96 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 Almost all my illusions of 1848 dropped from 
 me, for I saw they were impossible. I recognised 
 the fatal necessities of human society, I resigned 
 myself to a condition of the creation in which 
 a great deal of evil serves to produce a little 
 good, where a drop of exquisite aroma is distilled 
 from an enormous caput mortuum of refuse." 
 
 Yet, whilst admitting the absurdity of yesterday's 
 chimera, Renan did not cease to follow the ever 
 beckoning ideal. The Infinite remained the 
 eternal guide. And on the ledger of the Monas- 
 tery of Monte Cassino he wrote in 1850 : — 
 
 " Unum est necessarwm; Maria elegit optimam partem" 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE VALE OF GRACE 
 
 nPHE disenchantment which followed 1848 
 combined with the divine spectacle of Italy 
 to turn the mind of Renan from the future 
 towards the past. He saw no longer in his 
 dreams a socialistic phalanstery with its Spinoza 
 occupied in an optician's work-room. His fancy 
 preferred to evoke some steep small Umbrian 
 town with Etruscan walls and Roman ruins, with 
 mediaeval towers set high above Renaissance 
 palaces and the overladen Jesuit churches of 
 the Catholic Revival. Here was food for the 
 mind : the past is so poetic ! We imagine the 
 future so flat and full of prose ! The Celt 
 especially is open to the magical pathos of 
 historic memories, and, now that once Ernest 
 Renan had unsealed his hearing to that siren- 
 song, the music of the barricades might pipe to 
 him in vain ! 
 
 Impressionable to excess, Renan, while guard- 
 ing his will fixed on one steadfast aim, changed 
 the colour of his thoughts according to the atmos- 
 
 G 97 
 
98 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 phere he dwelt in. Imagine a chameleon, pro- 
 gressing unswervingly in one direction, but some- 
 times blue, sometimes rose, sometimes green, in 
 the course of his invariable traject ! Such is 
 Renan, the bizarre and eminently Celtic fusion 
 of a constant mind with a sensitive temperament. 
 Among the marvels of the Sabine Hills, the utili- 
 tarian ideal which yesterday he had invoked, 
 appeared odious to him. He continued to serve 
 Truth and Science — but no longer in the precincts 
 of Democracy. Rough-shod, iron goddess, might 
 her feet never tread the Seven Hills ! 
 
 " As for me, it is with something akin to terror 
 that I face the day when life shall penetrate anew 
 that sublime heap of ruins which is Rome ! I 
 cannot conceive her other than she is : a museum 
 of dilapidated majesties, a tryst for the exiles 
 of our work-a-day world, a meeting-place for 
 dethroned monarchs, disenchanted statesmen, and 
 sceptical philosophers weary of their kind. Should 
 the fatal level of modern common-place threaten 
 this mass of sacred relics, I would fain the priests 
 and the monks of Rome were paid to maintain 
 within her ruins their customary melancholy and 
 squalor, and to preserve all round about them 
 fever and the desert." 1 
 
 Renan's democracy had been a short brain- 
 
 1 Essais de morale et de Critique , p. 2 59. 
 
THE VALE OF GRACE 99 
 
 fever. It had passed : the coup d'etat disgusted him 
 once for all with the lower classes. The develop- 
 ment of his ideas made it easy for certain of his 
 friends to dissuade him from the publication of 
 DAvenir de la Science. Although already in July 
 1849 a chapter of the book had been printed in a 
 review, with the mention : " to appear in a few 
 weeks," the volume did not see the light, in fact, 
 until 1890 — less out of date than it would have 
 been in the first flush of that reaction which forms 
 the morrow of every revolution. Renan had been 
 the first to suspect the inopportunity of yester- 
 day's gospel. He was no longer under the 
 exclusive influence of the Berthelots. On literary 
 matters, he consulted Augustin Thierry — his 
 mentor in letters — and M. de Sacy : each of 
 them advised him to reserve his great work — to 
 dispose of it page by page, chapter by chapter, in 
 the form of essays and reviews ; but not to over- 
 whelm the public with his whole stock of un- 
 seasonable riches. 
 
 Thus, in five years, Renan had lost two ideals 
 — Christianity and Socialism. Despite his robust 
 faith in the future of Science, the present world 
 began to wear a disenchanted aspect. Our young 
 fanatic of yesterday was in some danger of be- 
 coming one of those "sceptical philosophers, 
 weary of their kind " for whom the Eternal City 
 
ioo LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 appeared so convenient a limbo. If we could 
 suppose a special Providence designed to watch 
 over so notorious a heretic, now was the moment 
 for its intervention. And lo ! his sister, having 
 finished her ten years' engagement in Poland, 
 summoned Ernest to meet her in Berlin. And 
 Renan encountered his Egeria. 
 
 " When we meet again, my dear, we shall 
 hardly recognise each other," Renan had written 
 to his sister years before. And after ten years 
 they met. The slim young woman of nine and 
 twenty, gracious of aspect, who had bidden fare- 
 well to her brother in the seminary parlour, was 
 grown into a woman of forty, plain in the face, 
 prematurely aged and lined by the hard winters 
 of Poland. The girlish lightness had departed 
 from her figure ; an affection of the larynx 
 threatened the sweetness of her voice. In air 
 and dress Mademoiselle Renan affected an elderly 
 fashion which nothing in her looks belied. Her 
 brother glanced at her, realised the sad change, — 
 and worshipped his austere Egeria as a second 
 mother, the comforting mother of his mind. She, 
 on the other hand, can have seen small trace of 
 the ungainly provincial seminarist she had left 
 in the travelled young philosopher of seven and 
 twenty who stood before her. For a moment 
 they were strangers in each other's eyes - — 
 
THE VALE OF GRACE 101 
 
 but they were intimate to the marrow of the 
 mind. 
 
 Henriette returned to Paris with Ernest. She 
 had lost her youth and her health in Poland, but 
 she had paid off her father's debts, redeemed the 
 mortgage on her mother's property, established 
 her brother in the way he should go, and a little 
 purse of savings remained to set up house with. 
 They were to live together. Each had long 
 dreamed this dream, and five years before Ernest 
 had written— "We shall be so happy, dear ! I 
 am easy-tempered and gentle. You will let me 
 live the serious simple life I love, and I will 
 tell you all I think and all I feel. We shall have 
 our friends too — refined and elect spirits — who 
 will beautify our life." 
 
 They chose a small apartment near the Val-de- 
 Grace, with windows looking over the garden 
 of the Carmelite Nuns. There was room for 
 them and their books ; place for M. Berthelot to 
 sit and discuss with them all things under the 
 sun ; a seat for such of Ernest Renan's masters as 
 would honour his home. Henriette had few friends 
 and did not desire to enlarge her acquaintance. 
 She had Ernest and that was enough. 
 
 Ernest was absent a part of every day at 
 the National Library : he had been appointed 
 to a small charge of Sub-Librarian. His salary, 
 
102 LIFE OF ERNEST REN AN 
 
 with Henrietta's savings, sufficed for their 
 daily wants. While her brother was away the 
 devoted sister copied out his manuscripts for 
 him, made long abstracts from volumes needed 
 for his work, corrected his proofs, took notes 
 which might be of use to him, compulsed a 
 mass of documents, verified dates and authorities. 
 For amusement she looked out of the window 
 at the nuns in their convent garden, or waited 
 for Ernests return. . . . Anxious pleasure of 
 waiting, of listening for a glad step on the stair — 
 and then the smile we expected, and the eager 
 budget of the day's events ! 
 
 In the evening, Ernest settled to his writing. 
 " She had the greatest respect for my work. I 
 have seen her sit by my side for hours of an 
 evening, scarcely breathing lest she should in- 
 terrupt my labours. Yet she loved to have 
 me in her sight, and the door between our two 
 rooms stood ever open. Her affection had be- 
 come something so ripe and so discreet that the 
 sweet communion of our thoughts was sufficient 
 for her. Her heart, — jealous, exacting, as it was 
 — demanded but a few minutes a day, since 
 she alone was loved. Thanks to her strict 
 economy, on our singularly limited resources 
 she kept a house in which nothing was lacking 
 and which could boast its own austere charm. . . . 
 
THE VALE OF GRACE 103 
 
 She was an incomparable secretary. Her delicate 
 censure discovered negligences and brusqueries 
 which I had overlooked. It was she who per- 
 suaded me that every shade of thought can be 
 expressed in a correct and simple style, that 
 violent images and new-coined expressions betray 
 either misplaced pretensions or ignorance of the 
 real wealth at our disposal Hence a profound 
 change in the manner of my writing. I ac- 
 customed myself to reckon in advance on her 
 remarks — hazarding many a brilliant passage to 
 watch its effect upon her, whilst decided to 
 sacrifice it if she observed it with disfavour." 1 
 
 Henriette examined not only the manner but 
 the matter. Her simple rectitude was discon- 
 certed by Ernest's recurrent irony. " I had never 
 suffered, and a discreet smile provoked by the 
 weakness or the vanity of man, seemed a sort 
 of philosophy." Many a winged shaft was offered 
 on her shrine. 
 
 Fine writing, irony, and a certain abstract 
 vagueness in spiritual matters ; such were the 
 qualities which Henriette was anxious to dis- 
 cipline and chasten in her gifted brother's writ- 
 ings. The tender inquisitress was not satisfied 
 until all was pure, exact, discreet, and true. 
 She said to her brother, " Be thou perfect ! " 
 
 1 Ma sceur Henriette, p. 36. 
 
104 LIFE OF ERNEST REN AN 
 
 And a dash of mockery, a trace of vanity, the 
 least little air of disdain, or flaunt of self- 
 satisfaction, however pretty in itself, was a flaw 
 in the absolute clear beauty she desired. Most 
 of all, she sought to cultivate in him the habit 
 of veracity, a habit the seminary had not in- 
 culcated, it appears. " I have never told a lie 
 since 1 8 5 1 ," wrote Ernest many years after her 
 death. 
 
 Her efforts were seconded by Ernest's friends 
 — by Augustin Thierry, who in 1 8 5 1 introduced 
 the young writer to the Revue des Deux Mondes ; 
 by M. de Sacy, who admitted him on to the staff 
 of the Debats. " It was these two organs," said 
 M. Renan in 1890, "who taught me how to 
 write, that is to say, how to limit myself, how 
 constantly to rub the angles off my ideas, how 
 to keep a watchful eye on my defects." 1 The 
 extraordinary absence of vanity which character- 
 ised Renan in his youth enabled him to profit by 
 all this good advice without any juvenile soreness 
 of feeling. He was right. Between the Avenir 
 de la Science, written in 1848 and 1849, and 
 the essays contributed to the Revue des Deux 
 Mondes and the Debuts, in the years immediately 
 following 1 8 5 1 , there is fixed the abyss which 
 divides work of fervent and interesting promise 
 
 1 Preface to Avenir. 
 
THE VALE OF GRACE 105 
 
 from the peculiar ripe perfection of a great writer. 
 Renan's genius was to grow freer and fuller, at once 
 more human and more fantastic, more audacious 
 and more penetrating. Henceforth it will lose 
 rather than gain in moral grace, in a certain 
 exquisite gravity and elegance of spirit. And, 
 perhaps, never again was the historian of religions 
 so religious. 
 
 In Renan's delicate philosophy, made up of 
 semi-tones and demi-tints, piety had out-lived 
 faith. In 1856, he no longer believes in any 
 of the myriad forms of the one informing soul. 
 (?ro>.Xa bvo^ara Mop<pq fifa.) But that essential idea of 
 Religion, peculiar and necessary to human kind, he 
 asserts to be immortal and destined to an infinite 
 development. Shall the exquisite herald-angel 
 remain chained, trammelled, wounded, dwarfed 
 perchance, by fetters of our mortal forging ? To 
 strike off those fetters, thought Renan, was good 
 knight's service. Set Religion free, let her move 
 and grow, let her guide us unenslaved, unim- 
 prisoned. The refusal to adhere to a definite 
 form of worship may be an act of faith in the 
 future of Religion. 
 
 Thanks to Ernest's genius and Henriettas 
 incessant vigilance, nothing in these early essays 
 suggested the beginner, nor even the young man. 
 They were rounded with a golden maturity. 
 
io6 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 The intrepidity of their conception was veiled 
 by a becoming reserve of phrase : the oracle 
 evidently wished to awake but not to startle 
 his audience. They combine a soaring liberty of 
 spirit with an exquisite candour. A great charm 
 in these essays is that, so various in their subjects 
 and their treatment, they are still invariable in 
 their aim. United they form not an anthology, 
 but a book. There is a link between them all — 
 whether they treat of the historians of Jesus, the 
 imitation of Christ, the lives of the Saints, or of 
 Calvin, or Mahomet, or the Prophets of Israel, 
 or of antique myths, or of the school of Hegel, 
 or whether they delicately flagellate the vulgarities 
 of American Protestantism. The author studies 
 one by one these religious ideals, not dogmatically, 
 but historically ; he penetrates each movement, and 
 tries to resume it in a typical figure, a sort of ideal 
 representative ; and this man he then evokes in 
 his habit as he lived, with every detail of his most 
 intimate originality. The portrait is singularly 
 living, whether or no it be singularly like. . . . On 
 this latter head I would reserve my opinion, omin- 
 ously enlightened by a passage in one of Renan's 
 letters to M. TAbb6 Cognat. . . . 
 
 " God forgive me for loving Ronge and Czersky 
 if they be misleading spirits ! For what I love 
 in them — as in all other men to whom I dedicate 
 
THE VALE OF GRACE 107 
 
 my enthusiasm — is a certain beautiful moral 
 image of them which I create within myself. 
 It is my own ideal which I love in them. Now, 
 as to whether they really resemble this image? 
 That appears to me, I admit, a matter of slight 
 importance." 
 
 Imaginative, suggestive, subtle, Renan's essays 
 as they appeared one by one in the early years 
 of the Fifties, attracted more attention than the 
 brother and sister dreamed of in their dear 
 seclusion. 
 
 " What was my surprise when, one morning, 
 a stranger of pleasant and intelligent appearance 
 entered my attic. He complimented me on 
 certain articles of mine which had appeared in 
 the Reviews, and offered to unite them in a 
 volume. Thereupon he produced a stamped 
 document stipulating terms which I thought 
 astonishingly generous, so much so that when he 
 asked if all my future works should be comprised 
 in the treaty, I consented." 1 The visitor was M. 
 Michel L£vy, the then rising publisher, whose 
 fortune Renan was to help to make ; and the 
 book, the delicious Etudes d'Histoire Religieuse 
 immediately established him in the first rank of 
 literature, if not of popular success. Published on 
 the 20th of March 1857, the Etudes d'Histoire 
 
 a Souvenirs, 385. 
 
io8 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 Religieuse were succeeded on the 6th of June 
 I 8S9, by the Essais de Morale et de Critique. 
 Nor did Renan neglect the austerer courts of 
 Science. In 1855 he had finally given to 
 the world the General History of Semitic 
 Languages, which, while still unpublished, had 
 won the Volney Prize some eight years before. 
 This book opened to the author the gates of the 
 Institute. Uncontested master of Semitic philo- 
 logy in France, Renan was elected, in 1856, a 
 Member of the Academy of Inscriptions and 
 Belles Lettres. 
 
 Meanwhile, in 1852, Renan had published the 
 work on Averroes, which brought him not only 
 his doctor's degree, but his first reputation as a 
 thinker. In Averroes the critic demonstrates 
 the sterilising effect of orthodoxy on a noble and 
 beautiful philosophy. Greek science, adopted by 
 the Arab thinkers, fixed and crystallised by them 
 into a dogma, becomes thenceforth a thing in- 
 capable of development or fecundity. To live 
 and grow, a thing must pass from the category 
 of esse into the category of fieri. Otherwise 
 routine and dogmatism rust out the vital principle 
 in even the greatest ideas ; even as a pool of the 
 purest water, set apart from the natural current of 
 streams or the running rains of heaven, will 
 stale and grow stagnant. 
 
THE VALE OF GRACE 
 
 The interest of philosophic history lies rather 
 in the picture it gives us of the growth of the 
 human mind, than in the theories which it 
 exhumes from bygone systems. The strange 
 development of Greek science by a civilisation 
 entirely alien to that of Greece interested the 
 historic curiosity of Renan. Aristotle among 
 the Arabs ! So we might imagine Pekin to adopt 
 the theories of Darwin and Pasteur, commentat- 
 ing them during centuries in a spirit of pure 
 Chinese orthodoxy. The result would probably be 
 of no mortal value — it would be piquant and un- 
 usual ; it would represent an infrequent combina- 
 tion ; it would have a value of its own in the 
 eyes of the disinterested critic of the universe, 
 curious of moral rarities. It would be interest- 
 ing and useful to see in what unlikely back-waters 
 the Stream of Life can meander when the main 
 current is blocked. . . . The Arabs took the 
 philosophy of Aristotle from the Syrian Chris- 
 tians, who had it from the pagan Greeks. The 
 Mahommedan Arabs bequeathed it to the Spanish 
 Jews, who passed it on to the Catholic doctors 
 of the Middle Ages and Aristotle ended as a 
 scholastic dogmatist in the Sorbonne ! Trans- 
 lated, interpreted, and falsified in a dozen different 
 senses, the intellectual curiosity of Greece con- 
 trived in these strange elements, if not to grow, 
 
no LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 if not to produce, at least to languish in a sort 
 of earthly limbo. Die Wahrheit magt Niemand 
 verbrennen, sang Mechtild of Magdeburg, who, 
 in her different degree, was another child of 
 Aristotle. 
 
 But not merely the curiosity of the man of 
 science attracted Renan to this subject. The 
 strongest bent of his genius inclined him to 
 consider, above all, the origins of things. He 
 loved the delicate, rooty fibres as others love 
 the flowers or the fruits ; and half of his secret 
 was his extraordinary faculty for seeing under- 
 ground. The scholastic philosophy of the 
 thirteenth century is only to be understood by 
 a thorough knowledge of the principles of Jewish 
 and Arab thought. When Renan did not under- 
 stand a phenomenon, an imperious instinct bade 
 him seek its source. His interpretation of 
 Catholic scholasticism led him first of all to study 
 Averroes, even as later on it led him to study the 
 Early Church, and thence the Origins of Chris- 
 tianity, whence he delved yet further back into 
 the Origins of Judaism. Averroes is the first 
 link in a chain which Renan was to spend his 
 life in forging. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER 
 
 IF we hold with Averroes that all men are the 
 transient expressions of one enduring soul, 
 we find small difficulty in explaining how the 
 noblest minds of a given generation arrive, 
 unknown to each other, and simultaneously, at 
 a like result While Renan was painfully de- 
 ducing from documents and inflections a new 
 psychology, a young classical master at Nevers, 
 named Hippolyte Taine, was writing to his 
 friends : — 
 
 " Free psychology is a magnificent science 
 founded on the philosophy of history ... we 
 must make of history an exact science. ... I 
 take refuge from the present in reading the 
 Germans." 1 
 
 Taine met Renan, five years his senior, in the 
 offices of the great Liberal reviews. Save in the 
 fundamental independence and unworldliness of 
 their natures, no men could be more different. 
 
 1 See, in M. Gabriel Monod's charming and valuable volume 
 Rencm, Taine \ Michelet y the previously unpublished letters of Taine. 
 
 hi 
 
H2 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 The genius of Taine was absolute, positive, vivid 
 to the verge of harshness, apt to mass and class 
 the confusion of things in a series of brilliant 
 syntheses : above all things he was a logician. 
 Renan, — subtle, complex and elusive, a historian 
 and, above all, an analyst, — was for ever dividing 
 and sub-dividing the prism of the universe into 
 an immeasurable sequence of minor shades ; was 
 for ever attenuating his keen and often auda- 
 cious analysis by a style serene and limpid 
 beyond comparison. But a like idea of Truth 
 and Liberty animated their souls. Equally 
 admirable, equally eminent, Renan and Taine 
 were as the two eyes of the generation which 
 came to its maturity towards i860. 
 
 The children of a later day can form no idea 
 of the repression which followed '48, of those 
 gloomy years in which thought was fettered, 
 freedom stifled, in which a political and orthodox 
 inquisition controlled the university and the press 
 of a liberal nation. The fusillades of the Luxem- 
 bourg were less detestable than the intellectual 
 tyranny of the Empire of the Fifties. A govern- 
 ment in reaction against armed insurrection 
 has some excuse for excessive reprisals ; it may 
 be right in maintaining order even by a flagrant 
 retaliation ; but it is an error to believe that the 
 premeditated dwarfing of a nation's intelligence 
 
THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER 113 
 
 can ever be the guarantee of peace. Adversity, 
 however, steels the obstinate; the Liberal party con- 
 tinued its opposition, aware that no ministry, how- 
 ever tyrannous, can destroy the mind of a nation. 
 When the main channel is blocked, intelligence 
 finds new outlets. The university, the public 
 schools, letters, the press, were constrained by an 
 iron censure, subject to exile, prison, suspension, 
 daily fines. Yet journalism had never been 
 more brilliant than under the Second Empire. 
 Beule contrived to outrage the Government 
 with impunity in writing the history of Augustus. 
 Rogeard bewailed the illiberal " Liberty of 
 December " — libertas Decembris, as Horace 
 puts it — and the censor dared not seize the 
 allusion to the coup d'etat. 
 
 France, in the Fifties, had at least one religion 
 which was not a mere lip-service, and that was 
 the doctrine of Liberalism. The little office of 
 the Debats y with its red-tiled floor, and its two 
 shabby ink-stained tables, was a sort of temple 
 of the faith. There statesmen, financiers, scholars, 
 artists, men of letters, met on a footing of ease 
 and equality, the result of their sincere devotion 
 to an aim outside themselves which made rank, 
 fortune, influence, details of no importance. MM. de 
 Sacy, Laboulaye, Prevost Paradol, John Lemoinne, 
 the Bertins, were the priests of this austere Chapel ; 
 
 H 
 
H4 
 
 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 and its creed was freedom, the rights of citizens, 
 justice, and a ceaseless aspiration towards a 
 nobler order of things. " Liberalism," wrote 
 Renan more than once, " Liberalism represents 
 for me the formula of the highest human develop- 
 ment ; " and the doctrine of the Debats was, in 
 fact, at bottom, much the doctrine of the Hebrew 
 prophets. The task of preaching it was attended 
 by almost insurmountable difficulties. The censor 
 was swift to punish and to suppress any indepen- 
 dent expression of political opinion. So the lead- 
 ing articles in the first columns were models of 
 discretion. The life of the journal passed into the 
 " Varieties " — into studies on moral and social 
 questions or purely literary articles, and the in- 
 telligent reader turned to the third page where he 
 read, between the lines of an essay or a review, all 
 that the political editor was obliged to leave un- 
 said. A notice by Provost Paradol, a piece of 
 Roman History by Cuvillier-Fleury, an article by 
 Ernest Renan were sure, in their subtle opposi- 
 tion, of an attentive public. 
 
 It was easy for a philosopher to serve the 
 Opposition simply by upholding the banner of 
 an austere Ideal. The staff of the Debats, 
 like the staff of the Edinburgh Review, was 
 content to " cultivate Literature upon a little 
 oatmeal." The traditions of the place were 
 
THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER 115 
 
 all of a certain Jansenist severity. Luxury, 
 display, — objects of elaborate mechanical con- 
 struction, even, — were suspect in the eyes of 
 the Debats. To own more than a million or 
 so (of francs bien entendu) appeared in very poor 
 taste. The immense expenses of the Empire, 
 the impetus given to industry, the heightened 
 standard of universal comfort, were signs of the 
 times regarded as distinctly ominous by these 
 eulogists of days gone by. They spoke of the 
 improvements of the Baron Haussmann with a 
 dash of contempt in a great deal of disfavour. 
 " I would give all your steamboats for an ^neid," 
 exclaimed M. de Sacy. The Government was 
 as generous in public works as it was illiberal in 
 public instruction. Vast sums were spent on 
 the extension of railways, the establishment of 
 the telegraph, on industrial exhibitions, on the 
 organisation of savings banks. " There was 
 some good in the Empire after all ! " cry we of 
 a later date, as we read the formidable list of 
 Imperial improvements. " No good ! " cried the 
 stern young prophet of the Dtbats. " What 
 material progress can compensate a moral de- 
 cadence? Will a steam traction engine make a 
 man happy? Will a universal exhibition make 
 him nobler or better? In taking the triumphs 
 of mechanical ingenuity for the sign of an ad- 
 
n6 LIFE OF ERNEST REN AN 
 
 vanced civilisation, you mistake the mere accident 
 for the essential." So taught Renan in France 
 throughout the Fifties ; while, curiously enough, 
 in England, John Ruskin was fulminating a similar 
 gospel against the gross, the palpable, ideal of 
 the age. 
 
 Renan discredited the advantages of tyranny, 
 and showed how despotism, to make itself accept- 
 able, invariably persuades Society of its talents as 
 a steward : "Bow down before me, and I will give 
 ye cent for cent." But what shall it profit a man 
 if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul ? 
 Nothing is less important than prosperity. Man 
 is not born to be prosperous, but to realise, in a 
 little vanguard of chosen spirits, an ideal superior 
 to the ideal of yesterday. The bulk of humanity 
 lives by proxy ; only the few can attain a com- 
 plete development. Millions live and die in order 
 to produce a rare elite. The true glory of 
 Holland, for instance, is to have brought forth 
 princes like William of Orange, painters like 
 Rembrandt, thinkers like Spinoza — not to have 
 the best pastures in Europe and a high standard 
 of comfort. Once we put the accent on prosperity, 
 we introduce into our midst envy, ambition, and 
 all their baleful sequel. The really noble society 
 is that in which each man is content with the 
 station into which he is born. The really noble 
 
THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER 117 
 
 nation is that which yields the greatest sum of 
 disinterestedness, of self-sacrifice, that in which 
 men most live for one another : the society whose 
 workmen are proud of the magnificence of their 
 prince, whose princes are solicitous for the needs 
 of the poor, whose laymen are sustained by the 
 prayers of the nun, whose priests rejoice in the 
 courage of the soldier, whose scholars profit by 
 the labours of the humble, whose harvesters feel 
 that, in their sphere, they too collaborate in the 
 great moral masterpiece which is a nation firmly 
 welded in an indestructible solidarity of soul. 
 Duty is the foundation of such a society, and the 
 satisfaction in duty accomplished the private joy 
 of every citizen — a joy deeper than any man can 
 owe to the mere diffusion of material abundance. 
 
 So runs the epistle of Renan to his contempor- 
 aries. In consequence of the storm raised by his 
 essay on the historians of Jesus, published in the 
 Etudes d'Histoire Religieuse^ he had turned for a 
 while from his chosen path of religious history 
 to the neighbouring track of moral philosophy. 
 The frivolity of the society of his age made him 
 pause in the destruction of an illusion which was, 
 perhaps, a restraint and an ideal. The morality 
 of the average man is in fact generally a con- 
 sequence of his piety ; let us therefore respect 
 that piety. Let us direct it. Whether or no 
 
n8 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 Christianity be true, this philosopher was persuaded 
 of the existence of good and evil. 
 
