The Reminiscences of Ernest Renan

THERE has always been an element of the magical in the style of M. Ernest Renan — an art of saying things in a way to make them beautiful. At the present moment he is the first writer in France; no one has in an equal degree the secret of fairness of expression. His style is fair in both the senses in which we use the word — in that of being temperate and just, and in that of being without a flaw ; and these Reminiscences of his younger years,¹ lately collected from the Revue des Deux Mondes, are perhaps the most complete revelation of it. His problem here was unusually difficult, and his success has been proportionately brilliant. He proposed to talk uninterruptedly about himself, and yet he proposed — or rather he was naturally disposed—to remain a model of delicacy. M. Renan is the great apostle of the delicate ; he upholds this waning fashion on every occasion. His mission is to say delicate things, to plead the cause of intellectual good manners, and he is wonder-

fully competent to discharge it. No one to-day says such things so well, though in our own language Mr. Matthew Arnold often approaches him. Among his own countrymen, SainteBeuve cultivated the same art, and there was nothing too delicate for SainteBeuve to attempt to say. But he spoke less simply — his delicacy was always a greater complexity. M. Renan, on the other hand, delivers himself of those truths which he has arrived at through the fineness of his perception and the purity of his taste with a candid confidence, an absence of personal precautions, which leave the image as perfect and as naked as an old Greek statue. It is needless to say that there is nothing crude in M. Renan ; but the soft serenity with which, in the presence of a mocking world, he leaves his usual plea for the ideal to any fate that may await it is an example of how extremes may sometimes meet. It is not enough to say of him that he has the courage of his opinions; for that, after all, is a comparatively frequent virtue. He has the resignation ; he has the indifference; he has, above all, the good humor. He combines qualities the most diverse, and, lighted up as he is by the interesting confessions of the volume before us, he presents himself as au extraordinary figure. He makes the remark that in his opinion less importance will be attached to talent as the world goes on ; what we shall care for will be simply truth. This declaration is singular in many ways, among others in this: that it appears to overlook the fact that one of the great uses of talent will always be to discover truth and present it ; and that, being an eminently personal thing, and therefore susceptible of great variety, it can hardly fail to be included in the estimate that the world will continue to make of persons. M. Renan makes light of his own talent — he can well afford to ; if he appears to be quite conscious of the degree in which it exists, he minimizes as much as possible the merit that attaches to it. This is a part of that constant play of taste which animates his style, governs his judgments, colors all his thought; for nothing can be in better taste, of course, than to temper the violence with which you happen to strike people. To make your estimate of your own gifts as low as may seem probable is a form of high consideration for others ; it corresponds perfectly with that canon of good manners which requires us to take up a moderate space at table. At the feast of existence we may not jostle our neighbors, and to be considerate is for M. Renan an indefeasible necessity. He informs us of this himself; it is true that we had long ago guessed it. He places the fact before us, however, in a relation to other facts, which makes it doubly interesting ; he gives us the history of his modesty, his erudition, his amiability, his temperance of appetite, his indifference to gain. The reader will easily perceive the value that must attach to such explanations on the part of a man of M. Renan’s intelligence. He finds himself in constant agreement with the author, who does nothing but interpret with extraordinary tact the latent impressions of his critic.

