Recollections of my youth

Front matter

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Appendix

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INTRODUCTION bY Dr. °G. Gy COULTON

IN 1845, on October 9, John Henry Newman left the Anglican for the Roman communion. Three days earlier a young student had walked out of the Seminary of St.-Sulpice with a very different resolve fixed for ever in his mind. His tastes and upbringing had been those of a Catholic priest; in a sense, he never ceased to regret his lost Catholicism, just as Newman regretted his lost English Bible and the Vza Media he had once dreamed of; but, fundamentally, Renan died as irreconcilable as he shows himself in the last words of this present book. Each of these men has left an autobiography seldom surpassed or equalled for interest; each was not only a leader of thought in his own generation, but also a master of style; and all the religious struggles of the last four centuries are typified in this adhesion of the great Anglican to Rome at the very moment when this model seminarist was finding the Church of his birth frankly impossible. Let me ‘therefore run rapidly through the main facts of Renan’s career;

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Vill INTRODUCTION such a summary may be useful to the reader after, if not before, his perusal of these Souvenirs themselves. Certainly we of the last generation, who read the book on its first appearance in 1883, would have been very grateful for a few such definite landmarks. Ernest Joseph Renan was born at Quimper on February 28, 1823, and died within a few weeks of the Psalmist’s threescore and ten (October 2, 1892). His father, a sea captain, died early, leaving three small children to a widow who lived on until 1868, undisturbed in her old Breton faith. Like Voltaire and Victor Hugo and many others, Renan was a very weakly infant at birth. At six he went to school, and so distinguished himself by his ability, hard work, and good conduct that at fifteen he was taken up, aS a young prodigy, to Dupanloup’s model seminary at Paris (1838). Thence he passed into the higher seminary of Issy (October, 1841) and to St.- Sulpice at Paris. Here, however, his more advanced studies awakened doubts as to his priestly vocation; in the spring of 1845, after agonies of conflict and renunciation, he had reached comparative calm outside his early faith; in October he definitely quitted the seminary. Herein he was encouraged by his sister Henriette, a governess of the Jane Eyre type, who had independently followed the same evolution

INTRODUCTION 1X long before him, and who now put her scanty savings at his disposal. But these were not long needed. Renan taught for a few days at the Collége Stanislas, directed by the distinguished Jesuit Gratry; but he could not bring himself to wear tiie clerical cassock, and therefore exchanged his post for that of pupilteacher at a private school. Here, as he tells us in the Souvenirs, he had the luck to find among his pupils the future chemist Berthelot, four years younger than himself. After two years of colossal labour, Renan obtained the Prix Volney, one of the great prizes of the Institut, for a monograph on the History of the Semitic Languages. In this same year (1847), after passing the degrees of Bachelier and Licencié, he became Agrégé, or Fellow of the University, and was appointed to the Lycée of Vendéme, a post which he was soon glad to exchange for a lower place in the Lycée of Versailles. Then came the Revolution of 1848, from which he held politically aloof, but which did much to stimulate his book on The Future of Sctence. At the same time, he was working at a love-story, Evnest and Beatrice. The former was published only in 1890, the latter was never finished. But meanwhile the Académie des Inscriptions sent him to seek material in the Italian libraries for the Histoire Littéraire de la France; those eight months x INTRODUCTION brought him a revelation which he never forgot. In 1850 he settled with his sister in a little flat overlooking the garden of the Carmelite nuns (No. 9g, Rue du Val-de-Grace). Her savings were their first fund; but Renan made his way very rapidly in journalism; he had soon attracted the notice of great men, and became a regular contributor, among other journals, to the Débats and the Revue des Deux Mondes. Early in 1851 he was appointed to a post in the Bibliothéque Nationale, at five francs a day. In 1852 he obtained his doctor’s degree with a thesis on Averroés, which he published at his own expense. This, his first actual book, cost him 1,378 francs of capital outlay, but repaid him well in the long run. Next year came the Coup d’Etat; his superior, Hauréau, with nearly forty professors, refused to swear allegiance to Napoleon III. and were expelled ; Renan, a more obscure functionary, was spared the trial. In spite of the obvious theological unorthodoxy of his writings, he was unmolested by the Government, and even patronized. In 1855 he was elected to the Institut; in 1856 he married the sister of Ary Scheffer, the painter; in 1860 he was made Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur and sent on an official mission to Beyrouth to collect Phcenician inscriptions. He sailed in October with his sister; his wife joined

