ERNEST RENAN

(1823-1892)

BY FERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE

N THE Preface to his 'Recollections of Infancy and Youth,' Ernest Renan himself recalled the legend of that town of Is, long ago engulfed by the sea in punishment of its crimes, the sound of whose bells one hears on calm days, rising from the depths of the abyss, where they continue always to call together for prayer a people who have not yet finished paying the debt of their repentance. And he adds: "It often seems to me that I have at the bottom of my heart a town of Is, that still resounds with bells continuing to call to sacred rites the faithful who no longer hear." This was "the state of his soul" when, nearing the sixties, having almost completed his life work, he tried to represent himself by this poetic comparison; where he re-found, mingled with memories of his devout infancy, all the melancholy that weeps in the heart of the people and soil of Brittany. But he characterized at the same time, perhaps without knowing it, the nature of his own talent; and he gave us the reason of his great reputation as a writer. We also, during forty years, have heard sounding in his work the far-off bells of the town of Is; we have heard the thrill of their voice vibrating even in the unthanked works of the philologue and the exegete: and he himself, do what he might, has never been able to make himself wholly unfaithful to his first beginnings. The vase has kept its perfume, quo recens imbuta semel; and if the originality of Ernest Renan is anywhere, it is there, in the strange and often displeasing but sometimes exquisite combination, developing itself in him, of the sincerest emotionalism with the narrow rationalism of the scholar and the philologue. The originality of a great writer, in a literature like the French literature of our time, is always a little composite: we are Alexandrians; that is not our fault, and we could not be reproached with it if we did not abuse it by abandoning ourselves to the pleasure of dilettanteism. This is a reproach, as will be seen, that Renan did not always know how to avoid.

He was born in 1823 at Tréguier, in the Department of the Côtes du Nord, under the shadow of an old cathedral full of mystery and incense; and he was educated for the priesthood. His family being

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humble, did his mother's ambition go beyond a vague hope of some day seeing him the celebrant at the high altar of their native town? But from the depths of his province, his successes in scholarship attracted the attention of the Abbé Dupanloup; the same who afterwards became the blustering bishop of Orléans, but who was then only the converter of M. de Talleyrand-Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord-and the superior or director of the Little Seminary of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet. The Little Seminary of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet was a "free institution of secondary instruction," where the best families of the Faubourg Saint-Germain sent their children to be educated. One of these children, afterwards the Duke de Noailles,- that Frenchman who since Tocqueville has understood America best,- kept a most vivid recollection of Renan; and I remember to have read some pages that he wrote upon his old schoolfellow,- pages that unfortunately have not seen nor perhaps ever will see the light.

From St. Nicolas du Chardonnet, where rhetoric completed the course, Ernest Renan passed to the Seminary of Issy, which stands somewhat in the relation of a preparatory school to the great seminary of St. Sulpice; and it was there that he began to experience his first doubts as to the justifiability of the vocation to which until then he had believed himself called. In his 'Recollections of Youth,' which he wrote thirty years later, he undertook to explain the nature of that crisis; and one would suppose, to hear him speak, that neither the desire of the world,-that avidity of living which is so characteristic of the twentieth year,- nor philosophy even, nor the sudden revelation of science, played the least part in it. It would seem that his reasons for doubting were purely philological; and that textual criticism alone swept away the faith of his childhood. We shall not contradict this. But the publication of his Correspondence' has revealed to us since then another influence that affected the formation of his character,—the most powerful perhaps of all: it was that of his sister Henriette. This girl, poor and highly cultivated, who conducted far from her family, in Poland or Russia, the education of the children of a great lady, was gnawed by resentment; and in her triple rôle of woman, hired teacher, and native of Brittany, suffered cruelly from being unable to satisfy or even to relieve it by giving it expression. It was through her brother that she found her opportunity. As soon as the first doubts began to show themselves in the seminarist, it was his sister who encouraged them; or rather she communicated to him her own boldness of spirit: and putting her savings to the service of her passion, it was she who supplied Ernest Renan with the means of quitting St. Sulpice, and of resuming thus the life of a layman. We are able to-day to affirm that Henriette

12151 Renan was the great worker of her brother's unbelief; she was the patient worker, the impassioned worker: and only later did exegesis or philology furnish Renan with the reasons he needed for establishing the convictions his sister had breathed into him.

It is right to add that both were utterly sincere, and that for Ernest Renan the sacrifice was painful. He was born to be a priest, as he himself has said; and his life was to be, if one may use the expression, that of a priest of science. With that suppleness of mind which was one day to characterize him, and procure him the means of being more at ease in the midst of contradictions than are many believers in the fortress of their dogmatism, he would have found without doubt the art of reconciling his studious tastes with the practice and observances of a dead faith. But with a care for his dignity which did him honor, he did not desire this. He liked better -in this country of France, where the conduct of the priest who renounces the altar is so eagerly laid to the lightest [les plus "joyeux"]- that is to say, to the lowest-motives, he found it more loyal and noble to brave the anger of some, the pleasantries of others, the distrust of all. He resumed his studies; he took his university degrees; and in 1847 he made his début as "philologue" and as "Hebraist," by a brilliant stroke, submitting to the Institute of France the paper which became, a few years later, his 'General and Comparative History of the Semitic Languages.'

We have from him, written about the same time, an important book which appeared later-much later; indeed, in 1890: it is The Future of Science,' of which it can truthfully be said that this "future of science" is in his work that "thought of youth realized by ripe age," that a great poet has set before the ambitions of young men as the image or the ideal of a noble life. The whole of Renan is in his Future of Science'; he was to draw, all his life, upon his vast Purana, as he liked to call it himself: nevertheless, he was not to make for himself a law of conforming during forty years to all the convictions of the beginning of his career. But he was not to abjure them; and in the future as in the present, when it is desired to form a just opinion of the type of mind, the personal method, and even the work of Ernest Renan, it is in this vast book that they must be sought.

Let us go on to consider his first great works given to the public: his thesis for the doctorate, upon 'Averroës and Averroïsm,' 1852; his 'General History of the Semitic Languages,' 1855; his 'Studies of Religious History,' 1857; his translation of the Book of Job, 1858; his book on the 'Origin of Language,' 1858; his Essays, Moral and Critical, 1859. Their charm of style is incomparable; and never have subjects so severe been treated with more precision, ease, and