M. Renan carries to such a high point the art of pleasing that we enter without a protest into the pleasantness of the account he gives of himself. He is incapable of evil, learned, happy, cheerful, witty, devoted to the ideal, indifferent to every vulgar aim. He demonstrates all this with such grace, such discretion and good humor, that the operation, exempt from vulgar vanity, from motives of self-interest, M. Renan being at that point of literary eminence where a writer has nothing more to gain, seems to go on in the pure ether of the abstract, among the causes of things and above all questions of relative success. Speaking of his ancestors in Brittany, whom he traces back to the fifth century, simple tillers of the earth and fishers of the sea, he says, with great felicity, “ There they led for thirteen hundred years a life of obscurity, saving up their thoughts and sensations into an accumulated capital, which has fallen at last to me. I feel that I think for them and that they live in me. . . . My incapacity to be bad, or even to appear so, comes to me from them.” Many men would hesitate to speak so freely of their incapacity to be bad; others, still more of their incapacity to appear so. But M. Renan has polished to such clearness the plate of glass through which he allows us to look at him that we are quite unable to charge him with deceiving us. If we fail to see in him so much good as that, it is simply that our vision is more dim, our intelligence less fine. “ I have a strong taste for the people, for the poor. I have been able, alone in my age, to understand Jesus and Francis of Assisi.” There is a great serenity in that, and though, detached from the text, it may startle us a little, it will not seem to the reader who meets it in its place to be a boastful note. M. Renan does not indeed mean to say that he has been the only Christian of his time; he means that he is not acquainted with any description of the character of Jesus containing as much historic truth as the Life he published in 1864. The passage is curious, however, as showing the lengths to which a man of high delicacy may go when he undertakes to be perfectly frank. That, indeed, is the interest of the whole volume. Many of its pages are rare and precious, in that they offer us together certain qualities that are almost never combined. The aristocratic intellect is not prone to confess itself, to take other minds into its confidence. M. Renan believes in a caste of intellectual nobles, and of course does not himself belong to any inferior order. Yet in these volumes he has alighted from his gilded coach, as it were ; he has come down into the streets and walked about with the multitude. He has, in a word, waived the question of privacy — a great question for such a man as M. Renan to waive. When the impersonal becomes personal the change is great, and it is interesting to see that sooner or later it must become so. Naturally, for us English readers, the difference of race renders such a fact more difficult to appreciate; for we have a traditional theory that when it comes to making confidences a Frenchman is capable of almost anything. He is certainly more gracefully egotistic than people of other stock, though he may have more real reserve than his style would indicate. His modesty is individual, his style is generic; he writes in a language which makes everything definite, including confessions and other forms of self-reference. The truth is that he talks better than other people, and that the genius of talk carries him far. There is nothing into which it carries people more naturally than egotism. M. Renan’s volume is a prolonged causerie, and he has both the privileges and the success of the talker.

There are many things in his composition and many things in his writing; more than we have any hope of describing in their order. “ I was not a priest in profession ; I was a priest in mind. All my defects are owing to that: they are the defects of the priest.” The basis of M. Renan’s character and his work is the qualities that led him to study for the priesthood, and the experience of a youth passed in Catholic seminaries. “ Le pli était pris — the bent was taken,” as he says ; in spite of changes, renunciations, a rupture with these early aspirations as complete as it was painful, he has remained indefinably, ineffaceably, clerical. The higher education of a Catholic priest is an education of subtleties, and subtlety is the note, as we say to-day, of M. Renan’s view of things. But he is a profane philosopher as well as a product of the seminary, and he is in the bargain a Parisian and a man of letters; so that the groundwork has embroidered itself with many patterns. When we add to this the high scholarship, the artistic feeling, the urbanity, the amenity of temper, that quality of ripeness and completeness, the air of being permeated by civilization, which our author owes to his great experience of human knowledge, to his eminent position in literature and science, to his association with innumerable accomplished and distinguished minds — when we piece these things together we feel that the portrait he has, both by intention and by implication, painted of himself has not wanted an inspiring model. The episode which M. Renan has had mainly to relate in these pages is of course the interruption of his clerical career. He has made the history so suggestive, so interesting, and given such a charm to his narrative, that we have little hesitation in saying that these chapters will rank among the most brilliant he has produced. We are almost ashamed to express ourselves in this manner, for, as we have said, M. Renan makes very light of literary glory, and cares little for this kind of commendation. Indeed, when we turn to the page in which he gives us the measure of his indifference to successful form we feel almost tempted to blot out what we have written. “ I do not share the error of the literary judgments of our time.... I tried to care for literature for a while only to gratify M. Sainte-Beuve, who had a great deal of influence over me. Since his death I care no longer. I see very Well that talent has a value only because the world is childish. If it had a strong enough head it would content itself with truth. ... I have never sought to make use of this inferior quality [literary skill], which has injured me more as a savant than it has helped me for itself. I have never in the least rested on it. ... I have always been the least literary of men.” The reader may be tempted to ask himself whether these remarks are but a refinement of coquetry; whether a faculty of expression so perfect as M. Renan’s was ever a simple accident. He will do well, however, to decide that the writer is sincere, for he speaks from the point of view of a seeker of scientific truth. M. Renan is deeply versed in the achievements of German science: he knows what has been done by scholars who have not sacrificed to the graces, and in the presence of these great examples he would fain persuade himself that he has not, at least consentingly, been guilty of that weakness. In spite of this he will continue to pass for one of the most characteristic children of the race that is preëminent in the art of statement. It is a proof of the richness of his genius that we may derive so much entertainment from those parts of it which he regards as least essential. We do not pretend in this place to speak, with critical or other intention, of the various admirable works which have presented M. Renan to the world as one of the most acute explorers of the mysteries of early Christian history ; we take for granted the fact that they have been largely appreciated, and that the writer, as he stands before us here, has the benefit of all the authority which a great task executed in a great manner can confer. But we venture to say that, fascinating, touching, as his style, to whatever applied, never ceases to be, none of the great subjects he has treated has taken a more charming light from the process than these evocations of his own laborious past.