INTRODUCTION x1 them in December. From April to the end of May he quitted his work to visit Jerusalem and the holy places of Palestine. In June he took his wife and sister into the mountains of Lebanon; the wife then went home, but Henriette stayed with him and caught a malarial fever. When they returned to the sea, she grew worse; he was attacked also; while both lay unconscious, she passed away (September 24), and he recovered slowly, to sail homeward on October 10. His search for inscriptions had produced little; he was really out of his element there; but he brought home the rough draft of his Vze de /ésus. Next January he was appointed Professor of Hebrew at the Collége de France. The clergy and the Empress soon procured an imperial decree forbidding his lectures. On June 24, 1863, he published his Vie de Jésus. His*Souvenirs tell us how good a friend he had found meanwhile in the rising publisher Michel Levy, who pushed this remarkable book with almost equally remarkable business ability. In less than five months 60,000 copies were sold ; and, within about a year and a half, it had been translated into eleven languages; Sainte-Beuve said truly that no novel had enjoyed a success comparable to this. Henceforward he was assured of an income sufficient for his needs. In 1865 he journeyed again to the xii INTRODUCTION

East, this time on his own account, to study the scenery for the next two volumes of his O7igins of Christtanity: The Apostles (1866) and St. Paul (1869). In 1869 he plunged into politics, and stood for the Corps Législatif, but failed; he failed again in the elections of 1871. The Franco-German War resulted in a breach between him and D. F. Strauss, who certainly gave inexcusable provocation. The Souvenirs began to appear in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1876; in 1878 he was elected to the Academy ; in 1881 he had finished the seven volumes of his Origins of Christianity and begun his History of the People of Israel. In 1885 he hired a country house near his own home in Brittany, in which he passed successive summers. Thenceforward .there is little to record but further literary successes and increasing bodily infirmities. He died in 1892, having exercised in his later years something like to the literary dictatorship of Voltaire, or to that of a very different man in a very different country, Dr. Johnson. He lived to see not only the success of his ideas, but a very strong reaction; there were young folk who still swore by him, and young folk who had sworn by him for a while only.

For, in a very real sense, he had his finger on the pulse both of the present and of the past. He thought

INTRODUCTION xiil most, and wrote most, concerning religion—a topic which can never fail to be, in one form or another, one of the chief concerns of the human mind; religion was Renan’s main preoccupation from childhood to old age. The man who is really interested here can never fail to interest others. Not only the men of Athens at one given time, but myriads of men and women in all ages are concerned either to tell or to _hear some new thing that shall bear upon the riddle of life; and, while teacher after teacher stammers out his own imperfect solution, it depends only upon each man’s sincerity that, while some mock, others shall say: “‘We will hear thee again of this matter.’’ That spirit will never wholly die which inspired the unnamed Saxon noble to claim a hearing for Paulinus of York. ‘‘ Man’s present life on éarth, O King, in comparison with that time whereof we know nothing, is like unto a little sparrow. For, when thou sittest at feast with thy chiefs and thy ministers in wintertide, and the blazing fire on the hearth warms the whole hall, and gusts of winter rain or snow are raging without, then a little bird will flutter into your hall by one door and fly out swiftly by another. Whilst he is within, he feeleth neither winter nor storm; yet that brief interval of quiet is quickly past, and he is soon lost to thine eyes, in the wintry darkxiv INTRODUCTION ness from whence he came. Thus do we see man’s brief span of life; what came before, and what shall come after, of that we know nothing. Wherefore, if this new doctrine can give us any sure help here, it would seem worthy of our attention.’’? But such doctrine takes many forms; and Renan, in these Souvenirs with which we are here mostly occupied, speaks from a standpoint which would have shocked Paulinus.