 " An impenetrable veil screens from us the 
 secret of this strange world whose reality con- 
 vinces and oppresses us. Philosophy and Science 
 pursue for ever, and ever in vain, the formula of 
 this proteus whom no reason limits and no tongue 
 expresses. But there is one indubitable founda- 
 tion, which scepticism shall not shake, where man 
 may find, until the end of time, a foothold firm 
 amid the uncertainties around him : Good is good, 
 evil is evil." 
 
 Good is good, evil is evil, and, above all things, 
 truth is truth : — " Whatever system we adopt to 
 explain man and the world, we cannot deny that 
 the problems they arouse are infinitely curious, 
 infinitely attaching, and worthy of the most patient 
 investigation. And even if virtue were but a 
 snare, laid for the noblest, if hope were a dream, 
 beauty an illusion, humanity a vain tumult, the 
 pure research of truth would still preserve its 
 charm ! For even if we suppose the world to be 
 the nightmare of a fevered divinity, or an acciden- 
 tal bubble on the surface of nothingness, yet are 
 we invincibly impelled to wring its secret from it. 
 Whatever we may think of the universe, it remains 
 a spectacle which rivets our attention. In the 
 life of St Thomas Aquinas we read that one 
 
THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER 119 
 
 day Christ appeared to him and asked him 
 what reward he craved for his learned writings. 
 * Nothing but Thee, O Lord ! ' replied the angeli- 
 cal doctor. The critic of the universe is yet more 
 disinterested. If Truth should appear and address 
 him a like question, he would answer — ' Nought 
 but the pursuit of thee, O Truth ! ' " 1 
 
 1 Essais de Morale et de Critique p. 100. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 MARRIAGE 
 
 A PORTRAIT by Henry Scheffer — the less 
 known brother of a famous painter — shows 
 us Renan at this time. The head is certainly 
 idealized, but its likeness to the sitter's charming 
 daughter forbids us to call it a piece of flattery 
 pure and simple. It shows a Renan strikingly 
 unlike the gnome-like figure, the colossal leonine 
 head, the radiant ugliness of the affable Acade- 
 mician we remember. Neither the strength, nor 
 the humour, nor the disenchanted benignant smile 
 we knew are here. This is a serious elegiac 
 young man, a Hamlet, — nay, too gentle and un- 
 suspicious for a Hamlet, — almost a Good Shep- 
 herd. The cheeks and jaw have not yet taken on 
 those formidable proportions which made the sin- 
 uous lips appear yet more delicate. All the features 
 are larger, the heavy nose, the mouth, especially 
 the eyes — charming, in this portrait, in their 
 smiling melancholy. The oval of the face ap- 
 pears not only slighter but longer. The ensemble 
 1 20 
 
MARRIAGE 
 
 121 
 
 is striking, touching, even handsome. The 
 relentless idealism of the painter has attenuated 
 the quaint awkwardness of the model, whose 
 small stature, heavy sloping shoulders, huge head, 
 and short arms can never have presented this dis- 
 tinguished appearance. Renan was well aware of 
 his deficiencies. Many a line in his earlier essays 
 informs us of his bashfulness in society. His 
 priest's education and the long habit of solitude 
 had left him awkward, silent, reserved. He could 
 discourse brilliantly on elevated subjects, but he 
 did not know how, at the right moment, to say 
 the usual thing. He was always utterly devoid of 
 the give-and-take of the ready talker. Thus he 
 oscillated between an inspired monologue and a 
 heavy silence, while he wondered how intelligent 
 persons could be so fired by the common-place, 
 " so interested in what does not ennoble." He 
 felt painfully his uncouth exterior, and perhaps 
 still more painfully, though with a certain pride, 
 that mark of the priest on his forehead, which, 
 as he thought, was clearly legible, destining him 
 to eternal solitude in the pursuit of the ideal. Sir 
 M. Grant Duff, who met him first in 1859, gives us 
 a more flattered version of the same character : — 
 " His manner had that charming gentleness 
 which is characteristic of the best of the Catholic 
 clergy. His conversation was very copious and 
 
122 LIFE OF ERNEST REN AN 
 
 limpid, not dealing much in epigram or anecdote, 
 but very easy and very informing." 
 
 It was towards 1855, I think, that Renan 
 made the acquaintance of Ary Scheffer. The 
 pure idealism of the Dutch painter's art, the 
 liberality of his religious feeling, the generous 
 and lofty temper of his mind, were such as to 
 fire the young savants enthusiasm. By his new 
 friend's hearth, he found that household warmth, 
 that simple and yet intellectual geniality which 
 were all that was needed to thaw his chill timidi- 
 ties. M. Schefifer's house had not been the home 
 it became to Ernest Renan were there no women 
 by the hearth. He had a niece and a daughter. 
 Some thirty-five years later I was privileged to 
 count the former among my dearest friends. 
 
 When I knew her Madame Renan was an 
 ageing woman, her figure grown to a great size, 
 the shape of her face something altered by the 
 habit of difficult breathing : she had a heart com- 
 plaint. But, at sixty, her bright blue eyes, with 
 their look of witty innocence, her clear skin, her 
 abundant chestnut hair, her delightful smile with 
 its winning unassailable youth, sufficed to remind 
 us of the attractions of her girlhood. Her early 
 portraits show a slim light grace, a pure oval of 
 cheek and brow, with the same air of merry good- 
 ness which made her face so charming in age. 
 
MARRIAGE 
 
 123 
 
 As clever as she was pretty, as kind as she was 
 wise, the friends of her girlhood used to call her 
 Minerva ; but imagine the most modest, the most 
 amiable fireside divinity, prescient for others, wise 
 with no thought of her own advancement. Lively, 
 gay, active, sweet-tempered, capable, discreet, — 
 Corn^lie Schefifer was the ideal helpmate. Really 
 gifted, she soon discovered the intellectual superi- 
 ority of her uncle's friend. Imagine his delight 
 to find this charming maiden, not only acquainted, 
 but deeply imbued, with his own writings, and 
 able to talk with him not merely as an admirer, 
 but as an intelligent companion. Little by little 
 her influence on her new friend became only 
 second to that of Henriette, and inclined him 
 ever more and more to the standpoint of the 
 artist, of the man of feeling, as opposed to the 
 pure scholar's point of view. I suppose M. Ary 
 Scheffer saw how things were drifting. Often 
 Madame Renan has told me of a ride she took 
 with her uncle on the sands near Scheveningen — 
 I suppose in the autumn of 1855. They were 
 talking of the future — of other people's future. 
 Suddenly he wheeled round his horse, confronted 
 her, and said — "You, my dear, you ought to 
 marry the most intelligent man I know." Neither 
 said any more ; they broke into a gallop, and 
 continued their thoughts in silence. 
 
124 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 But Mademoiselle Renan, in her dear seclusion, 
 laid no great stress on this intimacy with the 
 Scheffers, Long before she had proposed to 
 Ernest what she had considered a suitable al- 
 liance. He had refused ; the years glided on ; 
 and the tender, jealous sister, so happy in her 
 double solitude, had come to count upon her 
 brother as exclusively her own for ever. He, 
 on the other hand, relied on her sympathy for 
 a confession which his reserve continually put off. 
 And one day he awoke to find himself condemned 
 to break the heart of one of the two women he 
 loved best in all the world. 
 
 In pages of a penetrating beauty, Ernest Renan 
 himself has told the heart-wrung modest tragedy. 
 Who shall repeat the words which a sacred 
 emotion has let escape from the lips of a master ? 
 Henriette Renan could not, would not, at first 
 accept the bitter cup. And one day her brother, 
 forced to choose between two affections, decided 
 for that which seemed most like a duty. He 
 bade farewell, an eternal farewell, to the young 
 girl he loved. At night-fall, he went home ; en- 
 tered quietly the little study, henceforth desolate, 
 and told his sister of his sacrifice. Thus set • 
 face to face with a generosity superior to her 
 own, all that was noble, all that was the infallible 
 protectress, revived in Henriette and forbade the 
 
MARRIAGE 
 
 125 
 
 sacrifice. The next morning early she went to 
 M. Scheffer's house ; asked for her young rival, 
 sought and found her peace. The two women 
 wept long in each other's arms ; but they bid 
 each other au revoir I with glad faces. In those 
 hours of shaken tears their sisterhood had begun. 
 
 But not yet, if ever, was the demon of tender 
 jealousy allayed. The first years of Madame 
 Renan's married life were filled with a difficult and 
 tormented happiness. The young wife, brought 
 up with all the triple liberty of a cosmopolitan, 
 Protestant, and artistic home, must often have felt 
 the provincial reclusion of the Renans' house 
 weigh upon her spirits. For she was not mistress 
 there. The Minerva of Ary Scheffer's studio never 
 complained of the subordinate position allotted 
 her by her own conventual hearth. Her hus- 
 band, accustomed all his life long to look up to 
 Henriette and obey her, thought it quite natural 
 that his young wife should obey her too. And 
 the exquisite, the devoted, the noble Henriette 
 was sometimes a jealous divinity. 
 
 The birth of a son lit a warmer glow at their 
 fireside. Henriette adored her nephew, and this 
 great new interest reconciled her to her brother's 
 marriage. Melancholy, tearful, anxious, she re- 
 mained ; ever susceptible, easily wounded ; but a 
 real affection for Ary's mother knit her at last 
 
126 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 to her sister-in-law. In i860 they were still 
 closer drawn together by the loss of a little girl, 
 Ernestine, passionately beloved by her father, who 
 consecrated to this baby soul an exquisite In 
 Memoriam\ still unpublished. — Little Ernestine, 
 who lived nine months, was never forgotten ; — 
 often has Madame Renan recalled to me a loss 
 still recent to her faithful love ; and Henriette 
 Renan in her last illness spoke many a time to 
 Ernest of their " little flower." — Meanwhile old 
 Madame Renan had joined the family circle. 
 The witty, voluble little old woman had much 
 more in common with her daughter - in - law 
 than with her daughter. At heart, she had 
 never forgiven Henriette her plain face ; and 
 she, at least, knew the value of youth, charm, 
 beauty, and vivacity in a woman. Her presence 
 made things go smoothly. Her son adored her, 
 admired her, no less than in the old days at 
 Treguier. Every afternoon at dusk he was wont 
 to spend an hour in her room, lit only by the 
 gas lamps in the street. And she would dis- 
 course to him of Treguier and Lannion as they 
 were before the Revolution, of her own early 
 youth, and of a vanished Brittany. More than 
 twenty years later, these talks in the twilight 
 were to receive an immortal setting in Renan's 
 Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse. 
 
MARRIAGE 
 
 127 
 
 In 1858 Ary Scheffer died, and Renan lost 
 in him not only a near related friend but a 
 collaborator. Ary Scheffer's last design had been 
 made to illustrate his nephew-in-law's translation 
 of the Book of Job. The volume appeared, 
 without the promised illustrations, in 1859. And 
 thus Renan began his version of the Bible, 
 choosing by a sort of instinct the great hymn 
 of doubt and despair, the terrible dialogue of an 
 irresponsible God who mocks at justice, and of a 
 baffled and ignorant humanity. In the following 
 year he brought forth his second book — " The 
 Song of Songs," the triumphant paean of Profane 
 Love. More than twenty years later, he was to 
 give us EcclesiasteS) the last word of scepticism, 
 the last ironical smile-and-sigh of the pessimist 
 convinced that man shall never triumph over fate. 
 Strange scriptures these. In the Bible, according 
 to Ernest Renan, there is neither a prayer nor 
 a psalm. Renan's translation of The Song of 
 Songs is a masterpiece of ingenious scholar- 
 ship, and one may say that only those who 
 have read this charming version can appreciate 
 all the beauty, freshness, and candour of the 
 exquisite little Hebrew morality-play. 
 
 In 1857 Quatremere had died, and since 
 then there was a Chair vacant at the College 
 of France — the Chair of Hebrew and Syro- 
 
128 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 Chaldaic languages — the place which Renan 
 had desired consistently, and to which every 
 succeeding volume showed his title clearer. 
 
 The Professors of the College of France are 
 named by the Minister of Public Instruction from 
 two lists, the one drawn up by the College itself, 
 the other by the Academy of Inscriptions. 
 These lists are almost always identical. Cer- 
 tainly the name of Ernest Renan would have 
 headed either. But month after month, year after 
 year, dragged on ; the Chair of Hebrew remained 
 vacant ; the Minister never asked for the lists. 
 The Professorship of Hebrew at the College of 
 France is, in point of fact, a Chair of Biblical 
 exegesis. The Catholic party, all-powerful in the 
 first years of the Spanish Empress's influence, had 
 devised this means of reducing a renegade to 
 silence. Renan waited, and continued his duties 
 as one of the sub-librarians at the Biblioth&que 
 Imperiale. He knew his time would come. When, 
 in 1 86 1, overtures were made to him, to discover 
 if he would accept another Chair at the College 
 of France, he replied, No. He meant yet to fill 
 the seat of Quatremere. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 A MISSION TO PHOENICIA 
 
 "TV 7T EANWHILE the Empire prospered and 
 became mellower in its prosperity. The 
 laurels of the Crimea hid, in some measure, the 
 blood stains of the Deux-Decembre. Men began 
 to speak well of a Government which secured a 
 triumph abroad and magnificence at home. 
 When Napoleon III. declared war against Austria 
 in favour of Italian independence, the usurper 
 appeared the champion of liberty, and the 
 popular enthusiasm knew no bounds. And, in 
 fact, at heart, Louis -Napoleon, curious of all 
 things, convinced of none, inclined as much to 
 democracy as to any other popular idol. Like 
 one of those late Roman Emperors, in whose 
 private oratory there was a place for Isis and 
 a place for Abraham, his eclectic mind gave 
 a fragmentary worship to the idea of Freedom. 
 Personally, he was liberal in his views, though a 
 wave of conservative opinion had brought him to 
 the throne. But while he began to disassociate 
 his influence from the tyranny of his Ministers, 
 
 T 129 
 
130 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 he kept them in power. He attempted to realise 
 democratic projects by the aid of the repressers 
 of '48. He and his Government pulled in 
 different directions — the tension reassured him : 
 in that way he was sure of not going too far. 
 
 On the 15th August 1859, the Emperor pro- 
 claimed a general amnesty for all political offences. 
 Of the six thousand exiles of December, many 
 refused the Emperor's pardon. 
 
 " Si l'on n'est plus que mille, eh bien ! j'en suis. Si meme 
 lis ne sont plus que cent, je brave encor Sylla ! 
 S'il en demeure dix, je serai le dixieme 
 Et s'il n'en reste qu'un, je serai celui-la ! " 
 
 So sang Victor Hugo, and many took up the 
 echo. Others were dead in banishment, but 
 many returned. Nothing succeeds like success, 
 as we all know, and the empire appeared a great 
 success. One after the other, great names began 
 to slip from the ranks of the Liberals and to 
 appear on the horizon of the Court. Soon genius 
 became a frequent guest at Compiegne. The 
 Emperor's marriage had drawn Merimee into 
 his circle ; Sainte-Beuve, Nisard, Gautier, Emile 
 Augier followed suit. And the Empire, in 
 admitting these great men, was modified by 
 their influence, became eager to patronise art 
 and letters, to further the pursuits of Science. 
 The Emperor himself was a sort of a scholar, 
 
A MISSION TO PHCENICIA 131 
 
 a kind of an author, a hanger-on of Clio. 
 Hesitatingly, doubtfully, though he still clung 
 to his guides of yesterday, he began to 
 follow, with one step back for every two steps 
 forward, the brilliant phalanx that showed a 
 better way. 
 
 Curious, indulgent, Renan watched this new 
 departure with a sort of benign amusement, but 
 made no advances. He, at least, never changed 
 his political position. Liberal in 1848, Liberal 
 in 1851, he was no less Liberal in i860, when 
 Liberalism had become a sort of fashion. Yet, 
 when in the month of May i860, the Emperor 
 made a feeble advance to the man he had injured, 
 offered to send him on an archaeological mission 
 to Phoenicia, Renan immediately accepted. Some 
 of his old friends wondered. " The feud between 
 the Government and the intellect of France 
 was then so bitter that many persons of great 
 merit would not have accepted even a scientific 
 mission at its hands ; " so Sir M. Grant Duff 
 has well observed. Renan had no such scruple. 
 Henriette, moreover, urged him to undertake an 
 expedition which implied no political adherence 
 to the Government, no personal advancement, — 
 which took him from what still remained the 
 scene of his ambitions, merely to further the 
 gain of Science. And it was arranged that she 
 
132 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 should accompany him as secretary, as accountant, 
 as steward of his resources. 
 
 The arrangements for their departure were 
 not yet completed when the Druses fell on the 
 Christians of Mount Lebanon, and massacred 
 them in a Holy War. The Second Empire, how- 
 ever illiberal at home, was more than generous 
 in its foreign policy. Napoleon immediately 
 decided to protect the unfortunate Maronites. 
 The vessel which carried M. Renan and his sister 
 to Beyrouth was one of those which transported 
 a French division to Syria. Renan, in his candid 
 absorption in the ends of Science, appears to have 
 accepted the whole affair — massacres, Turkish 
 incapacity, French army partant pour la Syrte, 
 &c, — as providentially combined in the interests 
 of archaeology : " The presence of our soldiers 
 on the spot was a most favourable element in 
 my design. Thereby my excavations were 
 singularly simplified — they were made by the 
 soldiers. Thus my mission to Phoenicia took 
 that place in the Syrian Expedition, which the 
 French army, in its noble preoccupation with 
 the things of the mind, has ever loved to accord 
 to Science in her more distant ventures." 1 
 
 The blood of the Maronites was scarcely dry 
 on the sand when the Renans reached the Syrian 
 
 1 Mission de Phinicie, I^ re Livraison, p. 2. 
 
A MISSION TO PHCENICIA 133 
 
 shore. Thus they saw the East at once in the 
 squalor and horror of Moslem misrule, and in 
 all the glory of its past. They landed at Bey- 
 routh, and at once began their excavations at 
 Byblos. Ancient Phoenicia, as the reader may 
 remember, comprised that strip of Syrian coast 
 — some thirty miles wide at largest, but nearly 
 thrice as long — which runs between the Mediter- 
 ranean shore and the range of Lebanon. There 
 stand Azad and Marath, Tyre and Sidon, the 
 Byblos of Adonis — memorable names ! Ports, 
 whence the Canaanitish traders put forth to carry 
 cedarwood to Solomon, and purple from Tyre, 
 and, from Sidon, the famous wares of Artas the 
 glassmaker ; ports whence they sped to Greece, 
 Spain, Africa, Italy, founding Carthage, founding 
 Cadiz, building harbours and stations until they 
 made the Mediterranean a mere Phoenician lake. 
 In their boats, with their bales, these hardy 
 traders carried knowledge : but for their alphabet, 
 where were all our science? But in art these 
 English of the East were less happy. Colossal, 
 irregular, impressive, their strange dome of Amrit, 
 guarded by its lions, is almost their only master- 
 piece. For the best part, their monuments are 
 a half-barbaric reminiscence of Egypt or of 
 Greece, coarsely wrought, overloaded by plaques 
 of metal ornament. 
 
134 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 If the sarcophagi which the Renans unearthed 
 at Byblos, showed no happy marvel of design — if 
 they were but honourable examples of provincial 
 art roughly executed in the best materials, — at 
 least they afforded a singular pleasure to their 
 excavators. Brother and sister had never dreamed 
 of a life so free. Here they sat, on this beautiful 
 border of the Holy Land, commanding their little 
 camp, discovering the secret of antiquity. Care 
 and poverty had dogged their youth : for Ernest 
 the dull hours of the usher, or the dusty fatigues 
 of the sub-librarian ; for Henriette, exile and 
 dependence amid plain after plain of sand and 
 snow, endless forests of foreign pines. And now, 
 united, the great cities of Phoenicia lay at their 
 feet, and over the last blue mountain rim, Pales- 
 tine ! A new energy, a light of youth, animated 
 them both. Henriette, the recluse of the Val-de- 
 Grace, would spend ten hours at a stretch on 
 horseback, nor speak of fatigue. 
 
 The autumn in Syria is long and full of charm. 
 All the rocks of the gorges of Lebanon are 
 wreathed with cyclamen. The plains towards 
 Amrit are blue and red with flowers. From the 
 heights of the mountains, which rise here, tier 
 upon tier, in a quadruple range, the eye glances 
 across chasms and forests, towards a sea more 
 brilliant than the freshest blossoms. Cascades 
 
A MISSION TO PHOENICIA 135 
 
 and torrents, clear as crystal, cool as ice, leap 
 from their rocky sources, and dash down the sun- 
 baked mountain-side, filling the hot air with the 
 sparkle of their spray. A spectacle so extra- 
 ordinary forced itself upon the long slow gaze of 
 Renan. His unremarking eyes at last observed 
 the vision of natural beauty, absorbed it, retained 
 it. Syria completed the work begun by Italy : 
 Renan was henceforth to be one of the subtlest, 
 one of the profoundest painters of nature. Rousseau 
 himself has not more exquisite tints on his palette. 
 And, like Jean-Jacques, he reproduces less a land- 
 scape than his own dream of a landscape floating 
 in some pellucid haze of sentiment through which 
 reality takes on a prestige more magical, an air 
 of mystery and remoteness, peculiar less to the 
 landscape than the seer. 
 
 The climate, though beautiful, is unhealthy in 
 its brusque alternances of heat and cold. Some- 
 times sudden gusts of neuralgia, terrible, appalling 
 to witness, would sweep over Henriette Renan, 
 lay her prostrate for some hours, or some days, 
 and she would rise up again with unabated 
 courage and resume their hard, happy, adven- 
 turous life. Seated squarely on her horse, she 
 skirted the precipices of Lebanon, and never 
 paled. Rough fare, the huts of the mountain 
 for shelter, constant transitions from the burning 
 
136 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 sunshine to the sepulchral chill of the gorges in 
 shadow, were but as welcome episodes in a con- 
 tinual pleasure. At Tyre, the high pavilion she 
 occupied was rocked by the winds. The spec- 
 tacle of their little camp, lost in the desert, filled 
 her at night with a religious exaltation. 
 
 In January 1861, Madame Ernest Renan 
 came out to join them. Together they set out 
 in the spring for Palestine. Often at night, 
 their tent set under the shadow of Mount Carmel, 
 or by the deep hollow of the Lake of Galilee, 
 the travellers read the series of Pilgrims' Psalms, 
 which Renan was to recall a few months later 
 in writing the Life of fesus. 
 
 " For those provincial families the journey to 
 Jerusalem was a solemnity full of sweetness. 
 Psalm after psalm records the happiness of these 
 pilgrim households travelling together in the 
 spring time over hill and down dale, with the 
 sacred splendour of Jerusalem at the journey's 
 end. ' How happy are brethren who dwell to- 
 gether in amity ! ' . . . The last stage of all, 
 Ai'n-el-Harami^, is full of charm and melancholy. 
 Few impressions rival that of the traveller who 
 sets his camp there at nightfall. The valley 
 is narrow and sombre ; a dark water drips from 
 the walls of the rocks, pierced with tombs. It is, 
 I think, the * Vale of Tears ' — the ( gorge of 
 
A MISSION TO PHOENICIA 137 
 
 dripping waters/ which is celebrated in the ex- 
 quisite 83rd Psalm as one of the stations on 
 the way, and in which the tender sadness of 
 mediaeval mysticism saw an image of the life of 
 man. Early on the morrow the caravan will 
 reach Jerusalem. Even to-day the thought re- 
 animates the caravan, renders the evening short 
 and the travellers' slumber light." 
 
 Jerusalem, tragic, arid, barren, seemed then as 
 the law after the Gospel, as the letter after the % 
 spirit, and sharpened by contrast the souvenir of 
 Galilean grace. In this harsh environment, the 
 newness, the freshness, the divine originality of 
 the New Testament appear more apparent still. 
 Ever since his year of spiritual crisis Renan had 
 pondered in his heart a Life of Jesus, unlike any 
 yet written, which, while hiding nothing of the 
 textual errors and apocryphs of the Gospel as 
 we possess it, should set in high and clear relief 
 the divine character, the exquisite inventions in 
 moral sentiment of the Founder of Christianity. 
 Here, in the Holy Land, that great figure never 
 ceased upon his inner vision. No saint in his 
 cell, no Crusader, was ever more fervently haunted 
 by Christ Jesus than this unfrocked Churchman, 
 this sceptical archaeologist, busied with the details 
 of a scientific mission. In the desolate Galilee 
 of a Moslem rule, his mind's eye noted the 
 
138 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 flowery Paradise described by Josephus where 
 the walnut and the date palm grew together. 
 On the abandoned lake, with its one ruined 
 ferry-boat, he saw the sails of Andrew and 
 Peter, the prosperous fishermen of old. On the 
 little promontories, overgrown with tamarisk 
 and oleander, he followed the trace of the 
 very footsteps of the Son of Man. Far to 
 the north the ravines of Mount Hermon are 
 drawn in dazzling silver against the sky. The 
 horizon, at least, has not altered in these two 
 thousand years. 
 
 After the month of May the heat in Syria 
 becomes oppressive. Galilee, deforested, deserted, 
 is now so naked that the caravan reckons over- 
 night where it shall find a spot of shade for the 
 mid-day meal on the morrow. The journey 
 back to Beyrouth cost the travellers much 
 fatigue. Mme. Ernest Renan, enceinte, re- 
 turned to France in the course of July. Her 
 husband and sister-in-law would have done well 
 to accompany her. Almost every member of 
 the mission engaged under M. Renan in the 
 excavations had already fallen dangerously ill 
 with pestilential malaria. And the worst heat 
 of the summer was to come. But the sense of 
 scientific duty, always so strong in Renan, 
 which over and over again prompted him to a 
 
A MISSION TO PHOENICIA 139 
 
 course of action disastrous to his interests, urged 
 him to remain on the parched and feverish Syrian 
 coast in order to supervise the shipping of his 
 archaeological treasure, in order, also, to complete 
 his exploration of the upper range of Lebanon. 
 He meditated, even, an autumn excursion to 
 Cyprus. Henriette happier, she declared, than 
 ever she had been in her life, Henriette, satis- 
 fied to find herself still indispensable to her idol, 
 remained with him and braved — alas too 
 courageously ! — the exhalations of a Syrian 
 autumn. 
 
 The implacable sun of Beyrouth drove the 
 Renans to the hills. At Ghazir they found 
 green pastures, fresh snow from the mountains, 
 wholesome springs, and a little house with a 
 pergola. Here, in the utmost peace conceivable 
 on earth, Renan began his Life of Jesus. All 
 day long he sat in the cool shadow of his Syrian 
 home absorbed, intoxicated by that inner dream 
 which little by little took shape and lived before 
 his eyes. A New Testament, a Josephus, com- 
 prised his library ; but the book of the East 
 was open before him ; but the very past, familiar 
 through a hundred texts and inscriptions, rose 
 before him more real than the actual moment. 
 Thrown full length on his Syrian rug, his books 
 and papers scattered round him, he wrote hour 
 
HO LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 after hour in the fervour of a veritable inspiration. 
 Henriette was his perpetual confidant, as soon as 
 the page was written she copied it fair. When 
 at last the night fell, the clear, magnificent 
 Oriental night, brother and sister rose and 
 sought their terrace on the house roof. There 
 they would speak at last of the day's silent 
 work, and she would make her reflections, often 
 profound, always pregnant with that fine, moral 
 tact of which she had the secret. " Many of 
 them," her brother has said, " were to me as veri- 
 table revelations." 
 
