No More Learning

But tell me, since they bit
thee not, but sportfully licked thee, what harm? '—'What harm,
noodle? why, the sores came off. '-'How could that be? ' —
'How could aught else be, and them just fresh put on? Did I
think he was so weak as bite holes in his flesh with ratsbane?
Nay, he was an artist, a painter like his servant; and had put on
sores made of pig's blood, rye meal, and glue. '-'So when the
folk saw my sores go on tongues of puppies, they laughed, and
I saw cord or sack before me. So up I jumped, and shouted,
"A miracle! a miracle! The very dogs of this holy convent be


## p. 12142 (#180) ##########################################

12142
CHARLES READE
holy, and have cured me. Good fathers," cried I, "whose day
is this? " "St. Isidore's," said one. "St. Isidore! " cried I, in a
sort of rapture. "Why, St. Isidore is my patron saint; so that
accounts. " And the simple folk swallowed my miracle as those
accursed quiens my wounds. But the monks took me inside and
shut the gate, and put their heads together: but I have a quick
ear,
and one did say "Caret miraculo monasterium"; which is
Greek patter, I trow-leastways it is no beggar's cant. Finally
they bade the lay brethren give me a hiding, and take me out
a back way and put me on the road; and threatened me did I
come back to the town to hand me to the magistrate and have
me drowned for a plain impostor. "Profit now by the Church's
grace," said they, "and mend thy ways. " So forward, Bon Bec,
for my life is not sure nigh hand this town. '
"As we went he worked his shoulders. 'Wow, but the breth-
ren laid on! And what means yon piece of monk's cant, I
wonder? ' So I told him the words meant 'The monastery is in
want of a miracle,' but the application thereof was dark to me.
'Dark! ' cried he: 'dark as noon. Why, it means they are going
to work the miracle, my miracle, and gather all the grain I
sowed. Therefore these blows on their benefactor's shoulders;
therefore is he that wrought their scurvy miracle driven forth
with stripes and threats. Oh, cozening knaves! ' Said I, 'Be-
comes you to complain of guile. ' 'Alas, Bon Bec,' said he, 'I
but outwit the simple; but these monks would pluck Lucifer of
his wing-feathers. ' And went a league bemoaning himself that
he was not convent-bred like his servant,-'he would put it to
more profit'; and railing on quiens. 'And as for those monks,
there was one Above-' 'Certes,' said I, 'there is one Above:
what then? ' ( - who will call those shavelings to compt, one
day,' quoth he. 'And all deceitful men,' said I.
"At one that afternoon I got armories to paint; so my master
took the yellow jaundice, and went begging through the town,
and with his oily tongue and saffron-water face did fill his hat.
Now in all the towns are certain licensed beggars, and one of
these was an old favorite with the townsfolk; had his station at
St. Martin's porch, the greatest church: a blind man; they called
him Blind Hans. He saw my master drawing coppers on the
other side the street, and knew him by his tricks for an impostor;
so sent and warned the constables, and I met my master in
the constable's hands, and going to his trial in the town-hall.
I


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CHARLES READE
12143
followed, and many more; and he was none abashed, neither by
the pomp of justice nor memory of his misdeeds, but demanded
his accuser like a trumpet. And blind Hans's boy came forward,
but was sifted narrowly by my master, and stammered and
faltered, and owned he had seen nothing, but only carried blind
Hans's tale to the chief constable. This is but hearsay,' said
my master. 'Lo ye, now, here standeth Misfortune backbit by
Envy. But stand thou forth, blind Envy, and vent thine own
lie. ' And blind Hans behoved to stand forth, sore against his
will. Him did my master so press with questions, and so pinch
and torture, asking him again and again how, being blind, he
could see all that befell, and some that befell not, across a way;
and why, an he could not see, he came there holding up his
perjured hand, and maligning the misfortunate, that at last he
groaned aloud and would utter no word more. And an alder-
man said, 'In sooth, Hans, ye are to blame; hast cast more dirt
of suspicion on thyself than on him. ' But the burgomaster, a
wondrous fat man, and methinks of his fat some had gotten into
his head, checked him, and said: 'Nay, Hans we know this
many years, and be he blind or not, he hath passed for blind
so long, 'tis all one. Back to thy porch, good Hans, and let the
strange varlet leave the town incontinent on pain of whipping. '
"Then my master winked to me: but there rose a civic offi-
cer in his gown of state and golden chain,-a Dignity with us
lightly prized, and even shunned of some, but in Germany and
France much courted save by condemned malefactors, to wit the
hangman; and says he, 'An't please you, first let us see why
he weareth his hair so thick and low. ' And his man went and
lifted Cul de Jatte's hair, and lo the upper gristle of both ears
was gone. 'How is this, knave? ' quoth the burgomaster. My
master said carelessly, he minded not precisely: his had been a
life of misfortunes and losses. 'When a poor soul has lost the
use of his legs, noble sirs, these more trivial woes rest lightly in
his memory. ' When he found this would not serve his turn, he
named two famous battles, in each of which he had lost half an
ear, a-fighting like a true man against traitors and rebels. But the
hangman showed them the two cuts were made at one time, and
by measurement. Tis no bungling soldier's-work, my masters,'
said he; "tis ourn. ' Then the burgomaster gave judgment: 'The
present charge is not proven against thee; but an thou beest not
guilty now, thou hast been at other times, witness thine ears.


