Renan's Dramas

RENAN has collected in this volume his several dramas, all, as the title indicates, of a philosophical character, and all of which have appeared since the year 1878. The last two pieces, the Dialogue des Morts and the Prologue au Ciel, are, as Renan intended them to be, mere fragments; but his Caliban, its sequel the Eau de Jouvence, Le Prêtre de Nemi, and the well-known Abbesse de Jouarre (now in its twentyfirst edition) would, if we added the Dialogues Philosophiques, be sufficient to constitute quite an aggregate of literary work for one man. They excite all the more surprise when we remember that they have been composed in the leisure hours of an Orientalist, who in his two or three lines of work has written almost as voluminously as a Baur or an Ewald.

The slight esteem, however, in which the didactic romance and drama are held, and the effort to-day in all works of a dramatic character, whether novel or play, to avoid, if possible, merely speculative thought, could not have been an incentive to Renan in the composition of his Drames Philosophiques. He has felt this, and has prefixed, after the fashion of Racine and Corneille with their examens, several prefaces to his more important pieces. In these, the only new matter in the volume, he gives some of his motives in writing ; and in the first advances, somewhat in defense of himself, the plan of a new drama. Renan sees its office in the future as a vehicle of philosophy, since he considers the impartial character of the drama admirably adapted for expressing “ the many conflicting opinions in which philosophy consists.”

“ Truths of this order should be neither directly affirmed nor directly denied ; they cannot be the object of demonstration. What we can do is to present them in their different aspects; to show their strength, their feebleness, their necessity, their equivalents. . . . These were the reasons which led me one day to select the form of a dialogue to express certain series of ideas. I found then that the dialogue did not suffice, — that it lacks action; that the drama, free and without local color, in the style of Shakespeare, allows one to give much finer shades. Real history, that which has actually happened, is not alone interesting; along with real history is ideal history, that which has never taken place in the material world, but which to the ideal sense has occurred a thousand times. Coriolanus and Julius Cæsar are not portraits of Roman customs ; they are studies of absolute psychology.

“ Modern philosophy will have its last expression in a drama, or rather in an opera; for music and the illusions of the lyric scene would serve admirably to continue the thought at that moment when the word was no longer sufficient to express it. One arrives thus at conceiving, in an aristocratic humanity where persons of intelligence form the public, a philosophical theatre, which would be one of the most powerful vehicles of the idea and the most efficacious agent of a higher culture. Such a theatre would of course have nothing in common with the actual theatre-substitute for the coffee-concert, where the stranger, the provincial, the bourgeois, seek only some way of passing an agreeable evening.”

This theatre, while it would not supplant the old, would yet modify it, and one would have in the new the equivalent of the aristocratic book, with its few hundred readers only. In this aristocratic theatre an inner circle could see represented in human masks the conflicting social and moral ideas of the day.

One who has left the little dingy Maison de Molière, the Théâtre Françuis, with the feeling that he would never again see such acting unless there, with a sense of almost complete reconciliation for its sake with the theatre in general, would be inclined beforehand to resent the slighting tone in which Renan speaks of this honnête divertissement; and unfortunately, a comparison of one of his philosophical dramas, a Caliban (suite de La Tempête de Shakespeare) with the Tempest itself, written largely for the groundling and bourgeois, is possibly the best vindication of the old drama that one needs. The groundling and the bourgeois, with minds little trained to abstract thought, took the greatest interest in life itself, and demanded this in a play for them. But Renan, in spite of his several characters, falls into the inevitable one rut of a didactic play ; his persons are, after all, but the masks for a number of brilliant and suggestive abstractions ; while in Shakespeare it is the universal human life that we see, the human being superior in its own illogical, mysterious existence to any of its mere speculative opinions.

There is also an inconsistency, as one would think, in selecting as a model for the new drama which is to take a higher place than the old such plays as Coriolanus and Julius Cæsar, which form the very essence of the old theatre.

Nevertheless, though it may be the best critique of Renan’s theory of the drama to compare his Caliban with Shakespeare’s, and however inconsistent he may be, we can be sure of finding much interesting matter in Renan’s Caliban. Renan has written nothing that is dull ; he is one of the most subtle thinkers of his age as well as one of its greatest writers, and he who will read these dramas in a sympathetic spirit will be quite sure to find a large fund of literary and philosophical merit in them.

The dramas are by no means narrow in their range, and touch frequently with a profound insight the most prominent political and social as well as religious questions of our time.