 " This book," she would say, " I shall love. 
 Because we have done it together. And because 
 I like it ! " 
 
 Days of earnest thought, nights of dreaming 
 scarcely less fecund. When, in the first days 
 of September, the Renans were compelled to 
 return to Beyrouth the book was three parts 
 written, and Christ on the eve of the last 
 journey to Jerusalem. 
 
 Alas ! the soul and the body have not the 
 same requirements. An immense moral satis- 
 faction had not preserved the health of Henriette 
 Renan. The cruel neuralgia from which she 
 suffered was perhaps even aggravated by so intense 
 a nervous strain. Yet had the Cato started at 
 the date fixed, the sea winds and the air of home 
 
A MISSION TO PHOENICIA 141 
 
 might even yet have revived her. As chance 
 would have it, some ill-hap delayed the ship one 
 week. Made aware of this postponement, the 
 Renans started for Gebeil (Byblos), in order to 
 see to the shipping of two last sarcophagi, which 
 they had given up as untransportable. They 
 secured their spoil, and climbed the hill to find 
 shade and rest at Amschit, that Syrian village, 
 dear to Henriette, where they had spent together 
 the first few weeks of their Eastern sojourn. 
 Here, on the Tuesday, 17th September, Henriette 
 fell ill with a vague sort of intermittent fever, 
 accompanied by neuralgic pains. But she was 
 so accustomed to neuralgia ! She had often 
 seemed more violently ill. Even on the Wednes- 
 day, the surgeon of the Cato saw no reason for 
 anxiety. When Ernest Renan could be spared 
 from the wharves of Gebeil, he sat at her side, 
 she uncomplaining, he undisquieted, and continued 
 the work they had both so deep at heart. He 
 had reached the chapters of the Passion. But 
 on the Thursday he too fell ill with the same 
 mysterious disease, turn by turn mortal and 
 trivial, which seizes on the victim, and looses 
 him again, as a cat plays with a mouse. Un- 
 happily the surgeon of the Cato always arrived 
 when his patients were in their languid intervals 
 of remittance. He did not know the pernicious 
 
142 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 malaria of the Syrian coast. He foresaw no 
 serious consequences. But on Saturday morning 
 M. Renan, when he dragged himself from his 
 couch in the sitting-room to his sister's side, 
 meaning to work beside her at his Life of fesus, 
 was terrified by a new feature of the malady 
 — the heart appeared affected. He dispatched 
 a brief note to the surgeon of the Cato. He 
 had time to remark the Maronite peasants 
 passing his window on their way to church, and 
 in this foreign half-savage country, the familiar 
 sight filled him with a feeling of utter desolation 
 and helplessness which he has since recorded. 
 Then he himself fell down unconscious among 
 his scattered books and papers. 
 
 When, at nightfall, the French doctor arrived 
 at Amschit, he found brother and sister, both 
 apparently dead, laid out upon the carpet of 
 the little salon, watched over by Antoun, their 
 Syrian man-servant. The ship surgeon, dumb- 
 foundered by this strange neuralgia, apparently 
 of an irregular, fatal sort, retreated hastily to 
 Beyrouth in search of more experienced advice. 
 Later in the day the French commandant and 
 the French doctors, seriously alarmed, climbed 
 the steep road to Amschit. When they arrived, 
 the unconscious bodies of Ernest and Henriette 
 Renan had been transported from their rooms to 
 
A MISSION TO PHCENICIA 143 
 
 the large reception-room of Zakhia, their wealthy 
 Maronite host. There they lay, stretched out 
 on the floor, the family of the worthy Zakhia 
 grouped around them, wailing them as dead. It 
 was a scene of a poignant barbaric melancholy. 
 
 Henriette Renan never recovered consciousness. 
 She died on the Tuesday morning. Her brother 
 awoke from his long swoon about an hour before 
 she expired. But he awoke to a troubled dream 
 of things, clearly aware of nothing ; and Henri- 
 ette died without his hand in hers. For days 
 after he babbled of green fields, imagining that 
 he was resting w r ith his sister by the springs of 
 the river Adonis, under the great walnuts that 
 stand above the waterfall. She was seated 
 beside him in the deep grass ; he held to her 
 lips a cup of ice-cold water. When he stirred 
 in his dream it was to ask, " How is my sister ? " 
 They answered, " Very ill ! " He smiled, and 
 fell again to dreaming. When at last they said, 
 " She is dead," he barely understood. No 
 merciful silence was possible, for the Cato was 
 waiting in harbour, and so soon as the invalid 
 could bear the journey, he was put in a litter 
 and carried seaward. Henriette he left behind 
 him. She sleeps in the vault of Zakhia, under 
 the palms of Amschit ; distant, in death as in 
 life, from the Breton land she loved so well. 
 
144 LIFE OF ERNEST REN AN 
 
 As a dream within a dream, there remained 
 to haunt her brother the thought that Henriette 
 had been spirited away from him alive, buried 
 in the caverns of Lebanon while still in her living 
 trance. For the likeness of that swoon to the 
 last sleep filled him with fearful apprehensions, 
 and he had never looked on Henriette's dead 
 face. Even the presence of four French doctors 
 at her deathbed could not entirely reassure him. 
 And nearly twenty years after, in the Dream 
 of Leoline^ he speaks out this inner anguish : 
 " Ah, see, her eyes open ! Her long white hand 
 moves out of the coffin. Her face is pale as of 
 old, and her eyes swim in tears. Come, kiss me ! 
 Dear, I have so much to tell thee ! How many 
 years have passed since thy mortal fever. How 
 weary thou must be with the long journey from 
 thy grave. God knows that in all my joys 
 I have never ceased to long for thy presence ; 
 not one happy moment but I would have shared 
 it with thee ! Ah, white shadow, open thine 
 eyes, though it be for a quarter of an hour ; only 
 one quarter of an hour in which to weep with 
 thee, and expiate my faults towards thee, or 
 suffer thy pious reproaches. O, pierced heart, 
 how hast thou made me suffer ! For so many 
 hours, bitter and sweet, give me at least a glance." 
 
 There is no grief so terrible as to feel that, 
 
A MISSION TO PHOENICIA 145 
 
 however innocently, we have abandoned our dearest 
 in their hour of need. It is the grief of Peter. 
 Renan never forgot that his sister died alone. 
 For many years, she, at least, did not forsake 
 him ; for those whom we lose by death do not 
 quit us all at once. All the company of true 
 mourners may echo the words of Hippolytus, 
 //,s/£w pporeiag tfpotftfzffwv b^iXiag . . . kXvuv fih avbrjv, o^cc 
 8bv£ bpoov to tor. We feel an irresistible aegis above 
 us. An inner presence is more penetrating and 
 more intimate than we ever knew it, for the dead 
 speak to us now from within. Our continual 
 meditation on a vanished object recreates it in 
 ourselves. We grow like the dead we adore ; 
 their spirit finds a home in us, and appears to use 
 us and direct us at its will. But in the end our 
 natural personality reasserts itself ; only very few 
 souls are transformed into the image they recall. 
 Renan's character, so sensitive, so impressionable, 
 had none the less a ground-work of singular un- 
 modifiableness ; even the kindred spirit of Henriette, 
 so like his own, could not permanently change 
 that stubborn essence. . . . Time passes ; the 
 dead remain as dear ; but their influence per- 
 vades us less and less, shrinks gradually back to 
 its own centre, leaves us — as the fields are left on 
 the retiring of a flood — fertilized, no doubt, and 
 richer, but the same as before, land and not 
 
 K 
 
146 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 water, ourselves and not another, for the rest 
 of our time. . . . Even Love-in-Death cannot 
 create a new spirit within us. 
 
 So great, however, was the influence of Henriette, 
 that, for years afterwards, not only her brother 
 acted as she would have bid him act, but — far 
 rarer triumph of love ! — he thought as she would 
 have bid him think, in all seriousness, in all 
 tenderness, with a remote and noble elevation — 
 checking as they rose those impulses towards 
 irony, towards frivolity, towards scepticism, which 
 Henriette had not loved. 
 
PART III 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE COLLEGE OF FRANCE 
 ITH half his heart in the mysterious king- 
 
 * * dom of the dead, and himself still pallid 
 with the reflection of that unseen world, Renan 
 set himself to finish his Life of fesus — the book 
 which Henriette had loved, " because we wrote 
 it together." Never had the problems of religion 
 appeared so all-important in his eyes ; never had 
 he felt nearer to that infinite and eternal energy 
 which beats at the heart of things : One in All. 
 " The loss of my brave companion attached me 
 closer than ever to studies which had cost so 
 dear. ... I have looked Death in the face. 
 The pygmy cares which eat our lives away are 
 henceforth meaningless to me. I have brought 
 back from the threshold of the infinite a livelier 
 faith than I ever knew in the superior reality of 
 the world of the Ideal. It alone exists : the 
 physical world appears to exist. . . . The 
 older I grow, the dearer I have at heart the one 
 problem which ever keeps its profound signifi- 
 cance, its enchanting novelty. The Infinite sur- 
 
ISO LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 rounds us, overlaps us, and haunts us. Bubbles 
 on the surface of existence, we feel a mysterious 
 kinship with our Father the Abyss. God is 
 revealed, by no miracle, but in our hearts whence, 
 as St Paul has said, an unutterable moaning goes 
 up to Him without ceasing. And this sentiment 
 of our obscure relationship to the universe, of our 
 Divine descendance, graven in fire in every human 
 heart, is the source of all virtue, the reason we 
 love, and the one thing that makes our life worth 
 living. Jesus is, in my eyes, the greatest of men, 
 because He developed this dim feeling with an 
 unprecedented, an unsurpassable power. His 
 religion holds the secret of the future. . . . 
 To transport religion beyond the supernatural 
 — to separate the ever-triumphant cause of Faith 
 from the vain forlorn hope of the Miraculous, is to 
 render a service to them that believe. Religion 
 is necessary — as eternal as poetry or love : Re- 
 ligion will survive the destruction of all her 
 illusions. I say it with confidence : the day will 
 come when I shall have the sympathy of really 
 religious souls." 1 
 
 Henriette had said : write the Life of Jesus. 
 Henriette had also said : maintain your candi- 
 dature to the Chair of Hebrew and accept no 
 other chair. Behold, her least utterance had now 
 
 1 Questions Contemporaries 195 .. . 237 . . . 232 . . . 235. 
 
THE COLLEGE OF FRANCE 151 
 
 become oracular. As Renan himself wrote to the 
 Professors of the College of France : — " I saw an 
 imperative revelation in the counsel of a beloved 
 person who appeared to me haloed in the sacred 
 aureole of death." Ah, why was Henriette not by 
 his side ! She would have bid him keep distinct 
 these two noble ambitions — bid him speak of 
 Jesus in his book, analyse Semitic philology 
 at the College of France. But at bottom, for 
 all his airs of indecision, Renan burned to give 
 a reason for the faith that was in him. 
 
 At last, after nearly five years of silence, the 
 Minister of Public Instruction demanded the lists 
 from the College of France and the Academy of 
 Inscriptions. Renan's name headed either. And 
 a decree of the 1 ith January 1 862, proclaimed him 
 Professor of Hebrew at the College of France. 
 
 This election was passionately unpopular among 
 the Catholics, and for due cause : the Chair of 
 Hebrew being in fact a chair of Biblical criti- 
 cism as we have said. But it was also, oddly 
 enough, unpopular among the students of the 
 Latin Quarter, indignant that Renan, their Renan, 
 should have accepted office at the Emperor's 
 hands. Was he going to turn his coat? At 
 the mere idea they were all ready to shout with 
 Robert Browning — 
 
 " Just for a handful of silver he left us." 
 
152 LIFE OF ERNEST REN AN 
 
 It was clear there would be at his opening 
 lecture what the Latin Quarter loves to call a 
 Chahut. Renan's opinions were known. If the 
 Church was conspicuous by her absence, the 
 young Catholic party was there en masse to 
 avenge her. And the Liberal students were no 
 less suspicious and defiant. The University, not 
 wholly sympathetic to this unfrocked Seminarist of 
 supposed Radical opinions ; the world of fashion, 
 attracted by Renan's literary renown, helped to 
 throng the hall. The lecturer appeared, his head 
 in a dream, his mind full of Henriette, so cruelly 
 absent, of the Life of Jesus, of his old dreams at 
 last come true. He was barely aware of the various 
 causes of offence which he had given. He just 
 glanced at the amphitheatre crammed from floor 
 to ceiling — at the students, clinging in clusters 
 to the window ledges, shouting news of the 
 lecture to the crowd, black in the street. ... 
 I have heard it all described so vividly that it 
 seems to me I, too, was there ! 
 
 Then he began a parallel between the Semite 
 and the Aryan. Anti-semitism was not yet a 
 fashion ; there was nothing here to rail at. 
 The face of the audience fell : was it this they 
 had come out into the wilderness to hear ? 
 The lecturer continued — " The Political Idea 
 is Aryan. The French Revolution, for in- 
 
THE COLLEGE OF FRANCE 153 
 
 stance, may often have compromised Liberty, 
 but" . . . (Here the Latin Quarter saw its 
 opportunity.) 
 
 " Respect the Revolution, sir ! " thundered from 
 a hundred throats. A quarter of an hour later 
 an audacious comparison of King David to an 
 " energetic Captain of Adventure " threw a 
 bomb into the Catholic camp. By this time 
 the Liberal students were aware that the 
 lecturer was still their leader ; one and all 
 they became forthwith his clamorous partisans. 
 Their support alone rendered the delivery of 
 the lecture possible. 
 
 Was it well ? Better perhaps if, at the outset, 
 an unjust turbulence had drowned the orator's 
 voice. For one phrase in his speech — one 
 sentence which nowadays any Liberal Christian 
 would hear with tolerance, if not with approval 
 — falling just at that impassioned moment 
 on prejudiced ears, began a sequence of 
 injustice, a series of misunderstandings, which 
 were to make of the mild impartial scholar 
 the notorious martyr of the Empire, the demi- 
 god of a Republic he only half approved. 
 To this day, in his native place, Renan is 
 chiefly remembered as " a great Republican " 
 by those who have never read a line of his 
 writings. 
 
154 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 I can imagine Henriette's phantom mur- 
 muring — 
 
 " Ni cet exces d'honneur ni cette indignite ! n 
 
 This was not the future she had foreseen, 
 illustrious yet retired ; the life of a Le Nain de 
 Tillemont secluded in some park of Seine-et- 
 Oise, whose peaceful charmilles are not too far 
 from the libraries of Paris, whose lofty grey- 
 panelled chambers afford space and quiet for a 
 voluminous research. Such a life, irradiate with 
 the limpid light of Science, productive of labours 
 which should satisfy countless generations of 
 scholars, and never be profaned by the vulgarity 
 of fame, such a life she would approve. She 
 would have found something gross in the im- 
 mense celebrity which began, on that 21st of 
 February 1862, in the amphitheatre of the 
 College of France. 
 
 What a riot ! what a tumult ! Only here and 
 there we catch a word, half drowned in hisses 
 and acclamations. . . . " An incomparable Man, 
 whom some, struck by His exceptional mission, 
 call a God . . . victim of His ideal . . . deified 
 in His death . . . founded the Eternal Religion 
 of Humanity. . . . No man before Him had 
 reached so high a standard of perfection. . . . 
 For the time is come when ye shall worship 
 
THE COLLEGE OF FRANCE 155 
 
 Me no longer along this mountain nor at 
 Jerusalem, but in Spirit and in Truth." 1 
 
 St Paul did not disdain to say: "Jesus of 
 Nazareth, a Man sent from God among ye" 
 (Acts ii. 22). Bossuel, after him, wrote with- 
 out reproach of Christ as "a man of admirable 
 mildness." But Renan's " homme incomparable " 
 appeared the thrown gauntlet of the defiant 
 apostate. The Church was not slow to take it 
 up, nor the students to defend it ; the con- 
 fusion grew deafening. The lecture over, 
 Renan escaped by some back way to the 
 house of a friend, haunted by the dread of a 
 public ovation. The piece was played without 
 Hamlet ; the students, en masse, swarmed to the 
 Rue Madame, where the Renans lived, and (true 
 Frenchmen !) demanded, in default of their idol, a 
 glimpse of his mother. M. Egger, who was 
 calling at the time, harangued the crowd in 
 terms sufficiently vague to disguise from the 
 old lady (a devotee of Throne and Altar) 
 the full scandal of her son's success. He 
 need not have been at the pains. The dark, 
 witty old face had only its most benignant 
 smile for the turbulence of Ernest's riotous 
 champions. 
 
 The fact remained that M. Renan's opening 
 
 1 Melanges d'Histoire et de Voyages, p. 18. 
 
1 56 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 lecture had disturbed the cause of public order. 
 Beset by the Church, by the Empress, Napoleon 
 seized this excuse to suspend the young Professor 
 from his functions. And Renan continued his 
 lectures in his private study, still, nominally, 
 Professor at the College of France. But on 
 the 2nd of June 1864, on opening the morn- 
 ing paper, he saw his name. He was trans- 
 ferred from his chair at the College of France 
 to a post of sub-librarian at the Imperial Library. 
 The thing came on him as a thunder-clap. 
 And insult was added to the injury by an 
 official note, observing that this new appoint- 
 ment was more in accordance with the dignity 
 of a distinguished savant, " at present subject 
 to the anomaly of receiving pay for work 
 which he is not permitted to perform." Renan 
 had acquitted himself of his duty, exactly, if 
 in private. The fund of combativeness which 
 every man has at heart seethed within him. 
 He wrote to the minister, in a mood of ferocious 
 irony : Pecunia tua tecum sit He refused the 
 post of librarian, and maintained his right 
 to the title of Professor at the College of 
 France. 
 
 On the nth of June Renan was officially 
 destituted. He became one of the most popular 
 members of the Liberal Opposition. Already, 
 
THE COLLEGE OF FRANCE 157 
 
 in 1863, he had been invited to stand for Parlia- 
 ment. In March of that year he wrote to 
 Michele Amari. 1 
 
 " I am preparing my Life of fesus, which will 
 appear in about two months. I need not tell 
 you on what lines it is written. The partisans 
 of miracles will not be satisfied. I do not know 
 what will come of it all ! Between you and 
 me, I may say that if I should be deprived of 
 my chair at the College of France, it is probable 
 I may be elected as one of the Members for Paris. 
 I cannot say that I am in love with the idea. I 
 should have preferred the free and peaceable career 
 of Higher Education. But it is not my fault if 
 my feet are set on another road. And, if my 
 election take place, it would have a meaning 
 which would fill me with satisfaction ; to bring 
 about such a declaration, I am ready for many 
 sacrifices. All these things may be ! I am 
 playing a difficult game and I do not see the 
 upshot." 
 
 The Life of fesus appeared on the 23 rd of 
 June 1863. Before November, sixty thousand 
 copies of it were in circulation. No such success 
 had as yet issued from the printing presses of 
 the century. ... At such a moment, there was 
 something fitting in the destitution of Ernest 
 
 1 Carteggio di Michele Amari 2 vols., Turin, 1896. 
 
158 
 
 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 Renan. The professor had become the artist ; 
 the philologist, the man of letters ; the scholar, 
 the politician. Too much glory, too wide an 
 audience, ill befit the patient research of a 
 laboratory. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE LIFE OF JESUS 
 
 npHE Life of fesus is naturally the first of 
 Kenan's seven volumes on the Origins 
 of Christianity. Even more than its successors 
 it is a work, not of erudition, not of technical 
 exegesis, but of moral and psychological enquiry, 
 based on historical documents. Renan was cer- 
 tainly familiar with the curious mosaic of Le Nain 
 de Tillemont, he knew almost by heart the New 
 Testament, he had read and re-read the pages 
 of Josephus ; to this foundation, solid if restricted, 
 he added a rare archaeological capacity, an ac- 
 quaintance with the monuments, moneys, and 
 inscriptions of the first centuries of our era which, 
 of a surety, no other religious historian possesses ; 
 he was, moreover, a traveller, whom a year's 
 residence in Syria had accustomed to the horizons, 
 the races, and the character of the Holy Land : 
 the fresh impressions of his visit colour every 
 page ; but, above all, he was a psychologist, a 
 man who had once believed, who had felt the 
 pulse of his soul, with as much curiosity as 
 
 159 
 
i6o LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 anguish, during the long years in which that dear 
 belief expired : a man to whom, even after its 
 death, the impulse of Faith remained the holiest, 
 and the most interesting thing in the universe. 
 His rustic and religious origin enabled this man 
 of science to enter into the spirit of a credulous 
 country folk, and to analyse, without illusion, 
 without derision, the creative process of their 
 minds. The result is a master-piece. The 
 pure idyll of Galilee, hardly less sacred to Renan 
 than to the most fervent Churchman ; the Passion 
 of Jerusalem ; the religious East ; and philosophic 
 Greece, animating a Syrian people with the 
 spirit of the Gospel of St John ; the dogmatic 
 force and fervour of St Paul, supplying, as it were, 
 channels and imperishable aqueducts for the New 
 Source of Life which the rod of Jesus had set 
 welling; all the great concourse of saints, martyrs, 
 mystics, heretics, and charlatans who laboured 
 together blindly in a Cause superior to even the 
 noblest among them ; and the cruel consolidating 
 force of persecution ; and Nero, the Antichrist, 
 throwing into stronger relief the ideal perfec- 
 tion of Jesus : all this, grouped against a vast 
 Mediterranean background — Syria, Antioch, Alex- 
 andria, Athens, Rome — lives and glows before us 
 in the pages of Renan. 
 
 In the beginning there was a Life of unequalled 
 
THE LIFE OF CHRIST 161 
 
 perfection. The origins of Christianity begin with 
 the Life of Jesus. To write a Life of fesus has 
 been the fatality of modern theology, for the 
 hero of a biography can only be a man. The 
 Christ, who, at a given date, was born of Jewish 
 stock, in the obscure village of a distant Roman 
 protectorate ; who grew to manhood among 
 certain Syrian peasants, whose appearance, 
 education, and racial character he shared ; 
 who spoke an Aramean dialect, and never 
 knew Greek ; loses, by just so much as he 
 gains in historic precision, the vague glory of 
 universal Divinity. The theologian who would 
 write the life of Jesus should compose a hymn. 
 In such matters the Trisagion alone is really 
 orthodox. 
 
 So early as 1838, Salvador, and towards i860, 
 Bunsen, had published, in their different fashions, 
 material towards a history of the early Church. 
 In 1840, Littre's translation of Strauss's Life 
 of fesus acquainted the French public with the 
 speculations of Tubingen. More than to any 
 of these, Renan owed to Herder : Herder, 
 whose philosophy of history had helped to 
 mould his mind. That elegant philosopher, 
 Christian archaeologist, and philologist, fully 
 alive to the literary excellence of the text he 
 examines, — that man of feeling and ideas, in- 
 
 L 
 
1 62 LIFE OF ERNEST REN AN 
 
 fluenced by his age and largely influencing it, — 
 was a man after Renan's heart. He never under- 
 stood the austere and hard-headed rationalists of 
 the school of Tubingen, as deficient in tact and 
 measure as they are rich in knowledge. 
 
 Renan's debt to Tubingen has been exag- 
 gerated. The fault and the charm of his Life 
 of fesus is that he wrote it insufficiently pre- 
 pared. The charm — because its extraordinary 
 spontaneity makes the book a sort of fifth Gospel 
 — the gospel, if you will, according to Thomas 
 Didymus. The pages written on the mud floor 
 of a Syrian cottage, with Joseph and the Gospels 
 for their only sponsors, keep the freshness, the 
 life and the beauty of their original inspiration. 
 Renan's Life of fesus is the biography of a 
 divinity written by a worshipper still prostrate 
 before the dead body of his god, but convinced 
 there will be no resurrection. Its superiority 
 is its profound religious sentiment, its living, 
 vibrating atmosphere of the East, its sense of 
 the human personality, the life of Jesus. 
 
 Strauss, on the other hand, is a gnostic of 
 the nineteenth century. All that he touches 
 turns to allegory, myth, and symbol. His 
 Christ is an ^Eon — a glittering abstraction. The 
 aureole which the faith of the multitude has 
 lit around the face of Jesus blinds him to the 
 
THE LIFE OF CHRIST 163 
 
 features which it frames. His Saviour is a logical 
 deduction from prophecy. We wonder why the 
 first Christians lived hard, and died harder, for 
 love of so unreal a Messiah. There is no life 
 in these dead bones. The dogmatic man of 
 science has no sense of a thing so delicate, so 
 fluctuating, so spontaneous, so mysterious, as the 
 birth of a faith. 
 
 But only a German university can produce the 
 sum of labour necessary to collect, control, revise 
 and criticise the vast material of any given his- 
 tory. If, when he began his Life of fesus, Renan 
 had been better acquainted with the researches 
 of Strauss, Baur, Hilgenfeld, Reuss, Schwegler, 
 Ewald, Zeller, and other erudites, he would not 
 have taken a document of, we suppose, the end 
 of the first century for a contemporary narrative 
 of the life of Christ. A characteristic preference 
 for ideas over facts, an affinity for the man who 
 philosophises about events rather than for him 
 who simply records them, led Renan to lay the 
 greatest stress on the Gospel according to St 
 John. Later on he saw the error of his ways, 
 and, with the good faith he always showed, he 
 recast many passages of his original work : after 
 the thirteenth edition the difference is striking. 
 But something undecided, embarrassed, clings to 
 the work, which I consider inferior to at least 
 
1 64 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 three of the volumes which were to follow it — the 
 exquisite Apostles ', so humane and so tender in its 
 feeling of human brotherhood ; St Paul, a study 
 in sociology and in the psychology of geography ; 
 Antichrist, a magnificent historical painting. The 
 Life of fesus contains incomparable passages, but 
 the whole does not carry conviction. This Christ 
 is too Celtic, too German ; he is too much 
 like Ernest Renan. And the writer's attitude 
 is not clear. He is not a Catholic, so much is 
 evident since he denies the divinity of Christ ; 
 but he is also not a free-thinker, a disinterested 
 historical student ; for his Christ is more than 
 the founder of a great religion, he is something 
 quite apart from, quite above and beyond such 
 human sons of God as Moses, Mahomet, or 
 Buddha. Renan will none of them. " Christi- 
 anity," he declares, " has become almost the 
 synonym of religion ; all that is attempted out- 
 side its great and fertile tradition is doomed to 
 sterility. . . . Christ is the creator of the eternal 
 religion of humanity." This is limiting the 
 future. The divine essence has more than one 
 manifestation, and in the million years of man's 
 progress may reveal itself in many ways. On 
 the lips of an unbeliever, so absolute an affirma- 
 tion is more than incongruous — even a little 
 
THE LIFE OF CHRIST 165 
 
 exasperating. And occasionally Renan reminds 
 us of some inconsolable widower who, after the 
 stormiest married life, waxes eloquent of the 
 departed. If the marriage was so impossible, 
 why these tears ? But if the poor man be sincere, 
 he will not listen to you. 
 