## p. 12144 (#182) ##########################################

CHARLES READE
12144
Wherefore I send thee to prison for one month, and to give a
florin towards the new hall of the guilds now a-building, and to
be whipt out of the town and pay the hangman's fee for the
same. ' And all the aldermen approved, and my master was haled
to prison with one look of anguish. It did strike my bosom.
"I tried to get speech of him, but the jailer denied me. But
lingering near the jail I heard a whistle, and there was Cul de
Jatte at a narrow window twenty feet from earth. I went under,
and he asked me what made I there? I told him I was loath to
He seemed quite amazed;
better. That was not all
go forward and not bid him farewell.
but soon his suspicious soul got the
mine errand, I told him—not all: the psaltery. Well, what of
that? ' 'Twas not mine, but his: I would pay him the price of
it. Then throw me a rix-dollar,' said he. I counted out my
coins, and they came to a rix-dollar and two batzen. I threw
him up his money in three throws, and when he had got it
all he said, softly, 'Bon Bec. ' 'Master,' said I. Then the poor
rogue was greatly moved. 'I thought ye had been mocking
me,' said he: 'O Bon Bec, Bon Bec, if I had found the world
like thee at starting, I had put my wit to better use, and I had
not lain here. ' Then he whimpered out, I gave not quite a rix-
dollar for the jingler,' and threw me back that he had gone to
cheat me of; honest for once, and over late: and so with many
sighs bade me Godspeed.
"Thus did my master, after often baffling men's justice, fall
by their injustice; for his lost ears proved not his guilt only, but
of that guilt the bitter punishment: so the account was even; yet
they for his chastisement did chastise him. Natheless he was a
parlous rogue. Yet he holp to make a man of me. Thanks to
his good wit, I went forward richer far with my psaltery and
brush than with yon as good as stolen purse; for that must have
run dry in time, like a big trough, but these a little fountain. "


## p. 12145 (#183) ##########################################

CHARLES READE
E
HⓇ
MONK AND FATHER
From The Cloister and the Hearth ›
12145
STAGGERED to his den. "I am safe here," he groaned:
"she will never come near me again,—unmanly, ungrateful
wretch that I am. " And he flung his emaciated, frozen
body down on the floor, not without a secret hope that it might
never rise thence alive.
But presently he saw by the hour-glass that it was past mid-
night. On this, he rose slowly and took off his wet things; and
moaning all the time at the pain he had caused her he loved,
put on the old hermit's cilice of bristles, and over that his breast-
plate. He had never worn either of these before, doubting
himself worthy to don the arms of that tried soldier. But now
he must give himself every aid: the bristles might distract his
earthly remorse by bodily pain, and there might be holy virtue
in the breastplate.
Then he kneeled down and prayed God humbly to release
him that very night from the burden of the flesh. Then he
lighted all his candles, and recited his psalter doggedly: each
word seemed to come like a lump of lead from a leaden heart,
and to fall leaden to the ground; and in this mechanical office
every now and then he moaned with all his soul. In the midst
of which he suddenly observed a little bundle in the corner
he had not seen before in the feebler light, and at one end of it
something like gold spun into silk.
He went to see what it could be; and he had no sooner
viewed it closer, than he threw up his hands with rapture. "It
is a seraph," he whispered, "a lovely seraph. Heaven hath wit-
nessed my bitter trial, and approves my cruelty; and this flower
of the skies is sent to cheer me, fainting under my burden. "
He fell on his knees, and gazed with ecstasy on its golden
hair, and its tender skin, and cheeks like a peach.
"Let me feast my sad eyes on thee ere thou leavest me for
thine ever-blessed abode, and my cell darkens again at thy part-
ing, as it did at hers. "
With all this, the hermit disturbed the lovely visitor. He
opened wide two eyes, the color of heaven; and seeing a strange
figure kneeling over him, he cried piteously, "Mum-ma! Mum-
ma! " And the tears began to run down his little cheeks.
XXI-760


