Renan

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

COLERIDGE once mistook for a philosopher a silent, thoughtful-looking man who eventually revealed himself as a Norfolk farmer by exclaiming, on the appearance of dumplings at dinner, “ Them ’s the fellows for me!” Renan, on the other hand, would have been taken for a man without two ideas in his head beyond eating and drinking. The foreigner in Paris, drawn by admiration for his talents to the stuffy little room at the Collége de France assigned to the Hebrew lectures, was stupefied at finding a burly man with flabby face, reminding one of Luther, and very pronounced double chin, all the more marked because close-shaven ; an exterior, in short, far from bespeaking the refined writer, the acute thinker, the greatest stylist of his age. Discoursing, moreover, in the easiest conversational tone, he would loll back in his chair, or sprawl his arms on the table, as, with shoulders up to his ears, he stooped to read a Hebrew text. A second glance, it is true, showed the silkiness of his long brown hair, and the shapeliness of hands which he used very effectively for emphasis. His forehead, too, was fairly high, though not broad ; his eye, deep-set behind bushy brow and lash, was full of animation ; and his voice was mellow. At home or in society his attitude was far from imposing. He would either lean forward, his hands resting on his knees, or would throw himself back in his chair, his hands crossed on his breast. In either case his eyes were half closed, yet no man was a better listener. To see him in the streets — but of late years he walked only too little for his health, and he avoided omnibuses through aversion to the scramble for a seat — you were reminded of Dr. Johnson sailing down Fleet Street. In a Protestant country, he might have passed for a country parson of limited means and equally limited intellect. In France, he resembled a retired tradesman vegetating on a small competency. Had he donned cabman’s uniform, he would have passed muster as an average specimen of the Jehu ; and there are said, indeed, to be unfrocked priests in the fraternity. He was in reality atypical Breton priest minus the robe. His paternal ancestors were Breton fishermen, — all, he says, as poor as Job, — and Renan had inherited their physique, his good points doubtless being due to his mother, who came of a good middle-class Bordeaux family. Strange that such a mind, with its delicacy, acuteness, and many-sidedness, should have had so uncouth an embodiment. And Bonnat, at the last Paris Salon, even exaggerated this coarseness. Not only was there the ungraceful leaning-forward posture, but the very nails were jagged and uncleaned. Renan looked, too, nearer eighty than seventy, and I heard the figure compared to an old man in a workhouse, sitting on a bench in the sun. The broadcloth dress had a shine suggestive of threadbareness. Now it was all very well for Cromwell to insist that Lely should insert all his warts and blotches, but there seemed no reason why Bonnat should give the impression of senility and slovenliness. An artist should not flatter, but he need not allow his sitter an unpleasing pose or exaggerate uncomeliness. But the mischief is now irreparable. Renan has passed away, leaving the world less interesting by his absence, and those who want to know his outward presentment must go to Bonnat’s portrait.