 Renan was sincere, and in the things of the 
 heart there is no magic like sincerity. So heart- 
 felt, so hopeless, his pious unbelief took the world 
 by storm. For the world is full of men and 
 women who once believed, and who keep green 
 and strown with flowers the tomb of a dead ideal. 
 Here was a man who could speak the dumb 
 word in their hearts ; a man whose lips the 
 Eternal had touched with his fiery coal ; a man 
 who cried no more, as we all cry — d a domine, 
 nescio loquil Genius was in the book, and 
 sincerity, and a very tender reverence. As the 
 Empress said to Madame Cornu, in great surprise, 
 when at last she had read the maligned volume : 
 " It can do no harm to believers ; to unbelievers 
 it can only do good." 
 
 The most beautiful pages of the Life of fesus 
 open the succeeding volume, the Apostles, and 
 treat of the life-after-death of our Lord. We 
 doubt if there exist in any language more ex- 
 quisite pages of religious psychology. Here, 
 
i66 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 again, it is, from the historical point of view, un- 
 fortunate that Renan should have followed the 
 narrative according to St John. As was often 
 the case, the artist in him tempted the historian, 
 and the historian yielded. For the version of 
 St John is infinitely more pathetic, more probable, 
 more lovely than the versions of the synoptic 
 Gospels. And doubtless the narrative was in- 
 spired by an authentic oral tradition. But, in 
 a question of history, a scientific historian has 
 no right to choose a page, however beautiful, 
 of a later writer, in place of a prosaic narrative 
 copied from a lost recital possibly contemporary 
 with the event described. If Renan had been, 
 as single-mindedly as he believed the sole servant 
 of Truth, he would have chosen Mark or Luke 
 for his guide in this matter. 
 
 But if we may question Renan's judgment 
 in the criticism of his texts, we can only marvel 
 at the extraordinary ingenuity with which he 
 interprets them. With all the piety of the 
 Christian, with all the scruple of the man of 
 science, he gives an explanation of the Resur- 
 rection which leaves no least suspicion of fraud 
 to blur the aureole of our dearest saints, and yet 
 sets an event, which we cannot accept as super- 
 natural, in accordance with the normal laws of 
 
THE LIFE OF CHRIST 167 
 
 things. The vision of Mary Magdalene accom- 
 plished the necessary miracle — Christ had arisen. 
 " In these crises of the miraculous, it is easy 
 enough to see what another has seen. The one 
 merit is to see before the others, for those that 
 come after model their vision on the received 
 type. It is the peculiarity of fine organisa- 
 tions to see promptly, exactly, and in the true 
 line of things. The glory of the Resurrection 
 belongs to Mary Magdalene. After Jesus, she, 
 more than any other, laid the foundations of 
 Christianity. The shadow which her delicate senses 
 perceived — nay, created- — still shelters the world. 
 Queen and patroness of idealists, she knew, as 
 no other has known, how to affirm her own 
 ideal, and to force upon others the sacred vision 
 of her passionate soul. Her great woman's 
 assertion, ' He is risen ! 9 is the basis of the 
 faith of Humanity." 
 
 Beauty of the fabric, fragility of the foundation, 
 necessity of the consoling vision, fleeting illusion 
 of all things save the infinitely small which we 
 measure in the hollow of our hand ! And who 
 shall say which, in the essential is truest : Life 
 which is a dream, or the dream which may be 
 Life ? All here below is but a sign and a symbol, 
 the sun in the heavens no less than the phantom 
 
168 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 of desire. The symbols which serve to give a 
 form to the religious sentiment are incomplete 
 and transitory ; but a great truth inhabits them 
 and makes of the least of them the temple of an 
 hour. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY 
 
 CHRISTIANITY is not a simple faith ; it is 
 a profound theology, a tremendous organ- 
 isation. The Son of Man appeared, loved the 
 world and died, leaving a trail of light behind 
 him. His message is contained in the dis- 
 courses of Matthew, in the parables of Luke. 
 But a pure religion is too ethereal a thing to 
 subsist uncontaminate in the dense atmos- 
 phere of reality. The work of Jesus was taken 
 up and completed by a man of action. And 
 this is what Renan shows us in his volume on 
 St Paul. 
 
 His portrait of the Apostle is striking, life-like, 
 
 unexpected. For hitherto, in all the great images 
 
 which he loves to evoke from the recesses of the 
 
 past, Renan has sought some secret kinship with 
 
 his own soul. Here there is none ! St Paul is 
 
 scarce a saint, not at all a poet, a sage, a dreamer, 
 
 or a man of science. He was a hero of the 
 
 Active Life — a missionary and a conqueror, with 
 
 169 
 
170 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 a fierce, tender, proselytizing soul, not averse to 
 combat, often susceptible, sometimes jealous, 
 capable of rancour and aggression. For once 
 Renan has got outside himself. He calls up 
 before us the bizarre little Jew with his halting 
 speech, his incorrect and hurried eloquence, his 
 bent shoulders, his pale face with the large 
 features, his piercing eyes under their shaggy 
 eyebrows. The vision is so vivid that we scarce 
 have the heart to cavil at the insufficient tradi- 
 tion which is its only warrant : the same tradi- 
 tion maintains that St Paul was remarkable for 
 his personal beauty. 
 
 St Paul, as we know, was a Pharisee and a man 
 of some education. The fact that he spoke with 
 fluency a Greek dialect was all-important in the 
 propagation of Christianity, for Greek was the 
 chief language of the Mediterranean ports, and 
 a mere Hebrew missionary, confined to his own 
 tongue, would have been of scant influence with 
 the Gentiles. Paul, a Jew by birth, a Roman 
 citizen by hereditary right, a Greek by language, 
 was no less cosmopolitan than the world he 
 moved in — the brilliant, variegated, incoherent 
 world of Asia Minor : Splendid Antioch, " third 
 city of the globe," with its temples, baths, and 
 aqueducts, its wide streets bordered with stately 
 columns and statues ; immense Ephesus clamber- 
 
THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY 171 
 
 ing from the marshes up the sacred hills, with the 
 shrine of Diana in its midst, and all round the 
 clear horizons of the Asiatic plain ; Antioch, 
 Ephesus, Corinth, vast centres of wealth and 
 superstition, cities full of magicians and miners 
 and flute-players, of goldsmiths and courtezans, of 
 priests, rhetoricians, and novelists : such were the 
 unlikely cradles of the New Idea. Renan who, 
 in 1864, visited the whole area of the peregrin- 
 ations of St Paul, has fixed with the subtlest, 
 most vivid art, the very image of this vanished 
 world. 
 
 " Like Socialism now - a - days, Christianity 
 sprouted on what we call the corruption of 
 great cities." It was a movement of the hard- 
 pressed, intelligent, unlettered poor, who abounded 
 in the meaner suburbs of the Mediterranean 
 ports. 
 
 There the wandering Christian workman set up 
 his tent, there he sowed the good seed, and then 
 passed on. Like a travelling journeyman who 
 leaves behind him the trace of his opinion in 
 every wayside tavern where he has halted, in 
 every village where he has made friends, Paul, in 
 especial, wandered from place to place, tramping 
 over hill or down dale, coasting from port to port, 
 working for his bread, even while he set forth how 
 man does not live by bread alone. At Ephesus 
 
172 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 and Corinth, assisted by Aquila and Priscilla, he 
 set up, in some back street, a small shop for the 
 sale of the coarse Cilician canvas which it was his 
 trade to weave. In every town where he halted 
 he gained converts to the Faith. Christianity 
 was to spring in all her glory from these small 
 clusters of fervid, illiterate, primitive persons, 
 grouped, as a rule, round some virtuous well-to-do 
 widow, some spiritually - minded tradesman of 
 means. The Early Churches were narrow circles 
 of some dozen believers. " Probably all the con- 
 verts of St Paul did not number a thousand all 
 told." 
 
 Renan's rare knowledge of the social conditions 
 of antiquity on the Mediterranean shore has en- 
 abled him to reconstruct the double organization 
 which was to contain Christianity, even as the 
 hive and the wax contain the honey. The outer 
 framework, as we may say, was the compact 
 Orbis of the Roman Empire. One sole adminis- 
 tration governed all the countries visited by 
 the Apostles. Their propaganda would have 
 been impossible had Asia, Macedonia, Malta, 
 the cities of Greece and Italy, each been con- 
 stituted in separate and vivacious nationalities, 
 each with their own exclusive tradition, faith, and 
 speech. But the Pax Romana enveloped them 
 all in one monotony. A great dull well-being 
 
THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY 173 
 
 brooded over the vast Empire : the tedium of a 
 civilization which has attained its goal and has 
 nothing left to desire. 
 
 " If life consisted in amusing oneself by 
 order of the Law, in eating one's ration of daily 
 bread, in taking the regulation pleasure sadly 
 under the eye of one's chief, then the Roman 
 juris consults would have solved the problem of 
 human government." But a mortal coldness 
 breathed from this dismal prosperity : Rome 
 offered nothing to love ! Deep in man's heart 
 is the instinct of choice. The phalanstery, how- 
 ever comfortable, is not the home, nor the chance 
 desk-fellow the selected comrade. He longs 
 for the little coterie of chosen spirits, the guild 
 the confraternity, where he contributes, of his 
 own free will, to the welfare of his mates and 
 his own security. The sense of fellowship is 
 an instinct which must be allowed for ! In 
 the lowest circles of the Roman Empire men 
 met together in secret to satisfy this sacred 
 prompting. The Syrian, Greek, and Jewish 
 quarters were full of little illicit Collegia — Friendly 
 Societies, Mutual Aid Societies, Burial Societies 
 especially — condemned by the Government as 
 possible hot-beds of disaffection, but in reality 
 peaceful enough in their humble brotherhood. 
 The members were all of the poorest class : 
 
174 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 servants, porters, hucksters, old-clo , men, tinder 
 sellers and such like. Christianity immediately 
 illuminated the small Collegia. 
 
 And what was the ghetto but a larger, a 
 more complete Collegium ? A Collegium whose 
 life and centre was the Synagogue ? No gulf, 
 no apparent schism, as yet divided Christianity 
 from the Law and the prophets. The first 
 apostles sought their quarters in the ghetto. 
 There they awaited patiently the Sabbath day, 
 and then followed the crowding Israelites into 
 the square, plain structure which was less a 
 church than a school, a debating society. It 
 was the hospitable custom of Jewry to invite 
 the stranger within its gates to greet the brethren 
 with some discourse of edification. Paul and 
 the apostles found thus their opportunity. In 
 the Synagogue they preached the Gospel. In 
 the Synagogue they made their first converts. 
 In the Synagogue they aroused their earliest 
 persecutors. 
 
 For no people are (or were) so well instructed 
 as the Jews in the authentic dogma and tradition 
 of their own religion. Paul's audacious theories 
 roused a dozen eager voices, clamouring to con- 
 fute the heretic. Hence stonings, flagellations, 
 prison, exile. But hence also the instantaneous 
 bruiting abroad of Christian doctrine. The 
 
THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY 175 
 
 complicated ritual of Judaism was perhaps a 
 safeguard, it was certainly a barrier. It is 
 impossible to imagine the world accepting a 
 creed overcharged by so many observances. 
 Paul proclaimed : " The Letter kills, the Spirit 
 maketh alive." By declaring of no account the 
 distinctions between the clean and the unclean, 
 he admitted the Gentiles to the Faith, but he 
 outraged Judaism. In every religion there are 
 always more men ready to avenge a violated 
 ritual than to accept the new life of a free 
 spirit. Judaism, as a body, was lost to 
 Christianity. But in exchange it gained the 
 world. Instead of a sect of the ghetto, it 
 became the purest worship of the civilization it 
 renewed. 
 
 Therein was the merit of Paul. By his pas- 
 sionate affirmation of the broad freedom of 
 Christ he completed and secured the work of 
 Jesus. The history of his struggle at tre- 
 mendous odds ; the sunny, breezy, joyous 
 narration of his divine Odyssey ; the picture 
 of the social conditions under which he 
 laboured, is the subject of Renan's two volumes, 
 The Apostles y and St Paul. Seldom has the 
 master shown a science more solid, a profounder 
 sense of the secret roots of things, a more vivid 
 and brilliant vocation of their living image, 
 
176 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 than in this volume which, dealing with docu- 
 ments and facts beyond dispute, contains nothing 
 to grieve the liberal Christian, much to instruct 
 the student, and, more to rejoice the lover of 
 literature. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 POLITICS 
 
 NOT for a moment was Renan's weighty 
 mind thrown out of gear by the prodigious 
 success of the Life of fesus. He was aware that 
 an author's popularity is almost always the result 
 of a misunderstanding. He liked being liked, no 
 doubt, as much as St Augustine " loved to love." 
 Popularity was a pleasant episode. He would 
 not let it become an aim. 
 
 Had he continued the "Origins of Christianity" 
 in a crescendo of anti-clericalism, Renan would 
 have become the idol of the market-place. He 
 would have been to 1870 what Lamartine had 
 been to 1848: the vates, the philosopher, the 
 chosen guide. But the unity and the dignity 
 of Renan's life sprang from his sense of belonging 
 to a superior order vowed to superior duties : he 
 was the priest of Truth. Instead of contesting a 
 Parisian circonscription, he went to Asia Minor 
 with his wife and studied on the spot, as minutely 
 as he had studied the civilization of Palestine and 
 Syria, the local conditions into which were born 
 
 M 177 
 
178 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 the Christian churches. Then he came home and 
 continued the Origins of Christianity in a mood 
 of absolute abstraction from the passions of the 
 hour. 
 
 The Apostles appeared in 1866, St Paul in 
 1869. Renan looked up from his task at the 
 world about him, and saw that the soul of France 
 was disquieted within her. At heart he was still 
 a priest, a man set apart, elect, a member of a 
 moral aristocracy, — and therefore responsible for 
 the errors of his inferiors. To-day, as in 1843, 
 he thought : — 
 
 " A private life would be my happiness ; but 
 such a life appears to me tainted by selfishness. 
 I ought to be a priest ; for the priest is the de- 
 positary both of wisdom and good counsel ; the 
 man of study, the man of meditation, and yet a 
 very brother to his brethren." 1 
 
 Renan, so far at least, was no sceptic, no mere 
 dilettante indifferent to mankind. He had the 
 tenderest sense of fraternity, the most absolute 
 sense of the efficacy of the Ideal ; there was 
 balm in Gilead still ! If he believed it impossible, 
 and perhaps unnecessary, to admit the multitude 
 into the arcana of that temple wherein he was a 
 servant, he accepted none the less, and indeed 
 all the more, the claim which the ignorance 
 
 Lettres Intimes, p. 118. 
 
POLITICS 
 
 179 
 
 of the laity laid upon him in their hours of 
 perplexity and error. It is a mistake to say, 
 as I have heard it said, that Renan was an 
 ambitious man — that he desired to govern his 
 inferiors, and to impose the triumph of his own 
 ideas. But it is less of a mistake, I maintain, 
 than to imagine him, as the main public of 
 France imagines him, an idle dreamer in his 
 ivory tower. He was, in fact, a conscientious 
 leader of humanity, sometimes misguided, ever 
 willing to seek a better way. 
 
 France in 1869 had reached a high degree of 
 material prosperity. Napoleon III. had taught 
 the French how rich they were. But the seeing 
 eye could read the threat of disaster in the shifty 
 brilliance of the hour. All the roots of France 
 were exhausted in the production of one beauti- 
 ful, sterile orchid, — Paris. The provinces were 
 sapped, drained, lifeless ; neither country gentry, 
 nor county boards, nor local interests, supplied 
 the provincial with an existence of his own. As 
 France only bloomed in Paris, so Paris flowered 
 in the Court : a fast, frivolous, superficial, spend- 
 thrift Court of tinsel soldiers, of reckless beauties, 
 of brilliant authors : a world of little theatres and 
 universal exhibitions, of Baron Haussmanns and 
 Cora Pearls. It was clearly time that the order 
 of things should change. 
 
i8o LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 The General Election came round in May 
 1869. It was then that the Liberal Opposition 
 asked Renan to stand for Meaux. At some 
 sacrifice of time and fortune he consented. The 
 gods must have smiled to see Ernest Renan 
 go a-canvassing among the wealthy corn-growers, 
 the rich butter-merchants and cheese-mongers 
 of the plains of Brie. Brie, by nature of its 
 proximity to Paris, is Radical, anti-clerical, and 
 prosperous : it sells its wares to the Capital, and 
 takes, in exchange, some tint of Parisian ideas : 
 but it is a Radicalism fat with grass and grain, 
 fed to bursting with rich milk and the flesh of 
 kine : the Radicalism of the peasant landlord : 
 the most illiberal opinion of any party. 
 
 The vast plains were one shimmering ocean of 
 pale green, with last year's great ricks stranded 
 here and there, like ships, among the unbounded 
 corn, when Ernest Renan traversed them in the 
 spring of '69. What can he have said to the 
 influential voters who inhabit these solid farms ? 
 How they must have astonished each other, he 
 and they ? I can imagine a conversation some- 
 thing after this fashion : — 
 
 Farmer of Brie. — "Good morning, Mister. You 
 support the Liberal programme ? " 
 
 M. Renan. — " Yes, on the whole. . . . We 
 can indeed imagine a superior social order in 
 
POLITICS 
 
 181 
 
 which the individual would be remorselessly — 
 perhaps, indeed, willingly — sacrificed in order to 
 promote, in a few, the acquisition of some yet 
 undreamed-of good. But France appears irre- 
 vocably devoted to Liberty, to the happiness of 
 the mass, to a small, prosperous, somewhat vulgar, 
 affluence." 
 
 F. ofB. — " Well, well ! And you will vote for 
 the extension of the Board Schools ? " 
 
 M. Renan. — " Certainly ! If Science be the 
 chief good, what right have we to debar our 
 brother from it ? And yet, I own, I deplore 
 the abolition of the unlettered class, charming in 
 its rural simplicity, shrewd with a mother-wit of 
 its own, the faithful depositary of the ideas and 
 fancies of our remotest forefathers. The peasant, 
 the priest, and the noble are the only loveable 
 classes ! The Board Schools will replace the 
 peasant by a pretentious, ill-bred, self-made rustic, 
 infinitely more dangerous to Science, and probably 
 hopelessly unfitted for the sphere into which he is 
 born. The School Board will be the ruin of a 
 superior ideal. But let Justice be accomplished ! 
 Yes, yes, my friend, I shall vote for the School 
 Board." 
 
 F. of B. — (Does the man think me an ass ?) 
 " And the taxes ? At least, you are firm for 
 cutting down the taxes ? " 
 
1 82 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 M. Renan. — " In part. It is certain that, in the 
 whole cause of history, nothing has ever rendered 
 a government so unpopular as excessive taxation. 
 And yet ! a tax, rightly regarded, is a form 
 of disinterestedness, a way of participating in 
 the real life of the world. Our poor selfish aims 
 — all the criss-cross of rival activities which make 
 up the struggle for our daily bread, — are as nought 
 in the sight of the Eternal ! Our personal ambi- 
 tions, our thousand little strifes, successes, and 
 reverses are all, as we may say, consumed in 
 the wear and tear of the universe : every day 
 supplies the fuel of every day. But the little 
 fund of reserve force which makes the world 
 go round is the devotion which we willingly 
 give to an end outside ourselves, distilled, drop 
 by drop, from millions of selfish lives. Nothing 
 is so vain, so imbecile, as selfishness : beware of 
 selfishness ! Sometimes, I confess, I see the 
 future of earth as a planet of idiots, each basking 
 in his own particular ray, indifferent to all outside 
 his well-sunned limbs. Selfishness is the curse 
 of great material prosperity. And it may be 
 that, in this vast sunlit sheet of springing corn 
 before us, in all this panorama of grain and kine, 
 of earth and river, the one thing which really 
 exists is the tax which each yields of its increase 
 for the general weal of the nation." 
 
POLITICS 
 
 183 
 
 F. of B. — " Dang it, the man's gone daft ! 
 Good morning, Mister ! " 
 
 On one point, at least, M. Renan and his con- 
 stituency were as one. All his electioneering 
 bills bore in flaming letters — " No War. No 
 Revolution. A War would be as disastrous as 
 a Revolution." The Prussians may still have 
 read them on the village walls round Meaux. 
 And on this theme M. Renan was never too 
 eloquent to please his hearers. He had then, as 
 always, the most brilliant success as a speaker. 
 His wit, his astonishing naturalness, the originality 
 and the fundamental good sense of his paradoxes, 
 the charm of his manner, his air of enjoying the 
 ideas with which the occasion inspired him, made 
 him irresistible as an orator. And, at bottom, his 
 hearers and he were of a like opinion — at least as 
 to the prospect of war. Among the peasants of 
 Brie there reigned, in 1869, the most complete 
 indifference to military glory. They had a 
 certain honest respect for freedom, but at bottom 
 all that they asked was that the Prefet should 
 meddle as little as possible in their affairs, 
 that the taxes should be diminished, that the 
 term of military service — which took so many 
 strong young arms from the harvest — should be 
 shortened as much as possible. All that they 
 asked was to be left free to make their own for- 
 
1 84 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 tunes out of their own fields in their own way. 
 M. Renan looked in some wonder at these persons 
 incapable of a sacrifice, incapable of a general 
 idea. He found the farmer of Brie un etre borne. 
 He wondered at this thriving rustic, " content in his 
 gross and trivial comfort without a thought in his 
 head." M. Jules Simon used to say that, when asked 
 if he would vote with his party, M. Renan was wont 
 to muse, and to reply, at last :— Sometimes ! But 
 though he must have appeared an extraordinary 
 politician, Renan 's reputation was immense ; 
 probably his eccentricities were taken as the 
 hall mark of his genius. The Minister of the 
 Interior took great pains over this affair, and it 
 was not without a struggle that Ernest Renan 
 was defeated for the constituency of Meaux. 
 
 The tendency of the elections as a whole was 
 distinctly Liberal. The Empire itself at last, and 
 especially the Emperor, had absorbed a great deal 
 of the Liberal theory, and gave out as much 
 liberty, or thereabouts, as France at that moment 
 could assimilate without excess. L Empire Liberal 
 sought to repair its wrongs towards Ernest 
 Renan: already in the spring of 1870, there 
 was some talk of reinstating him in his Chair of 
 Hebrew at the College of France. True, the 
 affair was only completed under the Ministry 
 of Jules Simon, on the 17th November, after 
 
POLITICS 
 
 the fall of the Empire ; but the first steps 
 towards Renan's rehabilitation were taken six 
 months before that catastrophe. And, in fact, 
 Renan had accepted the Liberal Empire. It was 
 part of his theory that progress comes not by 
 leaps and bounds, but little by little : that out 
 of chaos comes misrule, and out of misrule 
 gradually a better order. He would have 
 accepted the chair of Quatremere as a Liberal 
 victory, infinitely more important than the defeat 
 of Meaux. 
 
 Much in the spirit of a Merovingian Bishop, — 
 who, unable to chase the barbarians from Gaul, 
 should set himself to civilize them, — Renan not 
 uncheerfully assumed the moral education of the 
 Empire. He had no doubt of its stability ; he 
 had touched as it were with his hands the wealth, 
 the solidity, the love of peace, of rural France. 
 The Government was certainly bad ; but a 
 system which encouraged the endowment of 
 research could surely not be wholly corrupt. 
 On the 8th of May 1870, seven and a half 
 millions of Frenchmen declared themselves 
 satisfied with LEmpire Liberal Brilliant and 
 hollow beyond example, France appeared destined 
 to show that a nation can flourish merely by the 
 excessive animation of its surface, as if a man, 
 having coughed up all his lungs, should live on 
 
1 86 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 by the extraordinary breathing power of his 
 skin. 
 
 Such health is deceptive. The Emperor him- 
 self was not deceived. The Empress said : unless 
 we have a war, my son will not come to the 
 throne. By a second act of high treason, by a 
 second Coup d'Etat, more culpable and more 
 disastrous even than the first, on the 19th July 
 1 870, the Emperor declared war against Germany. 
 Renan was at Tromsoe, in the far North of Nor- 
 way, in company with the Prince J6rome-Napol6on, 
 as innocent of apprehension as himself. " What 
 a crime, what a fit of stark, staring madness ! " he 
 wrote to Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff. 1 " I had 
 thought the danger of war waived for years, per- 
 haps for ever. . . . The greatest heartache of my 
 life followed the opening of that fatal telegram." 
 
 1 Sir M. G. Duff, Ernest Renan, p. 81. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE WAR RENAN AS PROPHET 
 
 T3 ENAN hastened home and joined his family 
 a t th e small house near S&vres, where he 
 was accustomed to spend the summer. From 
 the first he knew what to expect. A formidable 
 discipline, an organised force at the service of a 
 great idea, had come into contact with an in- 
 coherent mass of martial vanity and irresponsible 
 impulse. Electrified by the mere hallucination 
 of Napoleon's ghost, France was doomed to 
 defeat ; and, in his prophetic vision, Renan wept 
 her defeat in tears of blood, for she suffered it 
 at the hands of his ideal. 
 
 All his life he had dreamed of uniting 
 France and Germany. He saw them lead 
 the United States of Europe in the van of 
 civilization — the one passionately alive to all 
 that is generous, liberal, or lovely ; the other 
 proud in her hereditary strength of science and 
 authority. Together they might head the world ; 
 and now . . . ! 
 
 187 
 
1 88 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 Behold, the nation to which Renan owed all 
 that was best in him — the nation of Goethe, 
 Herder, Kant — revealed itself as a rout of 
 drunken troopers setting fire to Bazeilles ! The 
 brutal Bavarian, the plundering Swab, the 
 blustering Prussian, these were the teachers whom 
 he had ever held up as patterns of morality and 
 culture ! No man in France, we may fairly say, 
 suffered more in that hour than Ernest Renan ; 
 for the Franco-German war was to him as a 
 civil war, and he saw his two countries closed in 
 a murderous struggle. 
 
 Admirable in his freedom from party passion, 
 Renan never let go his hold on the general 
 relation of things. After Bazeilles, after Sedan, in 
 the midst of his cruel experience of the hard and 
 arbitrary spirit of Prussia, Renan still saw un- 
 obscured the ideal Germany which had formed 
 his mind. His country in flames, the Prussians 
 in sight of Paris, his own little house at S&vres 
 pillaged by his divinities, left him still convinced. 
 Behind this evident mass of drill-sergeants, 
 quarter-masters, heroes, and scoundrels — Goths 
 alike — there existed none the less a superior 
 order, an invisible senate of philosophers, men 
 of science, scholars, jurists (men of action also), 
 working together in the service of humanity. 
 These were really Germany ; and Germany being 
 
THE WAR— RENAN AS PROPHET 189 
 
 the most adequate expression of reason, would 
 listen to reason. 
 