## p. 12146 (#184) ##########################################

12146
CHARLES READE
Perhaps, after all, Clement, who for more than six months had
not looked on the human face divine, estimated childish beauty
more justly than we can; and in truth, this fair Northern child,
with its long golden hair, was far more angelic than any of our
imagined angels. But now the spell was broken.
Yet not unhappily. Clement, it may be remembered, was
fond of children; and true monastic life fosters this sentiment.
The innocent distress on the cherubic face, the tears that ran so
smoothly from those transparent violets, his eyes, and his pretty,
dismal cry for his only friend, his mother, went through the
hermit's heart. He employed all his gentleness and all his art
to soothe him: and as the little soul was wonderfully intelligent
for his age, presently succeeded so far that he ceased to cry out,
and wonder took the place of fear; while in silence, broken
only in little gulps, he scanned with great tearful eyes this
strange figure that looked so wild but spoke so kindly, and wore
armor, yet did not kill little boys, but coaxed them. Clement
was equally perplexed to know how this little human flower
came to lie sparkling and blooming in his gloomy cave. But he
remembered he had left the door wide open; and he was driven
to conclude that owing to this negligence, some unfortunate
creature of high or low degree had seized this opportunity to get
rid of her child for ever. At this his bowels yearned so over the
poor deserted cherub, that the tears of pure tenderness stood in
his eyes; and still, beneath the crime of the mother, he saw the
Divine goodness which had so directed her heartlessness as to
comfort his servant's breaking heart.
"Now bless thee, bless thee, bless thee, sweet innocent, I
would not change thee for e'en a cherub in heaven. "”
"At's pooty," replied the infant,-ignoring contemptuously,
after the manner of infants, all remarks that did not interest
him.
"What is pretty here, my love, besides thee? "
"Ookum-gars," said the boy, pointing to the hermit's breast-
plate.
"Quot liberi, tot sententiunculæ! " Hector's child screamed at
his father's glittering casque and nodding crest: and here was a
mediæval babe charmed with a polished cuirass, and his griefs
assuaged.
"There are prettier things here than that," said Clement;
"there are little birds; lovest thou birds? "


## p. 12147 (#185) ##########################################

CHARLES READE
12147
"Nay. Ay. En um ittle, ery ittle? Not ike torks. Hate
torks; um bigger an baby. "
He then confided, in very broken language, that the storks,
with their great flapping wings, scared him, and were a great
trouble and worry to him, darkening his existence more or less.
"Ay, but my birds are very little, and good, and oh, so
pretty! "
"Den I ikes 'm," said the child authoritatively. "I ont my
mammy.
"Alas, sweet dove! I doubt I shall have to fill her place as
best I may.
Hast thou no daddy as well as mammy, sweet
one ? »
The next moment the moonlight burst into his cell, and with
it, and in it, and almost as swift as it, Margaret Brandt was
down at his knee with a timorous hand upon his shoulder.
"Gerard, you do not reject us. You cannot. "
The startled hermit glared from his nurseling to Margaret,
and from her to him, in amazement equaled only by his agita-
tion at her so unexpected return. The child lay asleep on his
left arm, and she was at his right knee; no longer the pale,
scared, panting girl he had overpowered so easily an hour or two
ago, but an imperial beauty, with blushing cheeks and sparkling
eyes, and lips sweetly parted in triumph, and her whole face
radiant with a look he could not quite read, for he had never
yet seen it on her,-maternal pride.
He stared and stared from the child to her, in throbbing
amazement.
"Us? " he gasped at last. And still his wonder-stricken eyes
turned to and fro.
Margaret was surprised in her turn. It was an age of im-
pressions, not facts. "What! " she cried, "doth not a father
know his own child? and a man of God too? Fie, Gerard, to
pretend! nay, thou art too wise, too good, not to have- why, I
watched thee; and e'en now look at you twain! 'Tis thine own
flesh and blood thou holdest to thine heart. "
Clement trembled. "What words are these? " he stammered;
"this angel mine? "
"Whose else? since he is mine. "
Clement turned on the sleeping child, with a look beyond the
power of the pen to describe, and trembled all over, as his eyes
seemed to absorb the little love.


## p. 12148 (#186) ##########################################

12148
CHARLES READE
Margaret's eyes followed his. "He is not a bit like me," said
she, proudly; "but oh, at whiles he is thy very image in little;
and see this golden hair. Thine was the very color at his age;
ask mother else. And see this mole on his little finger; now
look at thine own: there! 'Twas thy mother let me weet thou
wast marked so before him: and O Gerard, 'twas this our child
found thee for me; for by that little mark on thy finger I knew
thee for his father, when I watched above thy window and saw
thee feed the birds:" here she seized the child's hand and kissed
it eagerly, and got half of it into her mouth, heaven knows how.
"Ah, bless thee! thou didst find thy poor daddy for her, and now
thou hast made us friends again after our little quarrel; the first,
the last. Wast very cruel to me but now, my poor Gerard, and
I forgive thee-for loving of thy child. "


## p. 12148 (#187) ##########################################



## p. 12148 (#188) ##########################################


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## p. 12148 (#189) ##########################################

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## p. 12148 (#190) ##########################################


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ERNEST RENAN.