Renan, as is clear from this volume, has not allowed himself, like Strauss, to be forced by the opposition to him into the single barren road of a destructive criticism; he has expanded in the liberal atmosphere about him into an “artist” and a man of opinions on all subjects. But though the French reviewers, to whom Renan is first of all the great writer, in noticing this collection of his dramas, have left his theological career almost entirely in the background, for the American and English mind the dramas will probably be most largely of interest as coming from the theologian. The Abbesse de Jouarre would hardly convey to us, with our conception of the proper subject matter of a drama, the moral lesson which Renan intended it to convey to his own countrymen ; and we could enter only remotely into the political and social significance of Caliban and the Eau de Jouvence. Renan’s aristocratic tendencies, his fear of the people (his Caliban), and his hatred of the bourgeois we have heard of only indirectly, and we shall probably always know him, according to our point of view, either as an “ apostate or an infidel,” or as the most brilliant figure in the modern literary scientific theology. In this respect alone, how much of historical interest attaches to his person ! How much he has seen and gone through since, as an honest, homesick Breton, he came to Paris (1837) at the call of the confessor of Talleyrand, the aristocratic Monseigneur Dupanloup, to enter the seminary of St. Nicolas Chardonnet! Born and brought up in Tréguier, a little town in Bretagne, with the priesthood as his goal in life, and still im Glauben fest, he had been spending the vacation with a friend in a neighboring village, when the Monseigneur’s dispatch came, — just, he tells us, as “ the chimes of the evening angelus were shedding from parish to parish something soft, calm, and melancholy in the air, an image of the life that he was to leave forever.”

Catholicism at Paris, Renan had found, as he says, an affair of " girls and wax candles. " The study of rhetoric and the humanities at St. Nicolas Chardonnet and the scholasticism at St. Sulpice had given him no comfort. His exegetioal and philological studies, however, had required a knowledge of German. At this point he made the acquaintance of Hug, Jahn, Gesenius, Oehlenschlager, and other great names in the freer exegesis of the Bible, and soon found himself taking root in a new world. And although he was first to make his fame as a philologist, and even to react from the revolutionary tone of his contributions at an earlier period to La Liberté de Penser, it was with him but a natural development from this time to that moment at which, on the government’s refusing to allow him to deliver a certain course of lectures, he published these as his Vie de Jesus. In the artificial conservatism and devotion of the new imperial régime, this book, which would have become famous under any circumstances, was read, as all know, to an unheard-of degree for a theological work; and after Strauss’s Life of Jesus has been the most influential in introducing to the secular world the enormous revolution which two men above all, Schleiermacher and Baur, had effected in the study of the Bible, — a revolution whose world-historical significance in its connection with the whole future destiny of the Christian system is still to appear even more distinctly than it does now.

In Germany Renan has not been needed, as his work could not have taken the form that it did but for German research ; but nowhere has he been more widely read except in France. He is to-day the most prominent historical figure in the theological world. Now an old man, his writings properly belong to a greater day than that of the more immediate present, and what he says, as paradoxical or inconsistent as it may often seem, has an universal interest. As a climax to his long labors on the Beginnings of Christianity, Renan has now written his History of Israel; and this, with his Jour de l’An 1886, a French version of the prologue in Faust, and Le Prêtre de Nemi, is his latest word on theology.

The Prêtre de Nemi is founded on the tradition of an old temple of Diana on the Lake Nemi, near Alba Longa, according to which the priest, in order to be one legitimately, must with his own hand have killed his predecessor. Renan has wished to develop in this work a thought analogous to that of the old Hebrew expectations of a Messiah; that is, faith in the definitive triumph of religious and moral progress, in spite of the repeated victories of folly and evil.” The priest, a young Antistius, who by an irregular succession has become priest without killing his predecessor, finds himself officiating in the temple of a cult which he has outgrown. He is, however, too heroic to desert, and makes a complaint of his beautiful associate, the sibyl Carmenta, who shares his more liberal views, the occasion of some very noble words as to their duty and destiny. “ The gods to whom you have made your vows,” he says, " exist perhaps no longer, but the divine exists; you belong to it. What would one say, the day on which the sacred virgin of Latium joined the common lot and lost her aureole of virginity ? I who am a priest am one forever. I have the right—I am obliged, indeed — to have religion make all the progress possible without destroying it. But I ought not to cease to be a priest. One shall never see Antistius in any other rôle than that of a master of sacred things.”