 While the Prussians were taking up their 
 positions at Versailles and St Cloud, Renan sat 
 down and wrote to David Strauss an open letter 
 denouncing the war as a crime against civilization, 
 pleading against the annexation of Alsace-Lor- 
 raine as a blunder in history, for Germany has 
 need of France as an ally against the growing 
 strength of Russia. The letter is eloquent and 
 noble. All through it echoes that love of Europe 
 which was Renan's true patriotism, that dis- 
 interested devotion to the future of humanity 
 which is his peculiar glory. But, alas ! when 
 did prophet arrest the course of battle ? Strauss 
 chuckled in his beard, translated his ingenuous 
 correspondent's pamphlet, and sold it for the 
 profit of the Prussian ambulances ; whilst, on 
 the horizon, Germany wrote her answer in flames 
 by the arson of St Cloud. 
 
 If Renan's attitude was a failure abroad, at 
 home it was a scandal. Even his nearest friends 
 deplored the prophet's madness. An exasperated 
 patriotism contracted the nerves of France. It 
 was not precisely the moment to speak of the 
 chosen few, of that elite of reasonable humanity 
 the wide world over — " Neither Greek nor Bar- 
 barian, neither German or Latin " — who from an 
 
190 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 empyrean raised above the struggles of race 
 and country, should remain undivided in their 
 Olympian goodwill, 1 and direct the affairs of 
 mankind. A line in Goncourt's Journal, — re- 
 ported with the inevitable inexactitude resulting 
 from the incapacity of a Goncourt to comprehend 
 a Renan, yet undeniably precious — shows us 
 the completeness of the misunderstanding be- 
 tween the idealist philosopher and a defeated 
 nation : — 
 
 " Berthelot continued his distressing revelations. 
 When he had done, I exclaimed, 6 All is over ! 
 There is nothing left save to rear a generation 
 to avenge us ! ' — ' No ! no ! ' cried Renan, 
 starting up, with his face aflame. ' No ven- 
 geance ! Perish France, rather ! Perish the 
 idea of country ! Higher still is the Kingdom 
 of Duty and Reason ! ' — ' No ! no ! 9 yelled the 
 whole table, ' there is nothing above one's country 
 — nothing ! ' By this time Renan had left his 
 chair and was walking round and round the 
 table with his shambling gait, waving his little 
 arms in the air, and quoting aloud fragments 
 of Holy Scripture, as he muttered, ' That's the 
 essential ! " 2 
 
 Doubtless Isaiah appeared as odious, and no less 
 
 1 Lettre a David Strauss, Ref. Intellectuelle et Morale. 
 
 2 E. de Goncourt, Journal, 2nd serie, 1st volume, p. 28. 
 
THE WAR— REN AN AS PROPHET 191 
 
 grotesque, in the eyes of the Court of Jerusalem 
 on more than one occasion. 1 Was not the 
 reproach of old cast up against the prophets 
 that they, sons of Israel, were friends of the 
 Assyrian ? 
 
 What is a prophet but a popular spokesman 
 animated by the idea of God ; inspired by the 
 Spirit to protest against the dulness, the mean- 
 ness, the cruelty or the iniquity of the times? 
 Such, at least, and not mere visionaries and 
 soothsayers, were the seers of Israel. Such, on 
 his measure and degree, was Ernest Renan 
 during the one difficult and heartbreaking year 
 of the war. Exposed to the long agony of the 
 siege, unpopular, without credit in the eyes of 
 the violent factions which divided the country, 
 Renan continued to preach his message, and to 
 show the sacred hope of a future redeemed by 
 the humiliations of the present. Repulsed by 
 Germany, he sought to raise up France, to bind 
 her sores, and renew a right spirit within her. 
 Like his great forerunners, he called for a king 
 in Israel ; a king to impose on his people a new 
 discipline and a new ideal, to build their founda- 
 tions on wisdom, earnestness, submission, justice. 
 " Democracy has no discipline, and no moral 
 ideal to impose. Children, left to their own 
 
 1 For instance, Isaiah viii. 
 
192 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 devices, will not educate each other." 1 It may 
 be that the only fruitful discipline comes from 
 within, is not forced upon us from without, but 
 so thought no longer the ex-Democrat of 1848. 
 Germany still haunted him. He would fain have 
 reconstituted France in the image of her con- 
 queror, as a mighty kingdom, governed by a 
 strong provincial aristocracy, kept in respect by 
 the fear of the throne. " The victory of Germany 
 was the victory of the man who is full of rever- 
 ence, careful, attentive, methodical, over slapdash 
 and hap-hazard. ... It is the victory of Science 
 and Reason. But it is also the victory of the 
 feudal idea, the victory of the historic right of 
 kings." 
 
 Such was not the mind of the French. There 
 are two great tendencies in modern politics. 
 The first, ever more and more predominant, is 
 jealous above all of the greatest happiness of 
 the greatest number, preoccupied by the rights 
 of individuals and their liberty ; and such, for 
 a hundred years, has been the trend of Liberal 
 France. The second establishes a priori a 
 providential order, sacrifices hecatombs of indi- 
 viduals to the attainment of certain abstract aims, 
 and is content if the sweat of a multitude permit 
 the nobler lives of a chosen few, and so increase, 
 
 1 R4forme % &c, p. 66- 
 
THE WAR— RENAN AS PROPHET 193 
 
 little by little, the intellectual capital of the 
 race. Which of these twain is the true end of 
 humanity? We may not know. The obscure 
 soul of the universe finds, perchance, its expres- 
 sion in either. 
 
 At least it is certain that, on the morrow of 
 the war, Renan was convinced of the efficacy of 
 the aristocratic ideal. Full of fervour, he pre- 
 sented himself at the elections of 1871. He was 
 again rejected. He took his defeat to heart ; the 
 sense of his uselessness in the hour of need 
 appears to have overwhelmed him. His desperate 
 struggle with the impossible altered the natural 
 gentleness of his nature. Condemned to look on, 
 impotent, he beheld the most cruel of his fears 
 come true. The Prussians were still round Paris 
 when, on the 18th March, '71, the capital, de- 
 lirious with famine fever, broke out into the 
 Commune. The barricades were up in the 
 streets ; blood ran in rivers ; all the old mad 
 dreams and hopes and hallucinations of '48, all 
 the atrocity of excessive reprisals, all the endless 
 sequel of hate and wrong, rose, like bloody froth, 
 to the surface of the troubled nation. Renan's 
 heart broke then, I think. The lees of a harsh 
 disgust for life shrivelled the lips that hitherto 
 had only spoken golden words. Like Zachary, 
 he abandoned Juda and Israel ; both had betrayed 
 
 N 
 
194 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 him. He shook the dust of the city from his 
 feet ; he broke in twain his shepherd's staff ; and 
 the name of the staff was Fraternity. 
 
 Beside the Thing that Is, beside the real fact — 
 there exists the ideal fact, which ought to have 
 taken place, but did not — 
 
 " Look in my face — my name is Might-have-been." 
 
 Were I writing not a biography, but a study in 
 absolute psychology — were I writing for a public 
 which could not match an ideal truth with its 
 obvious irrefutable counterpart — it is here, I con- 
 fess, that I might place the end of Ernest Renan. 
 Something died in him then ; the Breton, I think. 
 It is sure that in his despair he would fain have 
 died altogether, knowing that it is sometimes well 
 that one man should perish to redeem the people. 
 "If ever I have wished to be a Senator, it was 
 chiefly because I saw there a fair occasion for a 
 violent death." Let us then imagine him, like 
 his own Antistius, a victim to the strife of the 
 ideal with base reality. In some Parisian street, 
 full of March sunshine, riddled with shot and 
 shell, behold him mounted on the great barricade 
 of beams and flagstones. With the light of the 
 Sacred Mount on his face, he delivers undismayed 
 the message of a free spirit. But hark, a brief 
 
THE WAR— RENAN AS PROPHET 195 
 
 explosion, a burst of flame and smoke ! Struck 
 at once in heart and head, slain by the splinter of 
 a Prussian obus, and by a stone thrown by the 
 people of Paris, the prophet falls. So might 
 have ended Ernest Renan. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE £LITE 
 
 T3UT Renan did not die. He merely took 
 the train for Versailles, a disenchanted 
 emigre of the Commune. It was the end of 
 April. The stately Park of Le Notre was at its 
 rarest, — a greenness in desolation, a hope in 
 abandonment, such as perchance the world con- 
 tains not elsewhere. All through the month 
 of May, M. Renan wandered to and fro under 
 the tender leaves of the stately alleys, beside the 
 straight waters full of flowering weeds, where the 
 gummy scent of the poplar is fresh on the air. 
 There are few lonelier spots than may be dis- 
 covered in that forsaken pleasure ground : Renan 
 made it his habitual phrontisterion. Deprived of 
 his books, separated from his work, he mused 
 on the melancholy of human destiny. The old 
 thoughts that, thirty years ago, he had revolved 
 in endless meditations under the limes of Issy, 
 visited him again. Fragments of Herder and 
 
 Hegel and Malebranche rose to his lips. Twas 
 
 196 
 
THE &LITE 
 
 197 
 
 an endless conversation between the different 
 lobes of his brain. An echo of this long lonely 
 soliloquy has been preserved to us in the Philoso- 
 phic Dialogues. 
 
 We appreciate the violence of a storm by the 
 ravage which it leaves behind it. Compare this 
 book with St Paul or The Apostles \ and you have 
 the measure of Renan's profound and embittered 
 disappointment - — a disappointment which em- 
 braced not his own country only but his enemy's, 
 and the two main conceptions of human society ; 
 since the peaceful democracy of France appeared 
 a Commune unchained, shooting its hostages ; 
 while the military aristocracy of Germany was 
 revealed as a " handful of aristocrats, urging the 
 placable populations to the slaughter." Neither 
 these savage iconoclasts, nor those arrogant 
 uhlans full of oaths, were fit to be the instru- 
 ments of the Ideal. What was the future of 
 society? How should the kingdom of God be 
 brought to pass ? 
 
 Like Boethius, composing in prison his Con- 
 solations of Philosophy, amid the ruins of his 
 world ; like Condorcet, writing his Progress of 
 the Human Mind, in hiding during the Reign 
 of Terror ; Renan, from his avenue of Versailles, 
 with Paris flaming on the horizon, sent forth 
 his soul to seek a solution of this apparent 
 
198 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 anarchy of things. His Philosophic Dialogues 
 show a change of attitude rather than a change 
 of mind — few of us change much at bottom after 
 five-and-twenty. His old ideas still guide him : — 
 
 1. God does not proceed by special provi- 
 dences. 
 
 2. The universe fulfils, unconscious, a divine 
 destiny with which, from the beginning, it was 
 big. 
 
 3. One day, God, as yet inarticulate, shall come 
 into conscious being. 
 
 4. Every disinterested effort makes for the 
 little residue of excellence which, for ever ac- 
 cumulating, goes to shape the Divine Idea. 
 
 To these leading themes he adds two pre- 
 dominant motifs^ not new in his philosophy, but 
 developed out of all recognition. They are : — 
 
 5. The theory of the elect ; and 
 
 6. The suggestion of Conditional Immortality ; 
 both of them, as a fact, an ingenious application 
 of the Evolutionist Theory : the Survival of 
 the Fittest. 
 
 In sight of the magnificent arson of Paris, 
 Renan assumed it improbable that the Kingdom 
 of God would arrive by Democracy. In a 
 mood of bitter reaction he reiterates with em- 
 phasis a conviction which long had lain at the 
 back of his mind, namely, that the masses do 
 
THE ELITE 
 
 not count, are a mere bulk of raw material out 
 of which, drop by drop, the essence is extracted 
 — the rare essence, the one thing needful, which, 
 whether as Truth, Beauty, Self-sacrifice, or Genius, 
 goes to make the Ideal. Wherefore, then, cum- 
 ber ourselves with the education of the masses ? 
 Let them think as they please — if they think. 
 What matter the opinions of millions of fools? 
 Why trouble with difficult speculations the un- 
 developed brains which were not made to hold 
 them ? Is not the average man ephemeral as the 
 May fly, here to-day, gone to-morrow without a 
 trace, wholly eliminated from the Universe? 
 Such as these are not born to know, are not born 
 to have power, are not born to govern. But, 
 alas, they are born to transgress, to revolt, born 
 to immolate the Higher to the Lower, and 
 continually to crucify their Redeemer. If not 
 for their own sake, then for ours, and for the 
 dim-descried and distant goal of things, let us 
 put the masses within harness and drive them 
 whither we will, well within bounds, kept under a 
 yoke of gold and iron ! 
 
 The peculiar pride of the priest rings in these 
 theories, and still more in what follows, sinister 
 with odd reminiscences of Inquisition racks and 
 stakes. In an extraordinary symbol Renan 
 imagines that the advance of Chemistry and 
 
200 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 the arts of war may one day place in the 
 hands of a superior order means, hitherto un- 
 imagined, of mastering the many. Plato also 
 had dreamed of the Tyrant - Sage, the man 
 who should unite political with philosophic 
 authority. 
 
 " Unless those who govern States be serious 
 philosophers the perfect State will never see the 
 light," runs the theme of the Republic. " Author- 
 ity must be confided to those who think little of 
 authority, to men of science and philosophers 
 pursuing a more than mortal aim." And the 
 Athenian had already propounded a system of 
 social selection by which the most gifted, most 
 temperate, strongest and wisest of a nation should 
 be raised from the body of the people into a 
 superior caste, entrusted with supreme power. 
 ... The outburst of anarchy, of simple instincts, 
 which defaced the end of the Franco-Prussian 
 war, revealed how little power over a people 
 has the small class of free, enlightened spirits. 
 Renan looked on in a melancholy too deep for 
 tears ; and he too murmured — " Instinct would 
 play the tyrant ; we must find a stronger tyrant 
 to put Instinct in chains." So he came to dream 
 of his caste of Tyrant-Sages, having at their 
 disposal an authentic Hell, " not without the 
 limits of biology," the product of, as yet, un- 
 
THE ELITE 
 
 20I 
 
 dreamed-of discoveries in Chemistry and Balistic 
 Science. The philosopher then would not refute 
 the barbarian, but annihilate him on the first 
 threat of insurrection. Against such authority, 
 after one or two unfortunate attempts, there 
 could be no possibility of rebellion. An 61ite 
 of intelligent beings would govern the world 
 for good ; and the whole force of Humanity, 
 concentrated in a syndicate of demi-gods, would 
 hasten the advent of perfect Reason. Sombre 
 imaginings, unworthy of that liberal spirit ! 
 How should the world be saved by a false 
 principle ? Perish even the tyranny of the best ! 
 But the Reign of Terror of the Commune had 
 jangled out of tune the sweet bells of Renan's 
 harmony. For one moment of discord, he sought 
 to meet injustice with its own arms and to attain 
 a noble end by infamous means. The conception, 
 harsh, false, profound, was worthy of the echo it 
 found in the most singular brain of our time. 
 The Prussian, Nietzsche, read of M. Renan's 
 Dcevas and dreamed of the Uebermensch, of the 
 super-human master whose motto, worthy of 
 Prussia, reads : — Might is Right. 
 
 As for us, we will hold rather (with Emerson) 
 that the demi-gods must go ere God shall appear. 
 Let us diffuse our light rather than concentre its 
 life-giving rays. . . . Reflect, M. Renan, in what 
 
202 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 peril you place the great age-long structures of 
 Truth, Beauty, Wisdom, Civilization, by giving 
 them too narrow a base. . . . Once I was talking 
 to an eminent anarchist, a being kind and wise as 
 M. Renan's Dcevas : — 
 
 " We object to moderate fortunes," said he : 
 " We admit millionaires. Our ideal would be the 
 concentration of the wealth of the nation in a 
 dozen pockets. . . . There would be only a dozen 
 heads to fall." . . . 
 
 And ere now the Titans have fallen. The 
 Tyrant-Sage might fall ! Suppose that by some 
 deep-plotted combination the mass should arise 
 and murder the demi-gods in their sleep ! 
 Suppose that — owing, perhaps, to an imperfect 
 sterilization of their instruments of torture — 
 an epidemic should prevail among the Dcevas ? 
 Science, Truth, Power, Civilization would dis- 
 appear at one fell swoop ! No, dream for dream, 
 play for play, give us the pretty chimaera of '48 : 
 Let us ennoble the barbarians ! 
 
 Meanwhile, dreaming not only of Hell but 
 of Heaven, the sad philosopher tried to invent 
 a less redoubtable conpensation for Virtue and 
 Wisdom. They do not meet their reward on 
 earth. Lo, their homes are burned and pillaged, 
 a cruel enemy slays their sons, and a brother 
 arises to stab them from behind ! Yet in sinu 
 
THE ELITE 
 
 203 
 
 meo est haec spes reposita ; the just shall not 
 perish ! The Elect shall see God ! Those who 
 have contributed to the fund of the Universe 
 their atom of disinterested thought or feeling 
 shall receive, in exchange for the imperishable 
 spark which they emit, a part in the eternity 
 of the World-Soul. Eye hath not seen, tongue 
 may not tell, how that due return shall be 
 rendered unto them. But they shall be a part 
 of the consciousness of the Over-Soul. And when 
 the Divine shall become at last all-perfect and 
 all-powerful, every particle of that unimaginable 
 Being shall thrill, irradiate with life at once 
 separate and blended, at once individual and 
 general, at once a Soul and God. 
 
PART IV 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE ANTICHRIST 
 
 IN this crisis of his life, Renan returned to 
 his work with new ardour, disgusted with 
 politics. The professional Discourager's is a 
 melancholy business, and it is sad to be in 
 the right against the illusions of one's country. 
 Renan had tried to point out the reasons for 
 the superiority of Prussia ; he had tried to make 
 his country accept a discipline and an ideal. He 
 had worn, as it were, on his shoulders the yoke of 
 Jeremiah ; 1 he had sat on the temple-steps and 
 cried to the people ; but they had not listened. 
 The task of his own life, after all, was the quest 
 of Truth. Let Martha be busied with appearances : 
 one thing alone is needful ; and they who choose 
 the better part sit in long contemplation at the 
 feet of the Eternal Realities. 
 
 1 See a remarkable conversation recorded in Goncourfs Journal 
 under the date 18 April 1871. Renan says, in substance — " I 
 am disgusted with the lack of courage of the Deputies of Paris. 
 They should parade the streets and harangue the people group 
 by group. If I had been elected I would have done so — had I 
 worn on my shoulders the yoke of Jeremiah." 
 
 207 
 
208 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 The German invasion, with its terrible sequels, 
 had proved to our sage that brute force is still, 
 alas, the mistress of the material world, leading 
 it whither she listeth ; that, in the conduct of 
 events, the enlightened portion of humanity — 
 the disciples of reason — have little influence, 
 scant importance, and no true cohesion among 
 themselves. A Mommsen, and a Strauss, and a 
 Wagner, had each in turn revealed the soul of a 
 Prussian corporal, and a view of practical politics 
 quite unmodified by their proficiency in History, 
 Philosophy, or Art. Europe was not yet in the 
 hands of an international Elite. Renan sighed 
 at the narrowness of broad minds, went into his 
 study, and turned to the Past, since the Present 
 would none of him. 
 
 His own mind was the broadest of his age, and 
 therefore the least passionate. He was incapable 
 of taking a side, accepting a limit to the laws 
 of reason. If Truth spoke from the mouth of 
 an opponent, he was eager with his unqualified 
 assent. In his rare affirmations he never forgot 
 that things have always their unseen side, which 
 may possibly contradict all that we should predi- 
 cate from those surfaces within our range of 
 vision. For the human eye — and the mind's 
 eye also — is so constructed that it cannot see 
 every face of an object at the same time. Renan, 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 209 
 
 however, saw them so immediately one after the 
 other, as in a series of rapid dissolving views, that 
 his vision of things was never simple, but blended, 
 as it were, from a set of contraries. No aspect of 
 Truth engrossed him so entirely as to exclude 
 an instinctive divination of its opposite. A sort 
 of contranitency, — if we may use the word 
 — an elastic reaction against pressure, which 
 became the main quality of his mind, assured 
 him that the truth of one thing does not 
 necessarily establish the falsehood of its apparent 
 negation. The air through which we all see 
 the world is in fact a sort of vivid prism, iri- 
 descent, opalescent, only habit has dulled our 
 sense of it. But Renan kept in his mind's eye 
 unimpaired that intellectual iridescence which 
 illuminates the inner vision. The truth of his 
 most considered assertions is qualified with subtle 
 reservations. And the unity of his mind, excep- 
 tionally sincere and veracious, is made of a 
 thousand diversities in fusion, as a painter mixes 
 his white from a medley of many colours. 
 
 Hence inherent contradictions : a love of giv- 
 ing himself the lie. Hence many a disconcerting 
 strange predella painted underneath his sacred 
 pictures. In no book is this so marked as in 
 the book of these years : The Antichrist. He 
 cannot contrast the terrible hieratic Christ of 
 
 O 
 
2io LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 the Apocalypse with the tender Elder Brother 
 of the Gospel stories, but he exclaims : " Who 
 knows ? The image of the Gospel may be false. 
 Jesus may have been the centre of a group more 
 pedantic, more scholastic, nearer to the Scribes 
 and Pharisees than the Evangelists would have 
 us think." He cannot consider the obscurity 
 which envelops the end of St Paul without re- 
 flecting that the convert may be converted more 
 than once : the disenchanted saint may have 
 passed over to the creed of Ecclesiastes and the 
 Sceptics. Convinced that he had given his life 
 for a dream, Paul may have wandered despair- 
 ing, resigned, on some Iberian shore, aware of 
 
 the nothingness of life Then, in a 
 
 twinkling, the ironic little transformation scene 
 flashes out of sight, and leaves us face to face 
 with a soberer vision of the Past. 
 
 None of these brief glimpses into the interior 
 of a thinker's mind are so cruel as the sacrilegious 
 page wherein Renan ascribes to Nero, tearing 
 their last veils from the Virgin Martyrs in the 
 arena, the invention of a new order of beauty : 
 the supreme grace of Christian modesty. Such 
 pages bear too clear the disfiguring hall-mark 
 of the dilettante. In fact Renan, after 1871, 
 retraversed more seriously the crisis which had 
 menaced his moral health after the disasters of 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 211 
 
 1848. A second journey to Italy in 1875 led 
 him again to the feet of his old enchantress, 
 visible beauty — again he heard her whisper — 
 
 " Flede ramos, arbor alta^ 
 Tensa laxa viscera^ 
 Et lentescat rigor tile 
 Quem dedit nativitas? 
 
 The fourth volume of the Origins of Chris- 
 tianity is in some sense the masterpiece of the 
 series. It is the record of the most memorable 
 struggle between the hostile ideals of moral 
 and material perfection, written at a time when 
 that same struggle was a constant preoccupa- 
 tion of the author's spirit. In his profound 
 disappointment with Life there were moments 
 when Art, and Art only, seemed precious and 
 imperishable in Renan's eyes ; when the spiritual 
 enthusiasm of arid Palestine appeared, after all, 
 a poor thing to him compared with the divine 
 and innocent grace of Attic beauty. He had 
 given his life to the Holy Land, to the worship 
 of holiness ; there were hours when he half re- 
 gretted that he had not offered it to Hellas. 
 There are hours in most lives, perhaps, when 
 that which creates and represents appears more 
 satisfying, more positive, than that which suggests 
 and inspires ; when the frieze of the Parthenon 
 
212 LIFE OF ERNEST REN AN 
 
 strikes us as more real than the shadow of the 
 Cross on Calvary. And yet the Galilean conquers. 
 
 In the first century of Christianity, its history 
 shifts gradually from Asia Minor to imperial 
 Rome. Two Romes were soon in presence. St 
 Paul in prison was weaving, no longer the coarse 
 Cilician tissue of his loom, but the spiritual 
 fabric of the future, while Nero, the circus rider, 
 the aesthetic athlete, worshipped the art and the 
 splendour of the decadent Greeks. How Renan 
 makes us see them both : the prophet, illumin- 
 ated by suffering ; and Nero, " the poor young 
 man," whose deplorable taste in Art had so 
 unfortunate an effect on his morals ; a mere 
 Tenorino devoured by vanity, not wholly bad 
 but wholly artificial, debased, of irritable nerves- — 
 and entrusted with the government of a world. 
 No less vivid are the portraits of Titus and 
 Vespasian : serious military men, a little pro- 
 vincial in tone and therefore all the more en- 
 slaved by the elderly graces of the aristocratic 
 Berenice. 
 
 For life, brilliance, irony, force, this volume is 
 unmatched. But we miss the moral charm, the 
 rare deep fraternal kindness of St Paul and 
 the Apostles. 
 
 " Perhaps our race alone 1 is capable of re- 
 
 1 The Antichrist, p. 102, 
 
THE ANTICHRIST 213 
 
 alising virtue without faith, of blending hope and 
 doubt inextricably together. An hour strikes 
 in the life of European men of genius when 
 they agree with Epicurus. . . . Whilst continu- 
 ing their task with ardour, they feel a chill dis- 
 relish for life creep over them. Victorious, they 
 wonder whether the cause for which they fought 
 were worth so many sacrifices, and, whilst con- 
 tinuing to push the battle, many of them admit 
 that wisdom begins on the day when they are 
 content to contemplate Nature and enjoy her. 
 There is, perhaps, scarce one self-sacrificing 
 person, priest or nun, who, at fifty, has not 
 deplored a vow which they continue to observe. 
 A spice of scepticism appears to us integral in good 
 breeding. We like to hear the just man say : 
 1 Virtue, thou art but a name ! ' The essential 
 quality of distinction is this faculty of soaring 
 up and dominating our own beliefs, of rising 
 superior to the cause for which we are content to 
 give our lives, of smiling at our own most stringent 
 effort. And we love our heroes the better when 
 we watch them sink a moment by the road- 
 side, aware of the vanity of absolute convic- 
 tions." 
 
 What a disenchantment rings in these accents 
 of crystal and silver ! It is well, indeed, that 
 advancing years should take from us something of 
 
214 
 
 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 the substance of our personality — that we should 
 grow wider, fainter, and, as it were, diaphanous : 
 mere cobwebs to catch the grace of Heaven. 
 But such a diminution of fibre as Renan shows 
 us at this moment is nothing less than a moral 
 malady. Let us not hold victory too cheap ! 
 Our heroes do well to be victorious, for they 
 continue to live in their triumph ; their dead 
 hands mould and modify us from the other 
 side the grave ; their effort has shaped our future. 
 And influence is a sort of immortality. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY: 
 THE PHILOSOPHERS 
 
 ' I A HE incapacity to affirm does not imply the 
 
 incapacity to choose and resolve. The 
 
 least consistent in theory, in practice Renan was 
 
 the most persistent of men. He followed his 
 
 meandering paths to the very goal He was 
 
 willing to admit that all is vanity ; but he 
 
 acted as though nothing were so important as the 
 
 finishing of the task he had found to his hand. 
 
 His scepticism never paralyzed the continuity 
 
 of his effort : a hermetic compartment separated 
 
 his intelligence and his moral self. 
 