## p. 12149 (#191) ##########################################

12149
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 re-
proached 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


## p. 12150 (#192) ##########################################

ERNEST RENAN
12150
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 schol-
arship 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 Sem-
inary of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet. The Little Seminary of St. Nico-
las 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 re-
member to have read some pages that he wrote upon his old school-
fellow, - 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 semi-
nary 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 character-
istic 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 forma-
tion 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 oppor-
tunity. 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


## p. 12151 (#193) ##########################################

ERNEST RENAN
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 establish-
ing 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 "joy-
eux"]—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 univer-
sity 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 Compar-
ative 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


## p. 12152 (#194) ##########################################

12152
ERNEST RENAN
lucidity. This is saying too little: for the real truth is that there is
something "Platonic" in this first manner of Renan, were it only the
art with which he envelops his most abstract ideas in the most
ingenious metaphors, or the most captivating and poetic images.
With him, as with the author of the 'Cratylus' and the 'Gorgias,'
comparisons, in spite of the proverb, are often reasons, explanations,
solutions. Equally notable in these first writings is a keen percep-
tion of the analogies between natural history and philology; which
enables him to bind together by insensible transitions, and nuances
contrived with infinite art, that which is most "human" in us—that is,
language - with that which is most instinctive, which is the imprint
we receive from surrounding nature. There is a good example of
it in the development of the celebrated formula, "The desert is
monotheistic"; and who does not see that on this basis it would
indeed be possible to establish an entire new science, to be called
"the Geography of the Religions"? As to the scientific or technical
value of these same works, it is attested by the fact that in 1856 it
came about that the Academy of Inscriptions elected the young
author to succeed the brilliant historian of the Conquest of England
by the Normans. ' He was appointed librarian of the National Library
in the department of manuscripts. The imperial government charged
him with a mission to Phoenicia. But what is more interesting than
all else to affirm here, is that from this time forth he knew what
he wished to do; he approached his whole life work on all sides at
once and already good judges, like Sainte-Beuve in his 'New Mon-
days,' or like Edmond Schérer in his 'Studies of Religious History,'
saw its first lineaments outlined.
The attempt was novel and the undertaking bold. Convinced that
all the great races of men which have appeared in turn or together
upon the world's stage have left us in the remains of their language,
and still more conclusively in the monuments of their literature, the
surest witnesses to their highest aspirations, it was precisely these
aspirations that Renan proposed to rediscover; and he saw in phi-
lology, to use his own expression, "the science of the productions of
the human soul. " Therefore, just as under the superfluous matter
with which the hand of an ignorant copyist has covered a precious
palimpsest, palæography endeavors to find again the authentic text of
Virgil or Homer, and as soon as it begins to decipher it, calls to its
aid, to further its efforts to fix it in a way to remain, all the resources
of grammar, criticism, and history, so Renan, brushing away the
dust with which time has covered, as it were, the archives of human-
ity, proposed to re-establish their true meaning, altered or disfig-
ured by superstition. From all these archives, he chose the religious
archives as the most significant of all, to make them the object of a
-


## p. 12153 (#195) ##########################################

ERNEST RENAN
12153
more profound study: the Vedas of the Hindus, the Zend-Avesta
of the Persians, the Pentateuch of the Hebrews, the Koran of the
Arabs; and in truth, since there is no religion which is not at the
same time a system of the world, an expression of the relations that
man believes that he sustains with the nature which surrounds him,
and a solution of the enigma of destiny, what surer means could be
imagined of penetrating more deeply into what is innermost in the
mind of the races ? Aryans or Semites, Mussulmans or Buddhists, it
is in the intimate constitution of our race spirit that we find the
first principle, the reason for the forms of our belief, the limits also
of our religions! And believing that he saw at last in this very
formula a way of reconciling the sincerity, the ardor of his idealism
with the complete independence of his thought, Renan proposed to
disengage "religion," in so far as necessary or innate in humanity,
from the midst of the "religions" which have been until now in
history, at least from his point of view, only its multiple expression,
changeable and superstitious. From Indian Buddhism, from Greek
polytheism, from the monotheism of the Mussulman, and generally
from the particular content of the symbolism, rites, and dogma of all
the religions, when we have eliminated whatever they include that is
"local," dependent on time or circumstance,-when we have, as it
were, purified them above all of whatever they include that is ethni-
cal, what remains? This is the thought that, floating about for the
last hundred years, more or less, began a little while ago to condense,
to take shape, to "concrete" itself so to speak, in the Congress of
Religions at Chicago; and whatever may be its future, the propaga-
tion of this thought in the history of the contemporary mind is the
work of Ernest Renan.
―
Undoubtedly there is no need of showing in how many points it
differs from the thought of Voltaire or of Condorcet; but in how
many points also it approaches their thought! It comes so near it,
that like the philosophy of the eighteenth century itself, it ends in
the constitution of a "natural religion. " But while the natural reli-
gion of Voltaire is a creation of pure reason, a deduction of good
sense, common-sense, opposed to all things of any depth that the
positive religions teach, decidedly on the contrary it is from the
fundamental history of the positive religions, studied scientifically.
and impartially, that the "natural religion" of Renan is derived; and
hence its truths have no value except through their conformity to
whatever is most concrete and most intimate in the world. Or in
still other words, it appears that the same conclusion is reached,
but by different roads,-and that is the important point here,- in
every domain, in science itself, in physics or in psychology. "Discov-
eries » are nothing,-all lies in the manner in which they are made;