And we say this with a perfect consciousness that the volume before us is after all, in a certain sense, but an elaborate jeu d’esprit. M. Renan is a philosopher, but he is a sportive philosopher; he is full of soft irony, of ingenious fancy, of poetic sympathies, of transcendent tastes. He speaks more than once of his natural gayety, and of that quality in members of the Breton race which leads them to move freely in the moral world and to divert themselves with ideas, with sentiments. Half of the ideas, the feelings, that M. Renan expresses in these pages (and they spring from under his pen with wonderful facility) are put forward with a smile which seems a constant admission that he knows that everything that one may say has eventually to be qualified. The qualification may be in one’s tact, one’s discretion, one’s civility, one’s desire not to be dogmatic ; in other considerations, too numerous for us to mention. M. Renan has a horror of dogmatism ; he thinks that one should always leave that to one’s opponent, as it is an instrument with which he ends by cutting himself. He has a high conception of generosity, and though his mind contains several very positive convictions, he is of the opinion that there is always a certain grossness in insistence. Two or three curious passages throw light upon this disposition. “ Not having amused myself when I was young, and yet having in my character a great deal of irony and gayety, I have been obliged, at the age at which one sees the vanity of everything, to become extremely indulgent to foibles with which I had never had to reproach myself: so that various persons, who perhaps have not behaved so well as I, have sometimes found themselves scandalized at my complaisance. In political matters, above all, people of a Puritan turn cannot imagine what I am about; it is the order of things in which I like myself best, and yet ever so many persons think my laxity in this respect extreme. I cannot get it out of my head that it is perhaps, after all, the libertine who is right and who practices the true philosophy of life. From this source have sprung in me certain surprises, certain exaggerated admirations. Sainte-Beuve, Théophile Gautier, pleased me a little too much. Their affectation of immorality prevented me from seeing how little their philosophy hung together (le décousu de leur philosophie).” There is a certain stiffly literal sense in which, of course, these lines are not to be taken ; but they are a charming specimen of what one may call delicacy of confession. The great thing is to have been able to afford to write them ; on that condition they are delightfully human and charged with the soft irony of which I have spoken — the element to which M. Renan alludes in a passage that occurs shortly after the one I have quoted, and in which he mentions that, “ save the small number of persons with whom I recognize an intellectual fraternity, I say to every one what I suppose must give him pleasure.” He says that he expresses himself freely only with people “whom I know to be liberated from any opinion, and to be able to take the stand-points of a kindly universal irony.” “ For the rest,” he remarks, “ I have sometimes, in my couversation and my correspondence, d’étranges défalliances. . . . My inanity with people I meet in society exceeds all belief.

. . . Devoted on a kind of system to an exaggerated politeness, the politeness of the priest, I try to find out what my interlocutor would like me to say to him.

. . . This is the result of a supposition that few men are sufficiently detached from their own ideas not to be wounded if you say something different from what they think.” We should not omit to explain that what we have just quoted applies only to M. Renan’s conversation and letters. “ In my published writings I have been of an absolute sincerity. Not only have I not said anything that I do not think, but, a much more rare and more difficult thing, I have said all that I think.” It will be seen that M. Renan tells us a good deal about himsel f.