As one may judge from this sentiment, Antistius is much in advance of an age in which human sacrifices are still practiced, and no one has ever expressed more clearly than the young priest has done the dream and aspiration of a reformed religion. The deity cannot be pleased with injustice and crime. The best homage to render to the old, cruel, dark Diana is to deny her existence. Let love take the place of fear, and let even the tradition of a one God be lost, if it is necessary, in the conception itself of the divine ; one must at all hazards avoid making God a mere transcript of his own nature, — one who can be moved or brought over by importunities. Even if he heard our prayers, his first duty would most probably be to punish us for them. “ Tais-toi ! vil intéressé. Adore l’ordre eternel et tache d’y conformer.”

With such views, Antistius soon finds himself brought into sharp conflict with the existing religious order. In the first place, the former priest, Tetricus, had died of rage because Antistius had attained the succession without killing his predecessor, and then in his associates, Ganeo and Sacrificulus, who valued the emoluments of the priesthood, and would have been the losers by the abolition of human sacrifice, he could not expect friends. Quite as dangerous as these, also, was a demagogue, Cethegus, the Babeuf or the Eud of this ancient community, who wished to destroy all priests as well as tyrants. Moreover, Antistius, by his liberal politics (he is a friend of the Roman) as well as in his religious views, offends the conservatives about Lake Nemi. He struggles from the first against hopeless odds ; even so genial a nature as a Metius cannot conceive of a social order on any other basis than that of human sacrifice. Ganeo and Sacrificulus slay their human victims in secret, and in the last act one Casca creates a great deal of popular enthusiasm by the murder of Antistius, — thus becoming priest in his stead.

There could hardly be found a keener satire on religious intolerance, and at this point one might class Renan with such religious reformers as Theodore Parker and the German Tzschirner. But the Prologue au Ciel, written after Le Prêtre de Nemi, will not allow this; for it exceeds in its tone anything that Voltaire has ever written, and would seem to indicate that Renan has lost his faith even in the moral order of the universe, — a point of view of which the esprit gaulois in its most brilliant moment can hardly commend to any practical way of thinking.

The truth is that Renan, unlike the many other famous men of letters, who from Rabelais to Carlyle have begun as priests or as students of theology, but into whose literary work Christian thought penetrates only indirectly, has entered too deeply into the Christian spirit to be able to make himself independent of it. All of his best thought has been here, and in spite of his renunciation of Christianity on the Acropolis, he has never been able, as he so often confesses, to accept any other dogma in its place ; he has not the strength to press on, like Kant or Spinoza, into some compact and consistent world outside of the church. Hence the mass of inconsistencies in all that he writes; his glorification in the same breath and in an exclusive spirit of Hellenic and Christian ideals of life ; his Prêtre de Nemi, an elevated religious epic, side by side with his Prologue au Ciel, in which Gabriel has just been reading to The Eternal the novels of Alexandre Dumas, Balzac, and Stendahl, pour vous reposer de Spinoza, and in which The Eternal laments his imperfections, promises to reform, and is seen smiling with an expression de bonté et d’ ironie tout ù fait indictble, — a dramatic fragment which has the coarseness of one of the old Mysteries and the familiarity of Goethe’s Prolog im Himmel, without the naive character of the mediæval play or any touch of the latter’s sublime mysticism and beauty of form.

But however this may be, we can be sure that a sufficient number of such reflections will be made ; it has become stale, the convicting Renan of inconsistency and irreverence ; and we can afford to dwell on the really exquisite worth of such dramas as the Prêtre de Nemi and the Eau de Jouvence. As Scherer says of Taine, Renan excites antagonisms ; he is moreover a hopeless skeptic, and this with his charming style leads him into contradictions and dazzling half truths. But Renan has that rare Celtic gift, the ability to be as jolly and as frivolous as a buffoon in the days of Turlupin and the Gros-Guillaume, and yet to arrive at very substantial ends. The Drames Philosophiques, as all that Renan has written, may swarm with inconsistencies and paradoxes, but they are full, too, of profound and also original thought, and so far as style is concerned he has written nothing better. One can place Renan very high as a writer of French prose, and this is to class him but little after the Greek prose writers. In his dramas, though the transition from his histories to these could not have been an easy one, he shows the same hand of the master. He has done here precisely what he intended to do. His situations are interesting, and though the dialogue is in one or two places, as for instance in Caliban, where Jacinto discusses the philosophy of beauty, a little naive, it never seems forced, and though on abstract subjects it moves well-nigh with the rapidity of Lear or Macbeth, it is never unnatural, never insipid, never inflated ; the use of words is equal to that of Racine’s use of them ; and if one compares these dramas with others of their kind, the second part of Faust, for example, or with the Epimenides Erwachen (Goethe), he will see how good and rational they are, and how much Renan has done to give a certain romantic interest to the ideas of his day.