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and it is not the verities that enrich the human intellect, but the
"methods" that have led to them. The exclusive employment of the
philological or exegetical method suffices to establish between Vol-
taire's religion and Renan's a difference that Renan himself, in his
latter years, by means of an affected impiety, could not wholly suc-
ceed in effacing. In vain did he compare David to Troppmann; and
with less provoking coarseness, but in the same spirit, the prophet
Amos to some living "anarchist. " These pleasantries belied his
good taste; they led some persons to doubt his "sincerity" but his
"method" was the strongest; and it is this that keeps intact, with
the greatness of his name, whatever is most original and solid in his
work.
Meanwhile the moment of the struggle approached. "When a
man writes upon the rulers of Nineveh or upon the Pharaohs of
Egypt," said D. F. Strauss, "he can take only an historical interest!
But Christianity is such a living thing, and the problem of its origin
involves such consequences for the most immediate present, that
critics who would bring only a purely historical interest to these
questions are to be pitied for their imbecility. " Ernest Renan was
not, he could not be, of the number of these critics. But above all,
having set forth as he had done the question of the relation between
the "religions" and "religion," he could not leave Christianity out
of his inquest. One expected him to deal with the question of the
origins of Christianity. He must come to it. None of his works
were of interest except as they led to that. To hesitate or to with-
draw-that would have been to fail not only in courage, but in
intellectual probity. He understood it himself; and in 1863 he pub-
lished his 'Life of Jesus. ' No book, as is well known, ha made
more noise, in France, in Europe, in the world; a very different
noise from that raised by Strauss's 'Life of Jesus,' or all the works
of the School of Tübingen. No book has stirred up more polemics,
more ardent or more violent. No book has engendered graver
consequences. Whence came that tumult, and what did it mean?
Just here, to understand it perfectly, it is necessary to develop
Renan's method somewhat; and in order to develop it, join to the
'Life of Jesus' the six volumes which followed it, and which are —
'The Apostles' (1866), St. Paul' (1869), 'Antichrist' (1873), The Gos-
pels' (1877), 'The Christian Church' (1879), and Marcus Aurelius'
(1881).
There is still some uncertainty or embarrassment in the 'Life
of Jesus': the embarrassment or constraint of a man who does not
know exactly how far he can push audacity, and who fears pushing
it too far, lest he alienate from himself the very public he would
like to reach. This is why Renan attempts to restore all that he


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takes away from the "divinity" of Jesus to his "humanity," of which
he traces an image exceeding in every way the proportions of human-
ity itself. Neither man nor God, his Jesus resembles sometimes those
Christs of the Italian decadence - so admirable but so insignificant;
of a beauty so perfect, or rather so commonplace; so well clothed, so
well combed-seen in the pictures of Guido or of Domenichino; and
sometimes one would say a giant, a "sombre giant,"—it is his very
expression,- and not the greatest among us, but a force of nature
necessarily incommensurable with our mediocrity. But beginning with
'The Apostles,' and especially with St. Paul,' the method acquires
precision or character; and it is absolutely clear that its first princi-
ple is to beat down, so to speak, the history that till then had always
been called "holy" or "sacred" to the level of other histories, of all
histories; and it must be said, it was what no one since Spinoza, in
his famous treatise Theology and Politics,' had dared to attempt.
D. F. Strauss and Christian Baur themselves had appeared to believe
that if the Old and the New Testament are like other books,— or, to
go directly to the bottom of their thought, are books like the 'Rama-
yana,' for example, or like the Zend-Avesta,'-nevertheless Biblical
criticism does not forego her own principles, her own rules, her own
methods; and it would seem from reading them that "exegesis" is
something other and more than an application of philology. It is
this distinction that Renan strives to efface. There is for him only
one method, only one philology, as there is only one physics; and
whatever may be the content of the Pentateuch or of the Gospels,
it can be determined or interpreted by no other means than that
used for the content of the Iliad or Odyssey. Until his work, one
had taken for granted the entire authenticity of the form, according
to the accepted importance of the subject: it is the contrary that
ought to be done,- the conditions of the form should determine the
value of the substance. It is not a question of knowing the worth of
Christian ethics, nor whether the lofty character of Christianity is a
proof of its divinity,- that would be theology! But who wrote the
Gospel of Matthew or the Gospel of John, at what periods, in what
places, under what circumstances, on what occasion, with what in-
tention? There is the problem; and the object of a History of the
Origin of Christianity' is to elucidate it. When the problem is solved,
the history will be complete: and in fact, it is quite in this way that
Renan conceived it; it is thus that he proposed to write it; it is the
plan that he followed in writing it.
Taine liked to say that what he most admired in the works of
Renan, was "that one could not see how it was done"; and he was
right, if he meant only the style or the "phrase," which gives the im-
pression of being born spontaneously, without effort and without art,