His Reminiscences are ushered in by a preface which is one of the happiest pieces of writing that has ever proceeded from his pen, and in which he delivers himself of his opinion on that very striking spectacle, the democratization of the world. He is preëminently a man of general views. Few men have more of them at their command; few men face the occasion for speech with greater serenity, or avail themselves of it with more grace. His prefaces have always been important and eloquent; readers of the first collection of his critical essays, published upwards of thirty years ago, will not have forgotten the enchanting pages that introduced it. We feel a real obligation to quote the opening lines of the preface before us ; from the point of view of style they give the key of the rest of the volume. We must add that it is not easy to transport their exquisite rhythm into another tongue. “ Among the legends most diffused in Brittany is that of a so-called town of Is, which at an unknown period must have been engulfed by the sea. They show you, in sundry places on the coast, the site of this fabled city, and the fishermen tell you strange stories about it. They assure you that on days of storm the tip of the spires of its churches may be seen in the hollow of the waves ; that on days of calm you may hear the sound of its bells come up from the deeps, intoning the hymn of the day. It seems to me often that I have in the bottom of my heart a city of Is, which still rings bells that persist in gathering to sacred rites the faithful who no longer hear. At times I stop to lend an ear to these trembling vibrations, which appear to me to come from infinite depths, like the voices of another world. On the limits of old age, above all, I have taken pleasure in collecting together such echoes of an Atlantis that has passed away.” It may have been that M. Renan wrote these harmonious lines with the same ignorance of what he was about that characterized M. Jourdain ; in this case he is only to be congratulated the more. The city of Is represents his early education, his early faith, a state of mind that was peopled with spires and bells, but has long since sunk deep into the sea of time, lie explains in some degree the manner in which he has retraced this history, choosing to speak of certain things and to pass in silence over others, and then proceeds, by those transitions through which no one glides so gracefully as he, to sundry charming considerations upon the present state of mankind and the apparent future of our society. We call his reflections charming, because M. Renan’s view of life always strikes us as a work of art, and we naturally apply to it the epithets which we should use in speaking of any delightful achievement. As a votary of the ideal, a person who takes little interest in the practical, a distinguished member of that beneficent noblesse of intellect of which we have spoken, it would be natural that M. Renan should tend to conservative opinions; and he expresses such opinions, in various later pages, with exquisite humor and point : “ In other terms, our great democratic machines exclude the polite man. I have long since given up using the omnibus ; the conductors ended by taking me for a passenger of no intentions. ... I was made for a society founded upon respect, in which one is saluted, classified, placed, according to his costume, and has not to protect himself. . . . The habit that I found in the East of walking only preceded by a forerunner suited me not ill ; for one’s modesty receives a lift from the apparatus of force. It is well to have under one’s orders a man armed with a scourge which one prevents him from using. I should not be sorry to have the right of life and death, so that I might never put it into practice ; and I should be very glad to own a few slaves, in order to be extremely mild with them and make them adore me.” There is a certain dandyism of sensibility, if we may be allowed the expression, in that; but the author’s perfect good-humor carries it off, as it always carries off the higher flights of his fastidiousness, making them seem simply a formal, a sort of cheerfully hopeless, protest in the name of the ideal. M. Renan is always ready to make the practical concession, and he shows that it is a great thing to have a fine taste, which tells us when to yield as well as when to resist, and points out, moreover, the beauty of passing things by. “ One should never write save about what one likes. Forgetfulness and silence are the punishment that we inflict on what we find ugly or common in the walk that we take through life.” This discretion helps M. Renan to feel that, though the immense material progress of this century is not favorable to good manners, it is a great mistake to put ourselves in opposition to what our age may be doing. “ It does it without us, and probably it is right. The world moves toward a sort of Americanism, which wounds our refined ideas, but which, once the crisis of the present hour is passed, may very well be no worse than the old régime for the only thing that matters ; that is, the emancipation and the progress of the human mind.” And M. Renan develops the idea that, in spite of all that the votaries of disinterested speculation may find wanting in a society exclusively democratic and industrial, and however much they may miss the advantages of belonging to a protected class, their security is greater, on the whole, in the new order of things. “ Perhaps some day the general vulgarity will be a condition of the happiness of the elect. The American vulgarity [sic] would not burn Giordano Bruno, would not persecute Galileo. . . . People of taste live in America, on the condition of not being too exacting.” So he terminates with the declaration that the best thing one can do is to accept one’s age, if for no other reason than that it is after all a part of the past that one looks back to with regret. All the centuries of a nation are the leaves of the same book.” And in regard to this intelligent resignation, which fortifies itself with curiosity, M. Renan says several excellent things : “ There will always be an advantage in having lighted on this planet as late as possible. . . . One must never regret that one sees a little better.” M. Renan’s preface is a proof that he possesses the good spirits which he notes as an ingredient of his character. He is a raffinée, and a raffiné with an extraordinary gift of putting his finger on sensitive spots; with a reasoned ideal of the millennium. But a raffiné without bitterness is a very harmless person.