 Nil expedit . . . Laboremus I Our task is 
 
 of no importance, yet give us, O Lord, our 
 
 daily task ! Vanity of Vanities ! But let us 
 
 finish the fifth and sixth volumes of the Origins 
 
 of Christianity ! . . . Without a lapse, without a 
 
 pause, this solid and inveterate worker brought 
 
 the considerable sequence to a close. As we 
 
 have said, this great piece of history is also, 
 
 in some sort, an autobiography. The Anti- 
 cs 
 
216 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 christ reflects Renan's discouragement, his dilet- 
 tantism. The Christian Church and Marcus 
 Aurelius show us a Renan reconciled with 
 democracy, confident in the gradual ascent of 
 man, aware that the greatest cataclysms do not 
 really interrupt the imperceptible progress of the 
 world. 
 
 Truths had a knack of flashing their contraries 
 into the eyes of our philosopher. In the Philosophic 
 Dialogues he had elaborated his doctrine of the 
 Mite, of a world saved by the tyranny of a privileged 
 circle of adepts. And so, in the last volumes 
 of the Origins he shows us the peril of an aristo- 
 cracy of science, all the danger and the sterility of 
 the oligarchic theory. For, at one moment, a 
 chimerical, intellectual syndicate attempted to 
 govern Christianity : the Church was only saved 
 by breaking the yoke of the Gnostics. Rome and 
 the world were entrusted, at one moment, to the 
 rule of a philosopher and a saint : and Renan shows 
 us the intimate miseries of the reign of a Marcus 
 Aurelius. That wise emperor only succeeded 
 in giving a veneer of hypocrisy to the evil forces 
 which raged around him, and which he refused to 
 recognise. May it not be that Stoicism and Gnos- 
 ticism perished for lack of a public? That antiquity 
 was misguided on seeking to specialise Truth 
 and Virtue, in neglecting the education of the 
 
THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY 217 
 
 lower classes ! " I speak for one in a thousand," 
 said Basilides ; " the rest are dogs and swine." . . . 
 " Suffer the little children to come unto me," said 
 He who spake through the mouths of babes 
 and sucklings. May it not be that the brain 
 can not work without the pulse of the heart, that 
 Wisdom cannot be nourished without the warm 
 current of a live fraternity ? 
 
 With the doctrine of the Gnostics, as mere 
 doctrine, Renan had little fault to find. The 
 metaphysics of Basilides forecast the main ideas 
 of Hegel. His polytheistic cosmogony covers, 
 but does not conceal, a philosophic system. . . . 
 Life is the gradual development of a series of 
 seeds or germs contained in the original matter 
 of the Universe. Filiation is the great secret : 
 each organism, abstract or concrete, produces its 
 successor and dies. The sum of the aspiration 
 of Humanity makes for righteousness. The re- 
 compense of the individual is Rest : complete 
 absorption into the substance of Deity, a divine 
 unconsciousness, a tiiyuXn ciyvoia. Man passes, 
 but the Universe remains, and progresses. The 
 Residue of Perfection is secured by the Frontier- 
 Spirit. The Frontier-Spirit is a mystic inter- 
 planetary influence which carries the current of 
 Being from the domain of pure spirit into the 
 domain of pure matter, thus mingles either and 
 
218 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 thus strengthens each. This free, starry secret 
 of a life continually renewed, this Breath from 
 Over-the-Border, this psQopiov wsufiu, answers, in 
 Renan's own philosophy, to the Spirit of Love. 
 Renan could have no intellectual quarrel with 
 the Gnostics. 
 
 What he feared and loathed in them was their 
 sterile pride. Woe to the Truth which crystal- 
 lises too soon ! These thinkers, who imagined 
 themselves to form a close syndicate of Truth 
 for the sole use of the initiate, begat a vanity 
 fatal to progress. Their wisdom was a system 
 for solitaries. Had it endured it must have 
 caused at last the establishment of a society not 
 unlike the castes of India. The Gnostic Saint 
 was already a Buddhist in posse. 
 
 The Church fought tooth and nail against this 
 hermetic aristocracy. For the Catholic ideal was 
 the good of the masses ; her holiest instinct to im- 
 prove the average man whilst diminishing the sum 
 of his sufferings. Her means were Faith and Works. 
 She preached Hope in the Man of Sorrows, 
 Trust in the Beyond. She needed no meta- 
 physical system : the Primitive Church had little 
 or no theology. It is certain that Jesus, and his 
 immediate disciples, neglected that part of the 
 human mind which desires to know. 
 
 In their house Science had no mansion. They 
 
THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY 219 
 
 spoke to the heart, to the imagination, not to 
 the mind. Christianity came not to satisfy 
 our curiosity, but to console the unhappy, to 
 stimulate the moral sense, to teach men to say 
 "Our Father," to bind them together in a brotherly 
 bond. In more things than one, the Church and 
 Marcus Aurelius pursued the same ideal. But 
 Christianity counted on the masses, the Stoic 
 Philosophers upon the Few. As we know, the 
 Galilean vanquished. And yet, after her victory, 
 the Church was compelled to assimilate something 
 of the principles she had conquered. You cannot 
 say to the world at large, Be ye perfect ! Chris- 
 tianity, in her turn, felt the necessity of an elite — 
 of a Chosen Few set apart to practice a superior 
 morality. Without diminishing the broad, general 
 movement of her main current, Catholicism began 
 to reserve, as in some peaceful backwater, the 
 clearer, holier space of the conventual life. To 
 the Monk and the Nun, it was said : Be ye per- 
 fect ! And the average churchman, soiled with 
 the dust of the world, struggled content, knowing 
 that somewhere, out of sight, the Gospel was not 
 preached in vain. 
 
 In demonstrating the secret of Christian in- 
 fluence Renan fell again, to some extent, under 
 the charm which had ruled his early years. Not 
 that ever again he was to say Credo ! Faith 
 
220 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 remained to him a fountain sealed, a garden 
 enclosed — a garden at which one slants regretful 
 glances from the sun-beaten steep highway. . . . 
 It was the beauty of Catholicism which fascinated 
 Ernest Renan, which appealed to his aesthetic 
 faculty, which revived the souvenir of his pious 
 youth. His mind still accepted a modified 
 Pantheism as the most reasonable solution of 
 the problem of the Infinite. But, more and more, 
 his fancy harked back to the conception of a 
 Providence exterior to the universe, of a sym- 
 pathetic intimate spectator of the struggles of 
 the soul. " Man is always more anthropomorphic 
 than he thinks/' said Goethe. As old age steals 
 on, leaving our brain intact, nay, enriched by the 
 experience and thought of our maturity, threaten- 
 ing the springs of life only, the craving for a 
 continuation of our activity beyond the grave is 
 natural to man. More than once the ex-pupil 
 of St Sulpice will demand of the Unknown God 
 some survival of the holier instincts of our nature, 
 some possibility of progress after death. " Thou 
 art too resigned, dear Master ! " he cries to Marcus 
 Aurelius 1 ; "if it be true that even those among 
 us who have lived in communion with Deity be 
 extinguished for ever, then of a truth we have 
 the right to complain. If this world have not 
 
 1 Marcus Aurelius, p. 268. 
 
THE ORIGINS OF CHRISTIANITY 221 
 
 its counterpart Beyond, how shall he who has sacri- 
 ficed himself to Right and Truth die contented ? 
 No, such an one has the right to blaspheme ! 
 Heaven has taken advantage of his good faith. 
 Why has Heaven implanted in his heart instincts 
 of rectitude to which he falls a victim ? Why 
 should the ungodly triumph? Is it he after all 
 who sees clear? If there be no Beyond, accursed 
 be the gods who place so ill their favours ! . . . 
 I am content that the Future remain an enigma. 
 But if there be no Future, then this world of ours 
 is a hideous trap for Virtue. Mind ye, I crave 
 not the desire of the vulgar. What I ask is 
 neither to witness the downfall of the ungodly, 
 nor to enjoy the interest of my good behaviour. 
 No selfish reward ! Only to be, only to exist 
 in relation to the light, only to continue the 
 thought begun on earth. . . . To know more 
 and more, to enjoy the truth at last, to behold 
 the Triumph of the Good which I have loved ! " 
 
 More than once at the close of his history 
 of the Origins of Christianity \ Renan asked him- 
 self, What should be the future of the Catholic 
 Church? He saw one portion doomed to cor- 
 ruption, for the letter killeth. The Church will 
 resist the gradual growth of Truth, will heap 
 dogma on dogma, invent miracle after miracle. 
 Lourdes and Tilly-sur-Seules will not save the 
 
222 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 Church. No Papal Bull will make the sun stand 
 still in heaven — B pur si muove ! But there 
 shall be a remnant. Abandoning the excesses 
 of supernaturalism, Christianity once more shall 
 worship the Father in spirit and in truth. The 
 freer thought of Catholicism will find a new force 
 in its combination with the Liberal forms of 
 Protestantism, with enlightened Judaism, and 
 Idealist Philosophy. From these shall spring 
 a new Church which, in its turn, for its time, shall 
 serve the progress of the Soul, no less abundantly, 
 no less vitally, than those elder altars which it 
 shall inevitably supersede. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 SOUVENIRS 
 
 THERE comes an hour to all objective minds 
 — too occupied with the world and its 
 great problems to keep a constant register 
 of their own sensations — an hour when they 
 recognise that they are growing old. This 
 revelation came to Ernest Renan in 1875, one 
 twentieth of September, towards the evening, as 
 he watched the dews thicken on the vineyards 
 of Ischia, and the white sea deepen in tone as 
 the light grew less intense. He was but two- 
 and-fifty years of age. Rheumatism, not the 
 weight of years, stiffened and impeded his gait, 
 affected his heart, took the elasticity from his 
 veins and muscles. He had grown old ten years 
 too soon. With his habitual mild serenity, he 
 recognised the fact without impatience — with a 
 movement of thankfulness, rather, towards all 
 the benign influences which had shaped his life. 
 Even so, long ago, on the banks of the Grau, 
 
 Marcus Aurelius had let his mind turn piously 
 
 223 
 
LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 towards the tutors of his early years. Renan, 
 likewise, passed a happy hour in casting up his 
 debt to each of these. That September evening 
 he wrote but a few pages. The idea of writing 
 some record of his childhood was born, however, 
 into his reflective mind. 
 
 Five years later, M. Quellien asked our sage to 
 preside at the annual banquet of the Bretons in 
 Paris : the Diner Celtique. Renan agreed to be 
 the permanent president of this humble festivity : 
 a reunion of Celtic men of letters held in the 
 purlieus of the Western Railway Station. And 
 this accident helped to revive in his heart the 
 love of his native place. " Quellien prolonged 
 my life by a good ten years," cried Renan. " I 
 felt fifty years slip from my shoulders as I refound 
 myself in contact with my earliest memories." , . . 
 The historian's peculiar curiosity, which was ever 
 so responsive a fibre in him, began to vibrate in 
 answer to this image of the Past. " I had seen the 
 primitive world ! " It was a world of immense 
 moral solidity, but filigreed all over on the surface 
 with poetic Pagan superstitions, — it was, we may 
 say, a menhir, thick with harebells. Now the 
 great block had fallen out of place, and the 
 flowers with it. With every year Brittany be- 
 comes more and more a mere agglomeration of 
 western departments — an integral part of France. 
 
SOUVENIRS 
 
 225 
 
 But Renan could remember the royal and Catholic 
 Brittany of Charles the Tenth. 
 
 Renan's special gift as a historian was his art of 
 divining the origin of things. There was some- 
 thing singularly primitive and archaic at the root 
 of his supple, and apparently decadent, imagina- 
 tion. This vision of Celtic Brittany interested 
 him, even as the wanderings of the Beni-Israel in 
 Chaldea, or the small Christian communities on 
 the shores of Nero's Asia Minor. His mother's 
 tales, his own first memories, put him in touch 
 with a society, pious, primitive, simple, such as he 
 loved to delineate. In his own childhood, he had 
 contemplated a page of the Origins of Contem- 
 porary France. This page he wrote one day, and 
 treated it as Taine, for all his genius, could never 
 have done. 
 
 A meditative moralist, a student of history, Renan 
 was no less a man of feeling. Save Rousseau or 
 Samuel Johnson, no writer's peculiar temperament 
 has been destined so greatly to influence modern 
 times. He had his own magic by which he 
 knew how to revive all the tender, confused, rudi- 
 mentary forces which blend in a heart of fifteen : 
 love of home, unconscious love, awakening 
 thought, the first pursuit of Truth, the first 
 elusive escape of Faith. All these rule and 
 inspire the Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse, 
 
 P 
 
226 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 On the threshold of old age, the philosopher 
 turned and cast a last long lingering glance 
 at the days of his childhood, before the Angel 
 of Knowledge had troubled the waters of his 
 heart. He heard the drowned church bells of 
 the town of Ys peal again through all the waves 
 that have gone over them — obstinate carillons, 
 still convoking his renegade thoughts to a divine 
 service long since silent. The priests of Treguier 
 rose again on his inner eye. He saw the haggard 
 silhouette of the Bonhomme Systeme, and the 
 dazed melancholy figure of the flax-crusher's 
 daughter. He saw, in a more delicate aureole, 
 the little girls he had played with before his first 
 communion, and whose smile had haunted him 
 ever since. Most men begin with the heart and 
 end with the mind. Renan began with the mind, 
 and never thought so much of Love as after fifty. 
 The women and the priests, to whom he owed 
 his breeding, had bequeathed him the sentimental 
 turn of their imagination ; and, as he grew old, 
 this trait showed clearer — as our likeness to our 
 forbears comes out with our grey hairs — in the 
 oddest contrast to the sceptical attitude of his 
 mind. As we climb down the slope of later life, the 
 world of our fifteenth year, long since cast aside 
 as the thing of a child, revisits us, and revives, 
 singularly fresh and dear. And in the best-filled 
 
SOUVENIRS 
 
 227 
 
 life, there are hours in which we are glad to 
 amuse ourselves again with the old vain toys 
 which we broke a life-time ago. 
 
 Thus, nearing sixty, Renan sought to compress 
 into an hour the aroma of all his early life ; to 
 evoke, in the twinkling of an eye, all he had once 
 loved so much, so long ago. The Souvenirs 
 are neither an autobiography nor a confession : 
 they are, in Goethe's phrase, " Truth and Poetry " 
 — a long conversation with remembrance, born of 
 our instinctive pity for all that dies with us when 
 we perish, of our instinctive wish that something, 
 at least, of the heart of us survive. . . . 
 
 No man writing of himself was ever more 
 natural, more simple. Renan's egotism is so 
 devoid of display, so mere an outpouring, that 
 it seldom irritates and never wearies. He takes 
 us into his confidence. He sits down beside us, 
 as it were, and beguiles us with his Past ; as we 
 show our children a picture book, to pass the 
 time and cultivate their imagination. 
 
 The Souvenirs took the world by storm. 
 They possess that lyric note of personal utterance 
 which the public prizes in a man already famous 
 And what shall we say of their success in Renan's 
 old home? Disraeli's novels are not more elo- 
 quent of the " Semitic secret " than these souvenirs 
 of the prerogative of the Celt. The writer him- 
 
228 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 self is regarded as a mere epitome of his race. 
 He is eloquent with the treasured silence of 
 generations, rich with their economies of thought 
 and imagination — but not other than they. The 
 clear green springs ; the misty skies ; the moors 
 dotted with menhirs, and sprinkled with the silver 
 gleam of trembling lady birches ; the Atlantic 
 breakers rolling on the coast against the great 
 granite promontories ; the pious, stolid, fisher 
 folk ; the women of Ar-Mor, demure in their 
 black gowns and coifs of white ; the priests of 
 Treguier ; the skyward sweep of the cathedral 
 steeple — all these animate and inspire their faith- 
 ful spokesman. These are responsible for the 
 genius of Ernest Renan, and his glory reflects 
 on them. . . . Such, at least, is the refrain of the 
 Souvenirs. 
 
 In the middle of August 1884, Renan re- 
 turned to Treguier. He had scarcely seen the 
 place since he left it forty years before. He 
 had doubtless dreaded the return. But he came 
 back as the local prophet. Despite some natural 
 opposition on the part of the ultra-Catholics, the 
 author of the Souvenirs was received so warmly 
 that he determined to spend a part of every year 
 in his native clime. Near Lannion, and nearer 
 Perros Guirec, he discovered a comfortable manor- 
 house — Rosmapamon — which his children continue 
 
SOUVENIRS 
 
 229 
 
 to inhabit. It is a pleasant, long, low old house, 
 standing among woods close to the sea. Thence 
 the name and fame of Ernest Renan spread through 
 the country side. The peasants and fisher folk, 
 who treated him with a rustic familiarity never 
 repulsed, were aware of the fame of the sage 
 of Rosmapamon, though they knew not what 
 had earned it. The women inclined to suppose 
 him a Saint — " Cest un bien grand Saint, 
 Monsieur ! " said one old dame, I believe, to M. 
 Spronck. The men, seated in the tavern, swore 
 that he was a great Republican. Quite lately 
 there was a public fete at Treguier to inaugurate 
 an inscription on M. Renan's natal house, at 
 present the property of his children. On this 
 occasion our philosopher was greatly extolled for 
 his Republican principles. . . . Were they so 
 much out of count, these simple people, in their 
 definition of the greatest Religious Critic, the truest 
 Liberal, after all, of Modern France ? 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY 
 
 / T*HE Souvenirs cTEnfance et de Jeunesse 
 ■J* had appeared in 1883. They reflect 
 the picturesque and emotional side of Renan — 
 Celtic, Catholic in spite of all, and curious of 
 the Past. Another view of his complex tempera- 
 ment is given in a volume which came out a few 
 months earlier : a translation of Ecclesiastes 
 with an introduction. Here we see his dis- 
 enchanted self, — modern, agnostic, dilettante. 
 
 " The author of Ecclesiastes" says the trans- 
 lator, " is the author of the Book of Job grown 
 seven centuries older. His objurgations against 
 God, his eloquent and terrible blasphemies, have 
 sunk into the trick of a hopeless trifling. The 
 patriarch has suffered a change into the man 
 of letters about town. He has no longer the 
 strength to be angry with the Eternal : Where 
 is the use of it ? " 
 
 After a great experience of human things, 
 
 Ecclesiastes has lost his faith in progress. — 
 
 230 
 
ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY 231 
 
 The world offers a succession of phenomena 
 which repeat themselves without essential change. 
 What has been, will be. The wheel of things 
 revolves, and must revolve, ever in the same circle. 
 Our attempts at reform and progress are mere 
 chimseras. Nothing worth knowing is knowable. 
 Man is hopelessly limited by his faculties as by 
 his destiny. All is vanity ! The only wisdom is 
 not to be unnecessarily miserable about that which 
 it is certain we were never meant to alter. 
 
 Such is the melancholy philosophy of Cohelet. 
 " No man," says Renan, " was ever less of a 
 pedant. The clearest view of a truth never 
 prevents him from seeing, a second later, the 
 contrary aspect of that truth in just as sharp 
 relief. His disenchantment does not make him 
 in the least out of temper with the conventions of 
 society. In him, the motives for living are all 
 slackened and relaxed ; but his lively taste for 
 life and its pleasures remains unimpaired. He 
 no longer seeks to explain the scheme of things, 
 nor to invent symbols in which to incarnate 
 a precise religion. He amuses himself rather 
 with delightful philosophic vagaries. ' There is 
 another evil under the sun ' (he might have said) 
 — and haply is it the greatest of them all. And 
 this is the presumption of spirit which seeks 
 to explain the universe in a sentence four words 
 
232 
 
 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 long. Woe unto him who shall not contradict 
 himself at least once a day." 
 
 The soul of Ernest Renan animates this 
 Ecclesiastes of 1882. The portrait is a living 
 likeness. Only, save in quite his darkest hours, 
 Renan would scarcely have agreed that the world 
 revolves eternally in an unalterable circle. How- 
 ever pessimistic, he was still a Liberal. Almost 
 always he saw the course of the universe slowly 
 spinning down the grooves of Time, in a spiral, 
 imperceptibly advancing even when it appears 
 to recede. If nothing be wholly good, nothing 
 also is wholly harmful. " My philosophy," he 
 wrote in the Souvenirs, " inclines me to believe 
 that good and evil, pain and pleasure, the 
 beautiful and the ugly, slide into one another as 
 imperceptibly as the tints which blend on the 
 neck of a dove." There is no Absolute — All is 
 relative. Or if an absolute exist in the region of 
 the infinite, we, by the constitution of our natures, 
 are condemned to perceive only the relative. 
 The Order of things is no Finality, " knowing 
 what and why it worketh in a most exact order 
 or law," but a sort of happy accident without 
 purpose or precision. And yet — who knows ? 
 From this fortuitous combination there may 
 proceed the Conscient Soul, whose presentiment 
 is deep implanted in our heart. The progress of 
 
ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY 233 
 
 the Universe is, perchance, the long and painful 
 Advent of the unborn God. " Nothing proves 
 that there exists a Soul of the Universe ; nothing 
 proves the contrary. Let us deny nothing, affirm 
 nothing. We may hope." 
 
 In reading Mr Tollemache's " Recollections 
 of Mark Pattison " I have been much struck by 
 many similarities between his melancholy " Pis- 
 gah-sights " (as Browning would have said) and 
 Ernest Renan's. Both indeed were disenchanted 
 men, both still under the emotional sway of a 
 creed in which their reason had ceased to ac- 
 quiesce. Pattison observed that the idea of Deity 
 has now been " defecated to a pure transparency," 
 and Renan might have used the phrase : yet each 
 was haunted by a more personal religious Ideal, 
 while for ever baffled by philosophical per- 
 plexities. Only, in this baffling, Renan took, on 
 the whole, a certain pleasure, such as robust con- 
 stitutions find in walking against a wind, while 
 Pattison's slighter nature shivered and dwindled 
 in the blast Both inclined to imagine a conceiv- 
 able survival of the soul, contingent on its progress 
 in this mortal sphere ; and either would have 
 defined this hoped-for after life — so dimly adum- 
 brated, so faintly apprehended, — rather as a 
 possible posthumous influence for good than as 
 a renewal of our human personality ; and yet, 
 
234 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 each in softer hours, dreamed, half playfully, of 
 his childhood's Paradise. " Shall I have my 
 library in Heaven ? " queried the scholarly Rec- 
 tor of Lincoln, and Renan, the dreamer, laid up 
 stores of pleasant visions for the eternal night, 
 as though he were half persuaded that, after 
 death, he might still need an amusement. 
 
 An optimist at heart, Renan did not despair. 
 " This life of four days produces some enduring 
 fruits. ... I can not suffer to hear our Humanity 
 insulted — poor thing of grief, thrown like an 
 orphan upon the earth, scarce sure of the morrow, 
 which finds means, between the birth-throe and 
 the death-agony, to invent art, science, virtue." 
 Renan had, as he confessed, despite experience 
 of the Dead Sea fruit, " a lively taste for the 
 universe." He looked forward, though with but 
 a moderate cheerfulness. He thought with Pat- 
 tison that, when Reform has finished her perfect 
 work, the world, destitute of originality and 
 variety, will become a sort of universal China. 
 He foresaw that everything tended towards 
 Democracy, towards Socialism even, towards an 
 Americanising of our frame of life, a prosperous 
 vulgarity, repugnant to a man of taste. But 
 after all, who knows ? A sort of modified 
 Chicago may be a less insupportable condition 
 of existence than we imagine. Pattison was 
 
ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY 235 
 
 too innately the Don, the College Man, to con- 
 template such a change without a shudder. But 
 Renan, who was a human being and a dreamer 
 first and a scholar afterwards — mingled some 
 indulgence and much curiosity with his personal 
 distaste. " Who knows, the general commonness 
 may guarantee the happiness of the Chosen 
 Few ! American vulgarity would not have 
 buried Giordano Bruno, nor persecuted Galileo " 
 (Preface to Souvenirs). 
 
 On this subject Renan has embodied his re- 
 flections in a series of philosophical comedies, 
 which he composed, during his autumn holidays 
 in the Isle of Ischia in 1877 and in 1879, and 
 which he completed later at Rosmapamon. The 
 book appeared as a whole in 1888 under the 
 title of Philosophical Dramas. Three of these 
 tragi-comedies, Caliban, The Fountain of Youth, 
 The Priest of Nemi, are priceless documents for 
 the critic of Renan's character and opinions, 
 which the fourth, The Abbess of fouarre, on the 
 whole a regrettable performance, obscures from 
 the height of its bad eminence. 
 
 The dramas we have mentioned are chiefly 
 concerned with the problems of Democracy. 
 They show the attitude towards uncultured 
 socialism of a Liberal Philosopher. Aristocratic 
 by temperament and education, for no aristocracy 
 
236 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 is so close as the sacerdotal, Renan was by 
 principle a sort of Socialist, or at least Republican, 
 malgrt luL After the Commune, through fear of 
 the tyranny of the mob, he had warmly advocated 
 the restoration of the legitimate Bourbon. 1 After 
 the stifling experience of the Ordre Moral, he 
 had seen what a restoration of the Throne and 
 Altar would really mean : the dominion of ortho- 
 doxy, that is to say, tyranny plus hypocrisy, the 
 most monstrous regimen of all. 
 
 " I love Prospero (he writes in Caliban), but I 
 do not love the men who would re-establish him 
 upon the throne. Caliban, improved by power, is 
 more to my liking. Caliban, after all, is more 
 useful to us scholars than Prospero would be with 
 the Jesuits for his wire-pullers. In the present 
 circumstances, the Government of Prospero would 
 be, not a renaissance, but a crushing-flat of all free 
 intelligence. Let us keep Caliban ! " — that is to 
 say, Democracy. Under all his airs of ironic 
 aristocracy, Renan kept the staunchest sense of 
 the rights of the people. He was indeed at heart 
 more Radical, more anti-clerical, than he cared to 
 appear. When Jules Ferry launched his famous 
 Article VII., almost all cultured France deplored 
 the system of petty religious persecution which it 
 inaugurated : clerical colleges closed, monks and 
 
 1 Rcforme intelleduelle et morale. 
 
ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY 237 
 
 nuns expelled from their pious homes, convents in- 
 ordinately taxed. "A most illiberal persecution ! " 
 assented Renan, "and, what is more . . . insufficient! 
 I would not close a single clerical college : I would 
 only debar the pupils of the Regular Orders from 
 every public career." At heart, in his old age, 
 Renan returned to the democratic point of view 
 exhibited in his first social study, the " Future 
 of Science." The vision is less brilliant, but 
 it is not hopeless. Caliban (Democracy), the 
 unformed, mindless brute, educated by his own 
 responsibility, makes an adequate ruler after all, 
 no worse, if not wiser, than those who went before. 
 Prospero (the Aristocratic Principle, or, if we will, 
 the Mind) accepts, not unwillingly, his own de- 
 thronement from practical affairs for the sake of 
 greater liberty in the intellectual life : for Caliban 
 proves an effective policeman, and leaves his 
 superiors the freest of hands in the laboratory. Ariel 
 (the Religious Principle 1 ) learns at last not to give up 
 the ghost at the faintest hint of change. Robuster, 
 if less ethereal, he, too, flourishes in the service of 
 Prospero under the external government of the 
 many-headed Brute. The future of Ariel is in 
 fact secured by the unconscious co-operation of 
 Prospero and Caliban. Every great religion is 
 
 1 Compare with The Tempest Isaiah xxix., where Jerusalem is 
 figured under the symbolic name of Ariel, 
 
238 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 the result of some such fecund misunderstanding. 
 Nor is the future of Science less secure. " In the 
 Ledger of Knowledge every truth is added up, 
 every error omitted. Error is sterile, essentially 
 perishable." 1 Truth alone knows how to capitalise 
 her vast, her continually multiplying resources, 
 which, as it were at compound interest, increase 
 from year to year. In spite of all, the only need- 
 ful things are not destined to succumb : Religion 
 and Knowledge are as imperishable as the world 
 which they dignify. 
 