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ERNEST RENAN
under the pen of Renan. But he was in error if he meant the plan or
arrangement of his books: it is, on the contrary, fully seen how that
"is done. " Having collected all the texts that taken together consti-
tute the New Testament,- and not neglecting to add to them the
"apocryphal,” —Renan discussed them all as a philologue, accord-
ing to the principles of his exegesis, and dated and classified them
chronologically. He thus obtained a series of documents spread over
a period of about a hundred and fifty or two hundred years, from
Jesus to Marcus Aurelius. He then set himself to determine, accord-
ing to chronological order, what might be called the logical relations
between them; and—to take an example-very much as if, not know-
ing the authentic dates of Pascal's Thoughts' or of the 'Genius of
Christianity,' of Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress' or of Wesley's ser-
mons, we should nevertheless see without difficulty that these works
could not answer to one and the same moment in the evolution of
Christian thought. But the determination of that moment, in its turn,
is not fixed by itself, nor above all by the sole consideration of that
moment itself. Pascal and Bunyan are men who have lived, like all
men, at a given time in history; who are related to other men by all
their personal traits, who are contemporaries of Louis XIV. or Charles
II. , witnesses of the apogee of French greatness or of the corruption
of England under the Stuarts; the latter a bourgeois, the former an
artisan, whence it follows that we cannot understand them unless we
begin by replacing them in their milieu. It was this also that Renan
did; and thus the general history of the Roman Empire — which is
found to coincide with the history of the world-enters, so to speak,
into the intervals of these documents, which it binds together, which it
illumines with its light, which it sometimes overflows by the intensity
of its interest. The propagation of the Christian idea becomes the
soul or the active principle, - the principle of the movement of a
history of which its triumph is the limit. The historians of the
Empire had seen only the Empire in the Empire; and the excellent
and learned Lenain de Tillemont would alone furnish a proof of it,
since he wrote on the one hand the History of the Emperors,' and
on the other the precious quarto of his 'Ecclesiastical History,'
without ever conceiving the idea of intermingling them, as they were
nevertheless intermingled in reality. Renan did this; and is it neces-
sary to remark how this second application of the method confirmed,
and in the eyes of many of his readers naturally contributed to
aggravate, the first? The miraculous, the Divine element in the
beginnings of Christianity became in some sort attenuated; or to
change the figure, was the more "humanized" the more attentively
the investigator appeared to be following its evolution.
It only
remained to dispel a kind of prestige in which all that is ancient


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ERNEST RENAN
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is enveloped, major e longinquo reverentia; and the very logic of his
method obliged Renan to perform this office.
No means more simple nor more powerful in its simplicity. It is
the theory of existing causes - that theory with which the names of
Lyell and Darwin are associated - transferred from the order of nat-
ural history to that of high erudition. The active causes which with-
out our suspecting it, deform, reform, and transform the physical
universe under our eyes, are the same that formerly produced all
that our fathers interpreted as gigantic and marvelous in the archives
of the past. The drop of water wears away the stone; polyps have
constructed islands — perhaps continents; and accumulated dust has
become Himalayas and Alleghanies. In the same way, at no epoch
in the short history of humanity have other forces been at work than
those that are working still; and the present contains all that is
essential to the explanation of the past. Hence in Renan's writings,
in his History of the Origins of Christianity,' those perpetual allus-
ions to the present. He is of his time; and he never forgets it
when he speaks of Marcus Aurelius or Nero, because man is always
man, and the obscurity of the past could not be cleared
way better
than by the light of the present. Nothing creates itself nor is lost:
he takes literally and in its entirety an axiom that is perhaps true
only of the physical universe; and still it would be necessary to be
very clear on this point, and he applies it rigorously to history.
goes further: not only does he explain the most considerable revo-
lutions by the action of existing causes, but like Darwin and Lyell,
he insinuates that there are no revolutions, strictly speaking; and for
this reason, if he encounters some unique or extraordinary fact, he
reduces it to a contemporary fact. The preaching of St. Paul on the
Areopagus "must have had no more success than a visionary imbued
with neo-Catholicism would have had, endeavoring in the time of
the Empire to convert to his ideas an academician attached to the
religion of Horace; or than a humanitarian socialist of our own day
would have, were he to hold forth against English prejudices before
the fellows of Oxford or of Cambridge. " These perpetual juxta-
positions, which have pleased certain of Renan's readers, have irri-
tated many more of them; and their irritation was not unreasonable,
if perhaps nothing has contributed so much as the cleverness, often
deceiving, with which he uses them, to remodel the history of the
origin of Christianity upon the plan of universal history. But what
we cannot make too emphatic is, that they proceed from the very
foundation of his method: this we have just tried to show; and it
could be shown in another way by demonstrating that one has only
to examine these same things somewhat closely, to discover that
there is much in the method not only hazardous, conjectural, and
arbitrary, but also ruinous.