The first chapters of this volume are not the most vivid, though they contain a very interesting picture of the author’s birthplace, the little dead town of Tréguier, a gray cluster of convents and churches on the coast of Catholic Brittany. Tréguier was intensely conventual, and the young Renan was, as a matter of course, predestined to the church. “ This strange set of circumstances has given me for historic studies those qualities that I may possess. The essence of criticism is to be able to understand states very different from those in which we live. I have seen the primitive world. In Brittany, before 1830, the most distant past was still alive.” The specimens which M. Renan gives of this primitive world are less happily sketched than the general picture ; the coloring is rather pale; some of the anecdotes — that of the little Noémi, that of the Bonhotnme Système — are perhaps slightly wanting in point. He remarks somewhere, in regard to the opposition, about which so much used to be said, between the classic and the romantic, that, though he fully admits the latter, he admits it only as subject — not in the least as a possible form. To his mind there is only one form, which is the classic. And in another place he speaks of Flaubert, the novelist — “ ce pauvre Flaubert ” — as being quite unable to conceive of anything abstract. Putting these things together, we see a certain reason why M. Renan’s personal portraits (with the exception of the picture of himself) should be wanting in reality. They are too general, too white; the author, wonderfully at home in the abstract, has rather neglected the concrete. “ Ce pauvre Flaubert” would be revenged for M. Renan’s allusion, if it were possible to him to read the episode of the Flax-Grinder — revenged (an exquisite revenge for an artist) by simply finding it flat. It is when he comes to dip into his own spiritual history that M. Renan shows himself a masterly narrator. In that region of abstractions, where the most tangible thing was the palpitating conscience, he moves with the firmest step. The chapters on the two seminaries in which he spent the first years of his residence in Paris, Saint Nicholas du Chardonnet and Saint Sulpice, are full of the most acute notation of moral and intellectual conditions. The little Breton seminarist moved too fast, and, to speak briefly, very soon transcended his instructors. He had a passion for science, and his great aptitude for philology promptly defined itself. He traces with singular art the process by which, young, simple, devout, dedicated to the church from his infancy, the object of maternal and pastoral hopes, he found himself confronted with the fact that he could no longer be a Catholic. He also points out well that it was the rigidity of the Catholic system that made continuance impossible, it being all of one piece, so that dissent as to one point involved rejection of the whole. “ It is not my fault if my masters had taught me logic, and by their pitiless argumentations had converted my mind into a steel blade. I took seriously what I had learned — the scholastic philosophy, the rules of the syllogism, theology, Hebrew. I was a good scholar; I can never be damned for that.” M. Renan holds, moreover, that little was wasted of his elaborate religious education. “ I left their hands [those of the priests] with a moral sentiment so prepared for every test that Parisian levity could afterwards put a surface on this jewel without hurting it. I was so effectually made up for the good, for the true, that it would have been impossible for me to follow any career not directed to the things of the soul. My masters rendered me so unfit for all temporal work that I was stamped with an irrevocable mark for the spiritual life. ... I persist in believing that existence is the most frivolous thing in the world, if one does not conceive it as a great and continual duty.” This moral richness, these spiritual aspirations, of M. Renan’s, of which we might quote many other examples, pervade all his utterances, even when they are interfused with susceptibilities which strike us at times as those of a dilettante ; with refinements of idealism which suggest to us occasionally that they correspond to no possible reality, and even that the natural corrective for this would be that reality, in some of the forms which we children of less analytic race are obliged to make our peace with it, would impose itself a little more absolutely upon our critic. To what extent M. Renan’s nature has been reduplicated, as it were, by his intellectual curiosity may be gathered from his belief, recorded in these pages, that he would have gone much further in the exploration of the universe if he had not taken his inspiration from the historical sciences. “ Physiology and the natural sciences would have carried me along ; and I may certainly say it, the extreme ardor which these vital sciences excited in my mind makes me believe that if I had cultivated them in a consecutive manner I should have arrived at several of the results of Darwin, of which I had had glimpses.

. . . I was drawn [instead] toward the historical sciences — little conjectural sciences which are pulled down as often as they are set up, and which will be neglected a hundred years hence.” We know not what M. Renan may have missed, and we know not what may be the ultimate fate of historical conjecture and of the hapless literary art, in both of which he so brilliantly excels ; but what such a volume as these mingled, but on the whole delightful, Reminiscences represents in the way of attainment, suggestion and sympathy is a sum not easily to be calculated. With his extraordinarily composite nature, his much-embracing culture, he is a most discriminating critic of life. Even his affectations are illuminating, for they are either exaggerations of generosity or ingenuities of resignation.