 Thus, out of the depths, rises unvanquished the 
 essential idealism of Ernest Renan. 
 
 Faith and Science had ever occupied his mind. 
 On the threshold of old age, his philosophy 
 became aware of another great entity, of Love, 
 which, up to the age of five-and-fifty or there- 
 abouts, had appeared to him a personal accident, 
 of keen interest doubtless to the individuals it 
 concerned, but scarcely a problem, hardly an 
 immense universal force such as Beauty, Virtue, 
 Truth, or Faith. When we are old, we secretly 
 prize that which we disregarded most in its due 
 season. Love and the charm of woman took a 
 great importance in the eyes of our philosopher, 
 grown prematurely aged, the unwieldiest of mortals, 
 the wittier Dr Johnson of Parisian society. There 
 
 1 Preface to Feuilles D£tach{es. 
 
ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY 239 
 
 is something, we must own, a little grotesque in 
 this tardy Cupid perched on the rim of Socrates' 
 basket. Love as the interplanetary essence, the 
 running music of the spheres binding all exis- 
 tence in one harmony, Love the ps06ptov mev/ia 
 may occupy the sage at any decade. And we 
 are moved and pleased by the ageing scholar's 
 recollection of the girlish faces which had bright- 
 ened existence for him some forty years ago. 
 But that were enough ; we did not desire the 
 Abbesse de Jouarre ! 
 
 " At Christmas we no more desire a rose " — 
 
 And the rose, of an odd blue unhealthy-looking 
 sort, takes to blooming in Renan's frostiest season. 
 
 His life, as all who knew him can aver, was 
 ever the life of a saint, and would appear of 
 the purest, judged by the canons of any doctrine. 
 Quaintly enough, he considered that this white 
 apex of his gave him a singularly favourable 
 point of view for scrutinising the nice enigmas 
 of the heart. In the Abbesse of Jouarre he 
 writes the apology of instinct. Chastity, says he, 
 is often only another name for the merest social 
 prudence : were the world to end to-morrow we 
 should all abandon ourselves without remorse to 
 our most passionate desires. His excuse must be 
 that, in his peculiar mind, the most frivolous 
 
2 4 o LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 fantasies slide into philosophic symbols. ... In 
 the course of the universe Renan descried two 
 impelling forces — the gradual process which 
 develops, and the rare divine capricious impulse 
 of spontaneity, which, as with a leap and a bound, 
 hurries on the slow progress of cosmic elabora- 
 tion ; steps in, at difficult moments, like a god 
 out of a machine ; suggests Speech to the bleat- 
 ing and calling Bushmen ; makes the perplexed 
 savage, as he notches his tally, dream of writing 
 and arithmetic ; which, in fact, is continually inter- 
 vening with the happiest effect, in the intermin- 
 able evolution of the god from the sea-anemone. 
 Love, in the eyes of Renan, was the constant 
 manifestation of this force of spontaneity without 
 which no great thing had fully achieved its being. 
 Woman is the pure depositary of instinct ; and, as 
 such, she is precious above all things in the eyes 
 of the philosopher. 
 
 " The more man develops his brain, the more 
 he dreams of the opposite pole, of the Irrational, 
 of a repose in complete ignorance — of the woman 
 who is only a woman, of the instinctive being 
 whose acts are guided by the impulse of an 
 obscurer consciousness. . . . When our medita- 
 tions have led us to the last term of doubt — then 
 the spontaneous affirmation of the Good and the 
 Beautiful in a woman's soul enchants us, and 
 
ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY 241 
 
 may yet give the casting vote. . . . Through her 
 we are still in union with that eternal source of 
 things, wherein God is reflected." 1 
 
 It was this difference in woman which attracted 
 Renan. Here was something at his hand whose 
 movements he could not predicate, whose organs 
 and whose instincts obeyed apparently different 
 laws to those which regulated his own being. 
 The curiosity of the philosopher was invincibly 
 attracted.. We all know how, in the Indian 
 drama, the men speak in Sanscrit, the heroines 
 in Pracrit. Renan knew his Sanscrit grammar 
 by heart ; it was stale to him. In his old age he 
 longed to learn this Pracrit poetry of woman. 
 " If born again," he said in one of his last 
 prefaces, " I would be born a woman." 
 
 Woman, divinised in Renan's later philosophy, 
 repaid a hundredfold the adulation of the sage. 
 Uncouth in frame and gait, as some gnome-like 
 Breton saint, unworldly as the village cure he 
 always looked like, Renan became the arbiter 
 of the more intellectual elegancies of Paris. Fair 
 ladies slept happy when they had exhibited him 
 in their salons ; bonnets from Virot drooped a 
 trifle disconcerted at the uncompromising scholar- 
 ship of his lectures at the College of France ; 
 latter-day Magdalenes consulted him as to the 
 
 1 Preface an Souvenirs (PEnfance et de Jeunesse. 
 
 Q 
 
242 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 state of their conscience, and music-hall singers 
 asked his opinion on their songs. We have 
 spoken of Samuel Johnson. The great Doctor 
 himself did not yield a more undisputed or a 
 less-to-be-expected social sway over last-century 
 London than Ernest Renan over the Paris of 
 the Eighties. Victor Hugo, perhaps, was more 
 of a popular enthusiasm, but Renan was both 
 Society's and Caliban's special prophet. Perhaps 
 the good opinion they entertained of him may 
 have influenced our philosopher's estimate of 
 Society, and of Caliban. For to both of these, 
 in his latter days, he became extraordinarily 
 indulgent. 
 
 In 1879 Renan had been elected to the French 
 Academy. The Academy accepted him with re- 
 luctance ; but we may say that he reigned there, 
 even as he reigned — a placid, benevolent, am- 
 biguous divinity — over most of the learned 
 societies of Paris. President of the Asiatic 
 Society in 1882, he was, in the summer of 1884, 
 appointed Administrator of the College of France 
 — Principal, or Rector, as we should say at 
 Oxford. He came into residence on his return 
 from Rosmapamon. The local divinity was 
 poorly housed in the old building of the Rue des 
 Ecoles ; a meagre study looking north did not 
 spare his rheumatism ; the narrow bedrooms were 
 
ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY 243 
 
 worthy of a convent, but there was a fair-sized 
 salon to frame Scheffers pictures, and endless 
 garrets for the innumerable books. It is doubtful 
 if Renan was ever happier than in this inconvenient 
 apartment. After his death his devoted wife, in 
 setting his papers in order, found in a drawer 
 a collection of old half-sheets, backs of envelopes, 
 and such like, on which, from time to time, her 
 husband had scrawled his reflections. On one 
 of these she read : " I have known the grip of 
 poverty, but never have I been so badly housed 
 as at the College of France." Since then the 
 residence has been twice enlarged to suit two 
 successive Administrators, and at present it is 
 all that health and commodity require. As 
 much, and more, would have been done for 
 Renan had it occurred to him to ask for repairs. 
 But it is charmingly characteristic of the man 
 that he never thought of it. In some moment 
 of irritation he confided to a private Bocca di 
 Leone, and perhaps to the ear of the Eternal, his 
 just dissatisfaction . . . and then forgot it. I 
 doubt if he would have suffered an improvement. 
 It is certain that he would not have exchanged 
 his beloved college for the palace of the Elysee. 
 
 The least practical of men, Renan proved an 
 admirable Administrator. Whatever he set his 
 hand to do, he did it with all his might. One 
 
244 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 of his colleagues has set on record the unsuspected 
 firmness that underlay his charming genius : — 
 
 " Very indulgent to others, and convinced that 
 few of the things for which men torment them- 
 selves are really worth the trouble, there was one 
 thing as to which he was ever inflexible ; for if 
 we seek the continual motive of his life, in the 
 sphere of action, we shall find it to have been 
 the most abstract sense of duty. This man, who 
 seemed to prize especially the grace of courtesy, 
 among all the virtues of St Sulpice, who always 
 seemed to seek for the phrase most pleasant to 
 the ear of his interlocutor, be he whom he might, 
 and who often carried the caress of his amiability 
 to the verge of an apparent irony — this man, 
 so indifferent and so pliant in appearance, became 
 a bar of iron so soon as one sought to wrest from 
 him an act or a word contrary to the intimate 
 sense of his conscience." 1 
 
 No man had a stronger sense of a professional 
 engagement. Tortured with rheumatism, faint 
 with the oppressed action of his heart, he never 
 let his ill-health interfere with his lectures. I 
 have seen him carried down the steep staircase 
 of the College by hired porters — his bulk made 
 it no easy thing to do — in order to attend an 
 
 1 James Darmesteter, Ernest Return. See Critique et Politique , 
 p. 64. 
 
ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY 245 
 
 election of the Academy. The least personal, 
 the least glorious of his labours occupied him 
 most. The last months of his life were given 
 to the volume on the Rabbis of France in the 
 fourteenth century, which he was compiling from 
 the notes of Dr Neubauer, and which, I suppose, 
 scarce one of my readers will have read, or even 
 heard of. The most arid, the most ungrateful 
 of tasks, Renan was delighted to subject himself 
 to this labour, which he deemed useful, and which 
 no one certainly would undertake if he left it 
 undone. At the same moment all Paris, nay, 
 all the elite of Europe, was smiling over the 
 exquisite Feuilles Detachees. I have little doubt 
 that in his heart of hearts, Renan preferred the 
 Rabbis. 
 
 Traversed by ill -health, disciplined by hard 
 work, these years of apotheosis, these years of 
 the eighties, were very happy years, full of family 
 love, full of a just fame, to which Renan was 
 never indifferent ; full of the flattery of popular 
 applause. Surrounded by those he loved — his 
 delightful wife (" She must have been specially 
 made for me," he used to say) ; his gifted, 
 sensitive son ; his exquisite daughter, in whom 
 his dreams of Celtic grace had come to a perfect 
 flower ; with his grandchildren about his knees, 
 Paris at his feet, Renan spent happy winters 6 in 
 
246 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 his high-perched study of the College, and happy 
 summers in his Breton manor. With Ecclesiastes, 
 he exclaimed, more than once, that this, at least, 
 is not vanity : to grow old with the wife of our 
 youth, and to enjoy the modest fortune amassed 
 by one's honest labours. That fortune was very 
 modest, it is true ; but no shadow of money cares, 
 no thought for the morrow, ever touched the 
 serene self-detachment of this inveterate disciple 
 of Mary. His children still smile when they re- 
 call how, one afternoon, in their private, domestic 
 Commission of the Budget, Madame Renan ex- 
 posed the narrow extent of the family resources. 
 " 'Tis true, 'tis true," said Renan, with sagacious 
 impersonal calm, as he swayed himself from side 
 to side. " Money shows no signs of rolling our 
 way ! " But the fact appeared less important to 
 him, it was evident, than the date of the last dis- 
 covered Himyarite inscription. Care and trouble 
 came not nigh him. 
 
 It was at this moment that I made the ac- 
 quaintance of M. and Madame Renan and their 
 children. Well do I remember the day, the year, 
 the season! It was in September 1880. I was 
 travelling in Italy with my parents. At Venice 
 we fell in with a friend of my father's — Signor 
 Castellani, the archaeologist. He invited us to 
 spend a day at Torcello with the Renans, Sir 
 
ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY 247 
 
 Henry Layard, and his wife. I was a young girl 
 then, more familiar with the Nineveh Courts of 
 the British Museum (for which I worshipped Sir 
 Henry Layard) and with Signor Castellani's 
 exquisite Bronze Mask in the same collection, 
 than with any writing of M. Renan's. In fact, 
 save for a lecture on Marcus Aurelius, which I 
 had heard him deliver a few months before, I 
 knew him only by repute, as a heretic (that was 
 attractive), and a philologist (which seemed less 
 interesting). But after the first half-hour in his 
 company I saw that here, here was the Man of 
 Genius ! I thought him like the enchanter 
 Merlin — not Burne-Jones' graceful wizard, but 
 some rough-hewn, gnome - like, Saint-Magician 
 of Armor. What a leonine head, with its silvery 
 mane of soft, grey hair, surmounted that massive 
 girth ! What an elfin, delicate light shone in 
 the clear eyes, and lurked in the sinuous lines 
 of the smile ! How lucid, how natural, how 
 benign the intelligence which mildly radiated 
 from him ! M. Renan was at his best on that 
 occasion. We all felt ourselves in the glad 
 society of an Immortal. ... I still see the little 
 Italian gunboat cutting through the bright lagoon 
 towards the desolate shores of Torcello, fringed 
 with scarlet-dotted pomegranate hedges and 
 wastes of lilac-tipped sea-lavender ! How bril- 
 
248 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 liant the mother-island looked in her abandon- 
 ment. The brown old church inspired M. Renan. 
 At that moment, with a heart divided between 
 the glory of Hellas and the spiritual grace of 
 Christianity, few things, indeed, could have 
 touched him nearer than that ancient Mosaic, 
 where the Apocalyptic Angels pour the Wrath 
 of God from vials shaped like the purest classic 
 cornucopiae. He stood long in front of it. He 
 discoursed to the eminent archaeologists who 
 accompanied him ; we all listened, we girls no 
 less earnestly than they, if with less understanding. 
 At first I had thought him ugly, I confess. But, as 
 he spoke, he grew almost handsome. The great 
 head, held on one side, half in criticism, half in 
 propitiation, was so puissant in its mass ; the 
 blue eyes beamed with wit and playful kindness. 
 How he savoured, and made us savour, that 
 image of the anger of the Eternal elegantly 
 treasured in the horns of plenty. How he re- 
 vived for us the soul of the mother-church of 
 Venice — the handful of poor refugees: primitive 
 people, shipwrecked, as it were, upon that lonely 
 island ; yet, in their way, refined thinkers, with a 
 command of art and image, as became the heirs 
 of more than one immeasurable ideal. 
 
 Seven years later I went to see the Renans at 
 the College of France, and thenceforward they 
 
ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY 249 
 
 both are blended with the happy memories of my 
 married life. Madame Renan bestowed her kind 
 protecting friendship on the foreign bride. Her 
 husband, as Head of the College, as President of 
 the Asiatic Society where M. Darmesteter was 
 Secretary, was my husband's "chief" — and in 
 more ways than these, for was he not first among 
 the students of old faiths, and the leader of 
 Oriental philologists in France? Though much 
 firmness and an unalterable decision were masked 
 by that benignant affability of his, he was the 
 most genial of chiefs. I remember one after- 
 noon, when we were in mourning and my husband 
 ill, how he walked quickly into our little salon, 
 embraced James on either cheek, tapped him on 
 the shoulder, and pinned the Cross of the Legion 
 of Honour in his coat. 
 
 If we went to see him in his study at the 
 College, how wise were his counsels, never volun- 
 teered ! No man made less of a fetish of his 
 work. Those golden phrases of his were often 
 interrupted, for his time was at the disposal of 
 those who needed it. When a visitor arrived, he 
 would lay down his pen, give his mind to his 
 guest until the door shut upon him, and then he 
 would resume, without a pause, the unfinished 
 sentence. So he threw off the first jet, generally 
 copied by Madame Renan, recorrected, set up by 
 
250 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 the printer, and polished slowly and lovingly on 
 proof after proof of his interminable revise. 
 
 He was somewhat disquieted by the drones 
 and butterflies drawn to the College by the honey 
 of his hive. One cannot imagine his serenity 
 ruffled. But a summer lightning of irony would 
 play in his eyes when too many tall English 
 tourists, too many marvellous Parisian toilettes, oc- 
 cupied the narrow benches of the little " Salle des 
 Langues." I am told that on one such occasion, 
 seeing his own students ousted, he bowed to the 
 motley company as amiably as ever — " I am en- 
 chanted," he began, " to observe the vogue for 
 abstruse Hebrew studies which obtains to-day. 
 In the presence of so choice an audience (another 
 bow) there can be no need of an introduction to 
 our subject. We will therefore read our text, 
 phrase after phrase, in turn — in the original 
 Hebrew " — a quick dispersion left the scholars to 
 their book. 
 
 M. Renan talked marvellously well, and he 
 loved talking. He had little of the ready give- 
 and-take which is the most usual form of wit, 
 yet he had a colloquial magic of his own. His 
 conversation was an attentive silence, interrupted 
 by long pauses of solitary meditation, and by 
 outbursts of radiant monologue. He liked dining 
 out. Some of my most agreeable recollections 
 
ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY 251 
 
 are of the subtle and singular reflections with 
 which, as with the wave of a fairy wand, our 
 enchanter would turn a Paris dinner-party into 
 an elect symposium. He could be grave — he 
 could be gay. That night, for instance, when he 
 told us — with what charm ! with what elegant 
 lightness ! — the story of the Babylonian Tobias. 
 Rash and young, this Chaldaean brother of our 
 Tobit, discouraged by the difficult approaches of 
 prosperity, had entered into partnership with 
 a demi-god or Demon, who made all his schemes 
 succeed and pocketed fifty per cent, upon the pro- 
 fits. The remaining fifty sufficed to make Tobias 
 as rich as Oriental fancy can imagine. The young 
 man fell in love, married his bride and brought her 
 home. . . . On the threshold stood the Demon : 
 " How about my fifty per cent. ? " The Venus 
 d'llle, you see, was not born yesterday. From 
 the dimmest dawn of time, sages have taught 
 us not to trust the gods too far ! 
 
 Mvpidvovg avqp — M. Renan had far other moods. 
 I remember a more serious banquet. It was at 
 the house of the dear philosopher of the Rue 
 Cassette. The Renans were there, some others, 
 the Lyttons, I believe, and ourselves. That 
 morning M. Taine had received a bundle of the 
 papers of the Psychical Research Society. The 
 psychologist — much interested at that time in 
 
252 LIFE OF ERNEST REN AN 
 
 the problems of dual personality and so forth — 
 let the conversation wander into the dubious 
 sphere of the phantoms of the living. M. Renan 
 appeared sunk in a dream of his own. From 
 time to time he shook his mane, like a slumber- 
 ing lion. Suddenly he looked up and spoke, 
 with a flash in his blue eyes — fahg w Tig sXsyxnxog. 
 Briefly indeed, and with a rare scorn in his irony, 
 did the cross-examining God dispose of those 
 vague approximations, those imprecise reminis- 
 cences of another's experience, which suffice to 
 found a fact in the annals of unscientific ob- 
 servers. Truth, Science, were eloquently bid to 
 the rescue, enjoined to engulph and swallow up 
 the miracle -mongery, the wonder- worship, still 
 so dear to the fashionable uneducated. And 
 suddenly the prophet relented, cast up his hands 
 in kindly deprecation — " O les gens du monde ! 
 la science des gens du monde ! " In spite of 
 all, he knew he had a weakness for these well- 
 bred culprits. 
 
 Such outbursts were rare. The affable Arch- 
 angel concealed them, as it were, under a cas- 
 sock of non-committal ecclesiastical courtesy. He 
 generally acquiesced. I used to wonder what 
 assertion would be too wild to provoke his 
 amiable " Mais certainement, Madame ! " He 
 would let any young lady explain to him the 
 
ECCLESIASTES IN A DEMOCRACY 253 
 
 nicest points in Semitic archaeology without a 
 protest. Sometimes I tried, I admit, how far 
 one could go. Perhaps there was a twinkle 
 in the kindly indifferent eye. Never anything 
 so pedantic as a contradiction. 
 
 M. Renan and I were born on the same 
 day — at an interval of some five - and - thirty 
 years — or rather we thought we were so born. 
 For it is characteristic of the idealist that all 
 his life he thought himself a day older than he 
 was. On the 27th of February, notes and flowers 
 went gaily between us. For M. Renan was gay : 
 M. Lemaitre has reproached him with the fact, and 
 it is true. Despite old age, and constant pain, 
 lack of breath, and sometimes lack of means — 
 despite the prospect of the end at hand, M. Renan 
 was gay, unfailingly patient, cheerful, and serene. 
 One 27th of February there were no more good 
 wishes, and yet, as we talked with Madame 
 Renan, the kind sage seemed almost one among 
 us. " A widow," said Michelet, " should be her 
 husband's soul delayed among us." Such was 
 she. The thoughts, the wishes, the counsels, 
 the memories of M. Renan lingered with us 
 eighteen months after we had bidden him fare- 
 well. The past abided with her. She would 
 spend hours contentedly reviving the episodes of 
 their journey in Asia Minor, living over again 
 
254 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 the first years of her marriage. Happy years 
 full of youth and love and poverty, when, 
 at the end of his long day's work, she used 
 to carry off her young husband on some in- 
 expensive adventure. " We used to call on 
 the cats of the Quarter ! M. Renan had names 
 for them all. You may put that in your book ! " 
 she would say with a smile. This book was a 
 favourite project of her's. We made plans for 
 writing it together ; and, indeed, I could never 
 have written it without her. But she missed too 
 sorely, she mourned too faithfully, the hero of our 
 biography, and, before a line of it was set down, I 
 learned one day, at her door, that she would 
 never read it. 
 
 But remembrance carries me too fast. Those 
 days have not yet dawned. A brief spell of life 
 and noble labour remains to Ernest Renan. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL 
 
 IN that writing-table drawer to which our 
 philosopher confided so many private ejacu- 
 lations, Madame Renan found a slip of paper on 
 which was written : " Of all that I have done, 
 I prefer the Corpus? Of average, well-read 
 persons, taking an interest in European literature, 
 I suppose some fifty per cent, may have read 
 the Souvenirs of Ernest Renan, and perhaps 
 twenty per cent, the Life of Jesus, and ten, 
 at most, let us say, some other work of the 
 master's — usually the Feuilles Detachees, or 
 the recently published Letters, but occasionally 
 St Paul, or the Apostles, or perhaps one 
 of the two lovely volumes of Religious Studies, 
 Qr the Essays on Moral Science and Criticism. 
 But for every hundred cultured readers, scarce 
 the fraction of a unit can be placed to the 
 account of the Corpus. The Corpus Semiticarum 
 Inscriptionum is not in any sense a book. It 
 
 is a tool for scholars. It is a collection of all 
 
 255 
 
256 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 the Semitic inscriptions as yet discovered on 
 Jewish, Aramean, Phoenician, Himyarite, Cartha- 
 ginian, Cypriote, Greek, Egyptian, Sicilian, Mal- 
 tese, Sardinian, Arabian, Assyrian, and Chaldsean 
 monuments. The comparison of these inscrip- 
 tions—the unsuspected details, the singular 
 rapprochements which result from such a compari- 
 son — is, perhaps, the most important factor in the 
 exegesis and the historical discoveries of the 
 future. In the study of the Past no detail is 
 insignificant ; the most patient analysis of the 
 greatest possible quantity of authentic material 
 is the first condition of historic insight. A poet, 
 a prophet may touch the dry bones and make 
 them live. But without these dry bones, appar- 
 ently so mouldered and remote, even an Ezekiel 
 were of no avail. Renan never forgot this 
 essential truth. His soaring genius was con- 
 stantly refreshed from the humble springs of 
 fact and certainty. 
 
 It was in 1867 that M. Renan proposed to the 
 Academy of Science and Belle Lettres the forma- 
 tion of a Corpus for Semitic inscriptions on the 
 model of Bcekh's Greek Corpus ; but it was only 
 in 18 81 that the first number was given to the 
 world. Semitic epigraphy is a recent science, 
 and every year adds to its scanty store, and 
 patiently reanimates the past of Israel, and of the 
 
THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL 257 
 
 neighbours of Israel, too long transfigured by an 
 exclusively sacred tradition into something out of 
 the likeness of human days and works. The 
 materials are slowly accumulating for a definite 
 history of the Semitic kingdoms. M. Renan, 
 nourished on the Bible, familiar with the sites and 
 races of the Holy Land, was almost the first to 
 perceive the extent of the fresh resources offered 
 by recent epigraphy. 
 
 Renan commenced his " History of the People 
 of Israel " at sixty years of age— the first volume 
 appeared in 18 8 7 — having spent his whole life 
 in studying the materials which critics, scholars, 
 archaeologists, and explorers have gathered con- 
 cerning the Semitic peoples. Forty years before 
 he had planned his great work on the " Origins 
 of Christianity." " I ought to have begun with 
 the Prophets," he said later ; but the figure of 
 Jesus attracted him with an incessant magnetism, 
 and besides, a delicate lad of twenty, he had 
 not dared to count upon so long a future. Now 
 he determined to fill up the weak places in his 
 foundations, and to found Christianity, as in 
 truth it is founded, on the teachings of Amos, 
 of Isaiah, of Ezekiel, and especially of the great 
 nameless prophet, who wrote the latter chapters 
 of the book we call Isaiah's. 
 
 The originality of Renan's "History of Israel " 
 R 
 
258 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 lies in this fact, that he places the Prophets at 
 the very core and centre of Jewish thought — 
 the Prophets, not Moses or Elias. The first 
 volume of his history is perhaps disappointing ; 
 it is less a history than a vague poetic rhapsody 
 — such as we expect from a Michelet rather 
 than a Renan — a piece of cosmic folk-lore, 
 too merely grandiose and picturesque. Yet 
 it contains a page on the civilisation of Babylonia 
 which no reader can forget ; and the idyll of 
 Father Orcham, the ideal king of the Chaldsean 
 golden age, whom the pastors of Israel adopted 
 for their ancestor, has the true ring of a primitive 
 fable. But surely M. Renan exaggerates the 
 monotheism of these tribal wanderers ? He 
 is never so happy as when divining in its ultimate 
 recesses, calling up from its deepest hiding-places, 
 the different forms of religious feeling. And 
 yet we think he antedates the religious tendency 
 of these primitive tribesmen. Surely in their 
 attitude towards the Unknown there was little 
 but dread and mere propitiation. 
 