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-
>>
In truth, for all these comparisons, the propagation of Christianity
in the world remains a unique fact, a ἅπαξ λεγόμενον, according to the
expression that Renan himself liked to employ; and I do not wish
to say "a miracle," but incontestably an effect that down to the
present time has never been wholly explained by the reasoning of
history. Renan knew it so well that he exhausted himself in subtle
evasions of this conclusion of his own studies. And did he not do
this even in the Preface to his History of the People of Israel,'
in 1887, when he strove to distinguish what he called a "providential
history from a "miraculous history," or when to the "Jewish mir-
acle" he opposed the "Greek miracle"? But it is not possible to
escape the consequences of a complete method by such distinctions;
and in fact, without discussing here either the principles of his exe-
gesis, which are not immovable, nor his opinion of the supernatural,
which up to this point recognizes only the authority of physics,
Renan has slipped up in his attempt to bring the history of the
beginnings of Christianity to the level of other histories, and if one
dares speak thus, to "secularize [laïciser] God himself. " This is why
those who would like to know all that was extraordinary in the
development of Christianity have only to inquire of Renan; for in
truth no one has demonstrated better than he that "the Church is an
edifice drawn from the void, a creation, the work of an all-powerful
hand. " And I know very well he did not mean it thus, when he
protested the purity of his intentions, and when with an irony slightly
tinged with pharisaism, he bore witness to having himself "estab-
lished for eternity the true God of the universe"! But we do not
always the thing we would do, nor what we think we are doing; and
in reality, by a strange mockery, it happens that the work to which
Renan's came nearest was the Discourses' of Bossuet on Universal
History. '
In the mean time, and while he worked at his 'Origins of Christ-
ianity, important changes were brought about in the world, in
France, and in the condition of Ernest Renan himself. A political
revolution had not only reinstated him in that chair of Hebrew at
the College of France, of which he had formerly been dispossessed
for having begun his teaching with a lesson on The Part of the
Semitic People in the History of Civilization'; but it had also made
of him, without any effort of his own to obtain the honor, the the-
oretical or ideal head of what went by the name of anti-clericalism
at that time among us. Immediately after the events of 1871 — and
indeed because he had pleaded with eloquence, two or three years
before, the cause of higher instruction - we still insisted upon see-
ing in him the representative of that "high German culture" which
passed at that time for the very mainspring of our misfortunes. It
was naïvely believed that if France had been conquered by Germany,


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it was for lack of a few chairs of Sanskrit and laboratories of organic
chemistry or experimental physiology! Finally, boldnesses that a lit-
tle while before would have been pronounced reckless or sacrilegious,
were hardly more than boldnesses: and it was easy to see this even
in England: for example, where the distinguished author of the book
on the Origin of Species,' who formerly had thought necessary to
take many precautions, not only dispensed with them, but may be
said to have blushed for them, in his book on 'The Descent of Man. '
The reputation of Ernest Renan increased, so to speak, by the con-
currence and combination of these circumstances. It was fostered
all the more because, alone of all those who had maintained with him
the struggle of free thought,-the Taines, the Littrés, the Vacherots,
the Schérers, he retracted nothing, he did not withdraw; he gave
proof in his 'Antichrist' or in his 'Marcus Aurelius' of the same
independence of mind as in his 'Life of Jesus. ' His popularity was
equal to his reputation. He became at last what is called a master
of minds; criticism itself was appeased; and since a "literary sov-
ereignty" is always necessary to us in France, in the decline of the
old Hugo it was he whom our youth admired, followed, applauded.
This could not be too deeply regretted. This popularity that
hitherto he had not sought, whose advances he had even disdained
in other days, pleased him; he breathed its incense with delight. Un-
happily he wished to make himself worthy of it; and it was then that
he wrote his Caliban' (1878), his Fountain of Youth' (1880), his
'Priest of Némi' (1885), his 'Abbess of Jouarre (1886). The worst
facetic of Voltaire are scarcely more trivial. But he did not stop
there. He suffered those who sounded his praises to mock at all
that he had believed, at all that he still believed, that they might
praise him better. He mocked at it himself; and seeing that every-
thing was permitted him, he did just as he pleased. He taught that
"as a man makes the beauty of that which he loves, so each one of
us makes the sanctity of what he believes"; that "talent, genius,
virtue even, are nothing by the side of beauty"; that among several
means "of securing one's salvation," morphine or alcohol is no worse
nor less certain than others; that a little crapulence and dissipation
are not unbecoming to youth; and that after all, no one can say
whether our duty in this world is not to «< amuse ourselves. " Singu-
lar words these, which it is forever to be regretted that a man of
the age, the position, the authority of Renan, should have dared let
fall from his mouth. Having set out with The Future of Science,'
to finish with The Abbess of Jouarre' - what mockery and what
debasement! But what greater debasement yet, if when he developed
these paradoxes he hardly believed them himself,-happily for him,
but unhappily for so many "Renanists" who did believe them.
-
-


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I hold in my hand a precious and curious copy of The Abbess of
Jouarre,' bearing on the cover these few words of Renan: "À M²
B- en souvenir de notre conversation d'hier" (To M. B- in
memory of our conversation of yesterday). I had been having a long
talk with him about my intention of speaking of The Abbess of
Jouarre'; and doubtless fearing that I had not unraveled his exact
thought, he had turned down the leaves of the volume, and under-
lined those places in the dialogue by which he desired to be judged.
One of these places is the following: "O God of simple souls, why
have I abandoned thee? " Did the great master of irony mock at me
on that day? Several times since, I have asked myself this question;
and without letting my amour-propre enter otherwise into the matter,
it is indeed what I should have supposed, if afterwards we had not
seen him quit this rôle and devote the last years of his life to com-
posing his History of the People of Israel. ' It is well known that
he was not to see its completion; and it was not he who published
the last volume.
The author of The Origins of Christianity' is easily found there;
and if the genius is not always the same, it is always the same
method: only the structure is somewhat more summary and naked.
The comparisons, the juxtapositions, that we have already noted, are
more numerous here; not so felicitous, more flagrant if I may vent-
ure to say so, sometimes no less cynical, than those of Voltaire in
his pamphlets. In vain is he Renan; it is not with impunity that a
man quits the reading of the gospel to write 'Caliban' or 'The
Abbess of Jouarre,' and later returns to the Pentateuch. Then too,
some parts of it are - it must be said frankly — arid, unpleasant,
tedious. The style no longer has the same ease, nor in the ease the
same firmness. It is unequal, negligent, loaded with the terms of
exact scholarship, science, and politics. But in default of a brilliant
book, we still have here the idea of a brilliant book: and I know not
if the history of Israel is explained by the struggle, often secular, of
the Prophets against the Kings, of the religious ideal of the first
against the political ideal of the second; but what cannot be doubted
is, that this same idea throws a bright light on that history, and this
is all that is of interest here. It may be well to add, however, that
in The History of the People of Israel' as in 'The History of the
Origins of Christianity,' the execution has finally turned against the
design of the historian; and the continuity of prophetism in Israel
remains a fact none the less inexplicable, and down to the present,
no less inexplicable than even the propagation of Christianity in the
Græco-Roman world.
It now remains for us to speak of several other works of Renan;
and in particular, of the many articles he wrote for 'The Literary


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History of France. ' The most remarkable of all is his 'Discourse on
the State of the Fine Arts in the Fourteenth Century'; where he
dealt with the conditions, the history, and the decline, of Gothic
architecture, with no less ability than precision and brilliancy of
style. No man assimilated with more ease the things that were
most alien to him; and in such a way, as one of our old poets said,
as to "turn them into blood and nourishment. " The analysis that he
gave of the philosophy of Duns Scotus is still a masterpiece of lucid-
ity. The same may be said of his articles on William de Nogaret
and Pierre du Boys,-two of those jurists who have so greatly con-
tributed to the formation of our monarchical unity; on Bertrand de
Got, who was Pope in Avignon under the name of Clement V. ; on
Christine de Stommeln. This last article is particularly curious for
the accent of far-away sympathy with which Renan cannot help
speaking of the ecstasies and visions of the beatific one. Without
doubt it is his works of this kind that have defended him against
himself, and kept him from yielding completely to the breath of an
unwholesome popularity. Let us return thanks for this to the 'Liter-
ary History of France,' and to the Benedictine brothers who began
long ago that monumental series. The diversity of these works also
explains that variety of learning which constitutes one of the charms
of the style of Renan. It is filled with learned allusions, scarcely more
than indicated with a rapid stroke that prolongs the sentence, leaving
the impression that he always said less than he could have said.
Much more than a philosopher or a "thinker," indeed, Renan was
a writer,—I mean an artist in style; and although he affected to dis-
courage admiration, he lived on it. "The vanity of the man of letters
is not mine," said he; "and I see clearly that talent is of worth only
because the world is childish. " He deceived himself. Talent is of
worth because it is rare, greatly in demand, but seldom offered; and
because there is a close connection between its rarity and the insuffi-
ciency that language opposes to the exact expression of thought.
Again, he said upon this subject that "if the public had a strong
enough head, he should content himself with the truth. " But what
truth? Of what sort? For example, to how many people is it of any
importance that one Artaxerxes was called "Long Hand" because he
was ambidextrous, or because one of his arms was longer than the
other? A Provincial Letter' of Pascal, a tragedy of Racine, concerns
much more deeply the intelligence of man and the moral progress
of humanity than the discovery of a new planet, than the exact read-
ing of a Phoenician inscription, than the catalogue of the deeds of
Philippe le Bel or Francis I. ! Then finally, if humanity is alive to
talent, that is doubtless a trait of our species, a characteristic of our
make-up, which it would be as "childish » to complain of as it would
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be to regret having only two eyes or no wings whatever. All this
Renan knew. But if he knew it, how and why did he so often say
the contrary? And are we to attribute this to pure affectation on
his part?
No! There is something else there. His great merit as a writer
is to have annexed in some sort, to the domain of general literature,
an entire vast province that before his time was not included in
it. Just as Buffon, and before Buffon, Montesquieu, put into gen-
eral circulation, the latter "universal jurisprudence and the former
«< natural history," so Renan introduced exegesis and philology.