 Something of the same fatigue, the same in- 
 adequacy, is shown in the history of David and 
 Solomon, however picturesque, however full of 
 recondite and charming detail. Yet David, the 
 brigand chief, ruling Israel by means of his Cretan 
 mercenaries ; Solomon, the intelligent, unpreju- 
 
THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL 259 
 
 diced, wise man of the East, much like many a 
 Jew of our days — shrewd, epicurean, materialist, 
 blind to the true vocation of his race : these are 
 figures which impress us by their reality despite 
 the defects of the volume which contains them. 
 Of these defects the greatest is an excessive use 
 of Renan's peculiar irony. The immensity of his 
 mental horizon is such as to include, and as it 
 were to associate, objects which appear to belong 
 to different spheres of thought. What can be 
 more disconcerting than his serene and candid 
 fashion of assuring us how much the Book 
 of Jonah resembles La Belle Helene ? — that 
 Jeremiah was a journalist of the type of Felix 
 Pyat, and Ezekiel a sort of Victor Hugo at 
 Hauteville House, unless, indeed, we consider him 
 more like Fourier ? These unexpected compari- 
 sons startle and shock the attention of readers less 
 familiar with the antipodes of history ; and, while 
 acquitting our placid sage of any childish desire 
 to merely dazzle or astonish. I own that I con- 
 sider these " actualities " misplaced. They may 
 occasionally illuminate, as by a searchlight, some 
 obscure and dusty purlieu of the Past. But more 
 often they merely serve to irritate the student ; 
 and, after a short lapse of years, they will seem 
 even more incomprehensible : two Pasts, neither 
 familiar, will then confuse each other. This con- 
 
26o LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 tinual blemish mars the third volume of the 
 History of Israel no less, and perhaps even more, 
 than the two earlier ones. But, at this point, it 
 is caught up and, as it were, whirled out of sight 
 in the noble and living current of the work. For 
 M. Renan touches his true subject at last in deal- 
 ing with the Prophets of Israel. The notion of 
 justice, of righteousness unto God and Man, the 
 divine necessity of self-amelioration, was born into 
 the world with Amos and Hosea, and their religion 
 is big with our future. 
 
 Renan's History of Israel is, in fact, a history of 
 the religious Idea ; a chronicle of the divine thirst 
 after justice done, not to ourselves, but to all men, 
 for the greater glory of God. The prehistoric 
 cosmogony of Israel is, in this sense, not religious 
 at all : neither the Elohim, the multiple sprites of 
 the air, nor Yahveh, the storm-god of Sinai, have 
 any clear idea of right and wrong. They have 
 not plucked as yet the fruit of the Tree of Know- 
 ledge. Their will is capricious, inexplicable, 
 absurd ; the Elohim wrestle all night with the 
 sons of earth, and are wounded by a man at 
 cock-crow ; they enter into a chiefs garden, and 
 sit at meat with him. Yahveh is of a revolting 
 partiality ; he protects his favourites, he takes 
 care of his own, however little exemplary their 
 conduct, so that it is wise indeed to be the servant 
 
THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL 261 
 
 of Yahveh. The world which these deities govern 
 is quite small; a ladder connects it with the 
 heaven which they inhabit. One may say that 
 up to the death of Solomon true religion was un- 
 known. The deity was still the tribal god : his 
 prophet was still a sorcerer, a medicine-man, a 
 sort of mythic wonder-worker. But let us not 
 despair of that divine instinct in humanity which 
 knows how to turn dross into gold, how to evolve, 
 from the primitive terror of soothsay, the idea of 
 justice, the search for truth, the thirst after 
 righteousness. " Behold the days come (saith 
 the Lord) that I will send a famine in the land, 
 not a famine of bread nor a thirst after water, 
 but of hearing the words of the Lord " (Amos, 
 viii. 1 1 ). And behold, the Word of the Lord has 
 grown in its significance. Yahveh no longer says 
 "worship me and prosper" ; he says "eschew evil 
 and do good." He commands no more " take 
 thy brother's birthright," but " love thy neighbour 
 as thyself." 
 
 It is this moral evolution which is the secret of 
 the undying importance of the History of Israel. 
 Full of ruse and guile, destitute of the sense of 
 Beauty which ennobled Greece, or of the political 
 and military grandeur which made the force of 
 Rome, this small Syrian tribe is no less immortal 
 than Greece or Rome, for it first interpreted the 
 
262 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 secret oracle within the heart of humanity. All 
 the great fibres of spiritual being vibrate in the 
 soul of Israel. Wonder of wonders, the instinct 
 of religion reveals to the prophet even how 
 the day shall dawn when religion shall be 
 other than he may conceive it — freer, ampler, 
 tied to no ritual, bound upon the horns of no 
 altar. 
 
 " And it shall come to pass (saith the Lord) 
 that ye shall say no more : ■ The Ark of the 
 Covenant of the Lord ' : neither shall it come to 
 mind : neither shall ye remember it ; neither 
 shall ye visit it ; neither shall these things be 
 done any more — neither shall ye walk any 
 more after the imagination of an evil heart " 
 (Jeremiah iii. 16). 
 
 Every great gift is developed and nourished 
 at the expense of the exhausted organism which 
 produces it. The soul, that perfect flower of 
 Israel, ruined the material prosperity of Israel. 
 The doctrines of the Prophets are not compatible 
 with any strong military or civic organisation. 
 Preoccupied with individual justice, — individual 
 well-doing and well-being — Amos and Jeremiah 
 conceived as iniquity the nation which deliber- 
 ately devotes thousands of its offspring to the 
 brutal and stupid life of tent and camp. The 
 Assyrian hoplite appeared to them even lower 
 
THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL 263 
 
 in' the scale than the captive of the Assyrians 
 — for him, at least, there should be no return 
 from exile, no promised restoration. And in 
 a primitive civilisation, the country which means 
 to conquer, which means to dominate, can 
 only do so at the cost of the enforced service 
 of the mass : a colossal unconsented slavery in 
 the interests of a fatherland which absorbs and 
 does not reward the factors of its grandeur. 
 There is its fine side, too, in the military glory 
 of an Assyria or an Egypt. But Israel only sees 
 the innocent blood, the endless tears of the just 
 man offended, with which the stones of their 
 pyramids are welded together. And she will 
 none of the magnificence of Assur. 
 
 More than once, in writing the History of 
 Israel, Renan's thoughts reverted to his own 
 times. In Amos and Hosea, in Jeremiah and 
 Isaiah, he saw the forerunners of the socialists 
 of our age. In Nineveh and Babylon he saw 
 the ancestors of feudal Germany. Which is 
 the wiser ? Almost invariably, the nation which 
 labours for Humanity and the Future works its 
 own destruction in the process. The Kingdom of 
 God is not of this w r orld. In the administration 
 of a great power, in the maintenance of a national 
 army, there are abuses which are almost neces- 
 sary. A society which is always just is disarmed 
 
264 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 before the strength of the unscrupulous. A people 
 whose teachers are concerned only with the eternal 
 verities will be far behind Babylon, not simply in 
 practical affairs, but also in natural science. It 
 was Babylon, after all, which first attempted to 
 explain the Universe ; Israel borrowed the ten 
 opening chapters of Genesis from the savants 
 of Chaldaea. An exclusive preoccupation with 
 piety and morals is apt to produce a very 
 mediocre standard of culture. The ideal of 
 Israel is the ideal of a saint, a prophet, a monk, 
 a Savonarola. But which did the most for 
 Florence, Savonarola or the Medici ? 
 
 The happiness and the sanctity of the in- 
 dividual, or the splendour and force of the 
 organism of which he is an atom : whether 
 of these is desirable? More than once Renan 
 has asked himself the question, to which there 
 are only too many answers. Whichever response 
 we accept may be an error, for, when all is said, 
 which of us can be sure of what is in fact the 
 real object of Humanity? 
 
 " He, at least, is not wholly mistaken who fears 
 lest he be in the wrong and treats no one as 
 blind ; who, ignoring the goal of Man, loves him 
 as he strives, he and his work ; who seeks the 
 Truth in doubting of heart, and who says to his 
 opponent : ' Perchance seest thou clearer than 1/ 
 
THE HISTORY OF ISRAEL 265 
 
 He, in fine, who accords his fellows the wide 
 liberty he takes for himself ; — he surely may 
 sleep in peace and await the judgment of all 
 things, if such a judgment there shall be." 1 
 
 1 Hist, du peupled? Israel^ III., p. 279. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 LAST DAYS 
 
 " T N the Name of Life, the vast, the mysterious, 
 the excellent ! " So begins the Bible of 
 the Mendai'tes, and under this invocation would I 
 place the last philosophy of Ernest Renan. The 
 final reaction of his mind was, after all, optimistic. 
 Man is full of errors, but error is essentially 
 transitory, and the eternal result of his passage 
 through the universe is Truth. God is absent 
 from the scheme of things in the sense of Action ; 
 in all the ages of human history no trustworthy 
 evidence attests a divine intervention to protect 
 the innocent or to relieve the sufferer. But the 
 law and condition of so much of the Universe as 
 we may understand is ever a perpetual Fieri y a 
 divine Becoming, an eternal development towards 
 an unknown end, which may become at last a 
 manifestation of the Hidden Divinity. Nor, be- 
 cause His ways are not as our ways, His thoughts 
 as our thoughts, let us too hastily conclude the 
 eternal absence of that Heavenly Father which 
 
 the heart of man claims, and to which he calls 
 
 266 
 
LAST DAYS 
 
 267 
 
 incessantly without response. Out of our tears 
 and our prayers He may yet be born. More- 
 over, rightly considered, is not that call of ours 
 its own answer ? Disinterested prayer is not 
 a petition but an act of praise, an act of 
 Hope, an inner communing with the principle 
 of things, an affirmation of the spiritual Reality 
 which governs appearances. " And our day- 
 dreams themselves are another fashion of ador- 
 ing — a poor inferior prayer, full of long re- 
 mainders of the ardour of our youth, warm as 
 covered embers are, instinct with the secret 
 assurance that the Absolute Night itself is, per- 
 chance, not devoid of this same lingering warmth 
 and life ! " 1 The unselfish man — the only one 
 who counts — prays in secret a hundred times a 
 day. For an acquiescence in the laws of that 
 Universe, in which alone we may see God, — "as 
 in a glass, darkly," — is not this also Prayer and 
 an act of Faith ? 
 
 We must fain believe in Something inde- 
 pendent of the Finite and the Knowable, when 
 in our own hearts, in our own lives, in the 
 lives of all around us we observe the persistence 
 and the universality of certain great guiding 
 principles which are folly, according to the wis- 
 dom of this world : self-sacrifice, love, disin- 
 
 1 Preface to the Nouvelles Etudes Religieuses % 
 
268 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 terestedness, the instinct of Duty. These are 
 the voice of the Universe, " a language which 
 hails from the Infinite, perfectly clear in its com- 
 mands, obscure in its promises " 1 — a language, 
 which in some fashion and degree, we all obey. 
 No man is absolutely and consistently a monster ; 
 in every life there is some effort towards Love, 
 Truth, or Beauty ; the worst man drops one of 
 these priceless gold coins into the world's coffer 
 against the millions of mere brass counters which 
 he squanders out of window. And in the 
 scheme of things, Good is a coin of great 
 price, Evil is poor trash of no value. Thus 
 there is scarce any existence which, rightly 
 summed up, does not show an imperceptible 
 balance to the good. 
 
 Like Francis of Assisi, whom he understood 
 so well (" St Francis will save him ! " once cried 
 a Capuchin friar), Renan had arrived at the 
 supreme indulgence — he no longer believed in 
 the existence of sin. Evil appeared to him a 
 void, a vacuum, a gap to be filled up in the 
 gradual process of Creation ; but not a substance 
 to be vanquished and destroyed. Of him also 
 might it be said : " He would not admit the 
 reality of evil. It is not that he was indifferent, 
 but, in probing the heart of man, he found no irre- 
 
 1 Fetalis Detachhs : Examen de Conscience Philosophique. 
 
LAST DAYS 
 
 269 
 
 missible guilt in it: the one sin is baseness; weak- 
 ness, error, seemed to him scarcely sin/' 1 He 
 would have said with Plato, that when the Soul 
 is alienate from Truth, it is always momentarily 
 so constrained against its will : the natural growth 
 of our spirits being towards the light. An in- 
 voluntary opinion can not be a crime. Let us 
 believe that the sin of our neighbour is no affair 
 of ours, and probably infinitely less important 
 than we deem it. In time, the Truth will 
 certainly prevail, and convince even them that 
 sit in outer darkness. 
 
 The two fundamental doctrines of religion 
 remain undemonstrable : no man can prove the 
 existence of a personal God, nor the im- 
 mortality of the Soul. The task of the modern 
 thinker is the task of Kant — the task of the 
 Prophets of Israel. They justified the ways of 
 God to man with little more than the minimum 
 of faith ; from the rebellious stuff of humanity 
 they extracted righteousness and resignation, and 
 patient depths of long self-sacrifice, with no sure 
 promise of a future life. They loved God for 
 God, and the right for the sake of righteousness. 
 Happy those who can so inspire their fellows 
 without alleging anything unproven, anything 
 with which their conscience may reproach them 
 
 1 Nouvelles Etudes Religieuses: St Francois d'Assise, p. 333. 
 
270 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 as a lure. Piety may exist independent of all 
 dogma, and may prove the inner strength and 
 consolation of the Soul. We may still " seek 
 God," like the wise men of Israel, and find much 
 sweetness in that seeking. We may weep to 
 Him alone in our trouble, nor our tears be shed 
 in vain. For in the end, in the infinite end of 
 ages, Humanity creates the thing which it desires. 
 And at last, at last, all the dreams of Man come 
 true. 
 
 Thus "the most logical attitude of the thinker 
 towards Religion is : to behave as though Religion 
 were true. We must act as though God and 
 the Soul were proven. Religion is one of the 
 numerous hypotheses, such as the waves of ether, 
 or the electric, luminous, caloric and nervous fluids, 
 nay, the atom itself, which we know to be mere 
 symbols and manners of speech, convenient for 
 the explaining of certain phenomena, but which, 
 none the less, we maintain." 1 The more we 
 reflect, the more we see the impossibility of 
 proving, but also the moral necessity of be- 
 lieving in, these great premisses : God and 
 the Soul. Let us keep the category of the 
 Unknowable ! Parallels meet at the Infinite : 
 Science and Religion doubtless meet there. And 
 1 Examen de Conscience.— Feuilles DZtacJUes, p. 432. 
 
LAST DAYS 
 
 271 
 
 if not ? — Why, then, Renan would have said with 
 Goethe : 
 
 " Wen Gott betriigt ist wohl betrogen." 
 
 The most intelligent course of Man, as well 
 as the most virtuous, is to act in the general 
 sense of Universal Law. Domine, si error est, a 
 te decepti sunt I 
 
 In philosophy the consolatory hypothesis is, 
 after all, as good an hypothesis as any other. It 
 is the only one which could abidingly content a 
 man like Renan, who, — dilettante and scholar as 
 he remained, no doubt, — was none the less, by 
 the inner constitution of his being, a profoundly 
 religious man. The needs of his nature were 
 triple : his heart desired Beauty and his mind 
 Truth ; but the earnest problem of Man's virtue 
 in Nature's ruthlessness was the fundamental pre- 
 occupation of his soul. 
 
 " I often reproach myself (he said, in almost 
 the last pages that fell from his hand) because 
 at my age, I am sometimes occupied with other 
 things than these Eternal Verities. My excuse 
 is that my chief duty here below is accomplished. 
 . . . That last arch of the bridge which I had 
 still to throw between Christianity and Judaism, 
 is now established. ... I have still much to do 
 in the way of proof-correcting ; but, if I died 
 
272 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 to-morrow, with the aid of a good corrector, 
 my History of Israel could -appear in its com- 
 pleteness." 1 
 
 The third and finest volume of this last and 
 great work appeared in 1891. Renan did not 
 live to see the publication of the two concluding 
 tomes, which he left almost finished, lacking, in- 
 deed, those fine last touches, those delicate elabor- 
 ations and reservations, which he was wont to 
 add — patiently, interminably — on page after page 
 of his proofs. The pearl has less gloss, and a 
 dimmer orient, it may be ; but its orb is perfect, 
 and its structure sound. The chapters on Philo 
 and the Essenians, which adorn the fifth volume, 
 are among the most vivid and the purest which 
 we owe to Renan's singular genius. Age could 
 not stale nor custom wither that infinite variety. 
 The extraordinary freshness, the divine youth of 
 his spirit remained almost unimpaired by suffering, 
 to his last hour. It is a freshness as of thyme and 
 dew on a spring morning ; something natural, 
 and sweet, and pure ; and it was never more 
 conspicuous, as mere style, than in those Feuilles 
 Detaches, which he collected and published in the 
 very year of his death. 
 
 For long enough his health had been failing. 
 He took all the little miseries of age and a broken 
 
 1 Preface to Feuilles Detachers. 
 
LAST DAYS 
 
 273 
 
 constitution in that spirit of mingled irony and 
 sweetness which never left him. Before mere 
 physical suffering, he was ever serene as an 
 image of Buddha. Enforced idleness was a 
 sorer burden, and sometimes he would half com- 
 plain that in his childhood he had never learned 
 to play. His little grandchildren began his 
 instruction in that wise art. But the sage was 
 too tired to prove an apt pupil. He liked best to 
 look on and listen, thinking of many things, and 
 enjoying that last pleasure of watching life's 
 morning windows brighten when the sun forsakes 
 us in the west. 
 
 Few people suffer more than he in his last 
 illness. Protracted neuralgia tortured him month 
 by month. He admitted the fact, but never 
 murmured, and would certainly not have owned 
 himself unhappy. For he loved Life, and saw that 
 it was good. Self-pity was a weakness which he 
 knew not. Nor did his own pain ever blind him 
 to the immense sum of virtue, love, beauty, 
 knowledge, and innocent happiness, which, all 
 round him, at that instant, the universe was 
 yielding undiminished. That tiny but eternal 
 residue of good, that drop of immortal aroma, 
 which the scheme of things secretes from day 
 to day, appeared to impregnate every moment 
 of his life, and to embalm even the pangs of his 
 
 s 
 
274 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 agony. I think there was no day, even of that 
 cruel last year, from which he would not have 
 offered from a sincere heart, his Te Deum Laud- 
 amus. If there were hours in it racked with 
 intercostal neuralgia, stupefied with oppressive 
 weakness, there were also moments — divine 
 moments whose superior value outweighed those 
 hours — in which he was able to complete the 
 great task of his life ; or which he gave to the 
 management of that beloved College whose good 
 genius he was ; or he spent them in discussing 
 with a few chosen spirits — M. Berthelot, M. Taine, 
 M. Gaston Paris, and some others ever welcome — 
 the questions which occupied his unfailing mind in 
 sickness as in health ; or, simply, he let himself 
 rest in the tender love of his dear wife and 
 children. 
 
 He knew that he was dying. The physicians 
 continued to speak of gout, of rheumatism, of 
 neuralgia — but it is, I think, impossible to have 
 a mortal disease and not to know it : for years he 
 had told his wife that his heart was affected. 
 But he was dying at the end of his chosen task, 
 having completed the immense circle which he 
 had dared to trace. He had married his daughter, 
 and had embraced her children. The sensitive 
 artistic spirit of his son, the painter, showed itself 
 calmed and fortified by the first draught of success. 
 
LAST DAYS 
 
 275 
 
 His wife, the trusted confidante and secretary 
 of more than thirty years, would execute his 
 last wishes, and would see his History through 
 the press. One of his favourite pupils would 
 succeed him in his chair at the College of 
 France, and in the direction of the Corpus. He 
 could repeat with the ancient Simeon : Nunc 
 dimittis servum tuum, Domine, secundum verbum 
 tuum y in pace. . . . 
 
 The future, in fine, was a spectacle which he 
 could regard with a great satisfaction. He had 
 given his life to Truth, and he had certainly 
 furthered her progress. He had chosen the better 
 part, and it had not been taken away from him. 
 The things in which he had put the truest part of 
 his life would survive him, and would be fruitful 
 in his absence. Untimely death may be terrible, 
 for it may mean a waste of immense possibilities. 
 But death when our task is achieved? Why 
 rebel against the law of nature ? Did we ever 
 believe ourselves exempt from mortality ? 
 
 At the New Year of 1892 the Renans went to 
 Cap Martin for a few weeks of sun and sea. The 
 blue Mediterranean shore enveloped the dying 
 sage with its enchantment. He felt better, well, 
 saw the future brighten and lengthen before him. 
 But the south in winter is a cup of which a 
 sick man should drink deep, or not at all. 
 
276 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 Despite his wasted health, Renan could not 
 make up his mind to desert the College even 
 for a season. Before the month was out he 
 returned to resume his course of Hebrew. On 
 the return journey, at Dijon, he took a chill. 
 And after that, again, he was less well all winter. 
 
 Those who knew him as well as I did will 
 never forget his quiet heroism, his unassuming 
 devotion, all through the first semestre of 1892. 
 With my eyes shut, I can still see the heavy 
 quaint figure painfully descending the steep 
 stairs of the College, and serenely accosting, with 
 oppressed breath, but without complaint, the col- 
 leagues he directed, with a smile. He delivered 
 his lectures with exactitude. He presided over 
 the Asiatic Society. He completed his studies on 
 the Mediaeval Rabbis for the Academy of Inscrip- 
 tions ; — and this was a great joy. On Friday 
 evenings, in his wife's salon, his friends found 
 him willing to converse with them on any sub- 
 ject. His unimpaired curiosity continued to 
 interrogate the universe. He was dying, but he 
 had not abdicated. 
 
 At midsummer he moved with his family to 
 the Breton coast. And for a while things went 
 well with him. He loved his calm manor of 
 Rosmapamon, the fresh quiet country, with its 
 green fields and spinnies, its commons golden 
 
LAST DAYS 
 
 277 
 
 with gorse, its great granite rocks, its sombre and 
 splendid sea. It was there, perhaps, that he 
 spent his happiest days. " My ideal " — (he says 
 in the Eau de Jouvence, speaking as usual through 
 the lips of Prospero). — " My ideal would be an 
 old patriarchal country house, full of children 
 singing, full of lads and lasses light of heart, 
 where everyone would eat, drink, and be merry 
 at my expense." Rosmapamon supplied his kind 
 old age with that hospitable holiday. There 
 were long quiet mornings for work : evenings 
 in which the tired enchanter saw, as he wished, 
 the young people unchecked by his presence in 
 their merry-making. In the afternoons, in the 
 long, lazy, summer afternoons, almost every day 
 he went a little walk, leaning on his wife's arm. 
 He would sit on a bank by the side of a field, and 
 look placidly over the Celtic landscape which he 
 had loved in childhood — of which he felt himself 
 an animate part. But there was one thing he 
 loved more than Nature, and that was knowledge ; 
 the service of Truth. When, at the end of Sep- 
 tember, he had an attack of the heart, he said to 
 Madame Renan : " Take me back to the College." 
 And there on the 12th of October 1892, he died 
 at his post. 
 
 He died happy. His mind kept to the end its 
 
278 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 serene lucidity, his temper its kind sweetness 
 unalloyed by personal repining. All he asked 
 was that his illness should put nothing out of its 
 due order, that his death should cost no excessive 
 grief — the only thing in which his wife ever 
 disobeyed him. " I have done my work," he said 
 to Madame Renan, " I die happy." And again 
 he said, " It is the most natural thing in the 
 world to die : let us accept the Laws of the 
 Universe " — and he added : " the heavens and 
 the earth remain." 
 
 So he passed away, and his death struck 
 France with a sort of stupor. He was the 
 greatest man of genius our generation had 
 known : in style, sentiment, poetry of feeling no 
 less a Master than Victor Hugo ; in history and 
 philosophy the compeer of Taine ; in philology 
 the heir of Burnouf. There was scarce one 
 branch of thought in France but it was im- 
 poverished by his disappearance. 
 
 He was buried with great honours. The grey 
 old College was decked as for a national festivity. 
 The best and wisest men in France bade a public 
 farewell to his sacred ashes. There had been a 
 question of laying him to rest under the dome of 
 the Pantheon. At the last moment the Govern- 
 ment feared the protest of the Right at the 
 
LAST DAYS 
 
 279 
 
 opening of the Chambers. And the great Idealist 
 had not where to lay his head. . . . His wife buried 
 him with her people in the vault of the Sheffers 
 at Mont-Martre. But where he should have 
 lain, where he would have wished to lie, is in 
 the small, green space which the cloister of 
 Tr^guier encloses. "It is there I would sleep/' 
 he said once, " under a stone engraved with these 
 words — 
 
 Veritatem Dilexi? 
 
 Who knows ? the day may dawn when the 
 Church of his youth may yet accept the guardian- 
 ship of the grave of Ernest Renan. 
 
 " All religions are vain (he said), but religion is 
 not vain." ..." Let us not abjure our Heavenly 
 Father. Let us not deny the possibility of a final 
 justice. Perchance we have never known one of 
 those tragic situations where God is the sole 
 Confidant, the necessary Consoler. . . . Where 
 else shall we seek the true witness, if not on high ? 
 How often have we felt the need of an appeal to 
 Absolute Truth ; how often we would cry to it : 
 ' Speak ! Speak ! ' Who knows ? At that in- 
 stant we were, perhaps, on the threshold of 
 Truth. But the strange thing is that nothing 
 
28o LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 shows if our protestations have found a hearing. 
 When Nimrod shot his arrows into Heaven, they 
 came back to him tipped with blood. We have 
 never received any response at all. O God, 
 whom we adore in spite of all, Thou art in truth 
 a Hidden God ! " 1 
 
 These were almost the last written words of 
 Ernest Renan. They are characteristic. They 
 might be taken from his earliest pages. Instinct 
 and Reason speak to us in different voices, equally 
 imperious, equally insistent ; only we are most of 
 us a little deaf with one ear ! But Renan lost no 
 word of either of these eternal monitors. There 
 is his secret, there his charm, there the peculiar 
 value of his genius. But therein also the some- 
 thing unconvinced — or only momentarily convinced 
 — which leaves his purest harmonies for ever un- 
 resolved. We know that, in one other moment, 
 he will hear the other Voice, he will deliver a 
 different message : le coeur a ses raisons que la 
 raison ne connait pas. One lobe of his brain is 
 continually engaged in supplementing the thoughts 
 produced by the other : we can imagine them as 
 two mirrors so placed as to show the opposing 
 faces of the object they reflect. Fortunately this 
 variety is saved from chaos by certain dominating 
 
 1 Preface to Feuilles DdtacMes* 
 
LAST DAYS 
 
 281 
 
 principles which remain unaltered in the midst of 
 mutability. 
 
 Religion may or may not be true ; it is not 
 vain ; even though it answer to no supernatural 
 reality. Our conscience is a moral fact as im- 
 portant as our reason, and the man who says 
 " I ought " as superior to the savage as the man 
 who says " I reflect." 
 
 The Good exists ; and indeed we may say that 
 it alone exists. Evil is transitory. In its different 
 forms of Truth, Virtue, Knowledge, Beauty, the 
 Good endures and accumulates, and, by the im- 
 pulse of its own force, must develop more and 
 more. " The world's our oyster " : slowly, surely, 
 it secretes the inevitable pearl which may survive 
 it. Meanwhile Evil is with us certainly. We 
 suffer, we are oppressed by material circumstances, 
 we may even die before our time in anguish and 
 never bring forth the fruit which we were destined 
 to produce. Yet the construction of the universe 
 allows for infinite waste. Other germs will bear ; 
 all will not be blasted. Evil is a sort of moral 
 carbonic acid gas, mortal when isolated and a real 
 danger to our existence ; and yet, when combined 
 with other forces, not only innocuous, but even 
 necessary to our vital powers, in the present 
 state of their development. The important 
 thing in life is not our misery, our despair, 
 
 T 
 
282 LIFE OF ERNEST RENAN 
 
 however crushing, but the one good moment 
 which outweighs it all. Man is born to suffer, 
 but he is born to hope. And the message of 
 the universe still runs, as of old : a/Xhov, a/Xhov, 
 elm, rh d y *v vixdrw. 
 
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