He was far more interested in ecclesiastical history than in speculative theology. To write most truly in the former field (he has said elsewhere), two conditions are necessary : the author must have believed, and he must believe no longer. And Cardinal Newman, with that penetration and knowledge of human nature which so often give a double edge to his observations, had practically anticipated Renan when he wrote: ‘‘ It is melancholy to say it; but the chief, perhaps the only, English writer who has any claim to be considered an ecclesiastical historian is the infidel Gibbon.’’? Gibbon had been Protestant and Roman Catholic and free-thinker, and he saw the long perspective of history from that triple standpoint. We may not think him unbiased, but his experi-

INTRODUCTION XV ence had given him the power of seizing salient points in their significance not for the past only, but still more for the future. And Gibbon’s autobiography, itself a monument of sound literature, supplies a great deal that may help us to understand Renan. There are sentences which Renan himself might have written: “‘ When I contemplate the common lot of mortality, I must acknowledge that I have drawn a high prize in the lottery of life. . . . According to the scale of Switzerland I am a rich man; and I am indeed rich, since my income is superior to my expence, and my expence is equal to my wishes. . . . My tender constitution has been fortified by time

; and the inestimable gift of the sound and peaceful slumbers of infancy may be imputed both to the mind and body.’’ Most significant of all, perhaps, is the sentence where Gibbon sums up the things which may be learnt from foreign travel, and ascribes to the perfect learner ‘‘ a virtue which borders on a vice; the flexible temper which can assimilate itself to every tone of society from the court to the cottage; the happy flow of spirits which can amuse and be amused in every company and situation.’’! Put this side by side with the last pages of Renan’s

1 The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon, edited by John Murray. 1896, pp. 270, 342-5.

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Souvenirs, where he acknowledges in his own life so many happy coincidences that he is sometimes tempted to believe in predestination or in Providence; and note especially that last sentence of all: “‘ Je n’aurai, en disant adieu A la vie, qu’A remercier la cause de tout bien de la charmante promenade qu’il m’a été donné d’accomplir a travers la réalité.”’ This optimism was perhaps partly the cause, partly the effect, of Gibbon’s ‘‘ virtue which borders on a vice’’; that habit of looking at all sides which promoted tolerance, but came perilously near to indifference, and was mainly responsible for the reaction among Renan’s younger pupils. Maurice Barrés, whose youth had been fascinated by the Master, portrayed him a few years later in an imaginary ““ Week at Mr. Renan’s House’’—a pamphlet which the great philosopher, losing for a moment his sense of humour, took very seriously, complaining that here was a young man to whom, as a matter of fact, he had never even offered a glass of water! Barrés’s caricature 1s as subtle and pitiless as those of Max Beerbohm ; the legendary old lady who loved Gibbon for the pious reflections in his footnotes might’ well read the conversations in Huzt Jours chez M. Renan, and believe that the Sage himself was speaking.

““At the age of twelve, my young friend, I was

INTRODUCTION XVii already what I am now, rheumatism included; since then, I have learned nothing but familiarity with dictionaries.’’ And again: ‘‘ This afternoon, when I was introduced into M. Renan’s study, the illustrious academician was dozing peaceably over his crabbed and ancient tomes. He awoke with perfect ease of manner, quite imperturbably, like a sage who is accustomed to pass from dreams to business. And, before I had spoken, he was already of my opinion.’’! Compare this with p. 318 of this present volume, and with Renan’s confession that omnibus conductors had ceased to look upon him as a serious traveller (p. 314). Here, again, is what the disillusioned Barrés wrote in his more serious mood : ‘‘ Renan loves to palm off the most perfect immoralities upon simple souls; he troubles them and he charms them. He is a splendid sophist; the man who has done most to create the moral nihilism of our present generation. . . . This Jesuitical genius, those intimate yet reticent phrases, this sermonizing Ste-Beuve, always reminds me, [| know not why, of Taztuffe. He has such a soft hand to stroke the lady’s heart as she reads him. And yet, what a relief there is in this smiling hypocrisy of

1 The little book is very difficult to procure ; but Barrés repeated the same delicate persiflage in the introduction to his novel Le Jardin de Bérénice. b}

XVili INTRODUCTION the sceptics! what repose we find in it after all the brutalities of the daily papers and the amenities of politics, and how we take it to our hearts! In twenty years’ time we shall be stretching out our arms to some slightly modified form of Catholicism.’’? And, in another place: ‘‘ At his death he bequeathed to us no clear watchword, if J understand him aright, beyond the worship of lofty ideas.’’?

Yet that is much; and though Renan, with his desire to say what would please his audience, sometimes approached for a moment to that unenviable character which Dr. Johnson gave to Lord Chesterfield’s Letters, yet his higher utterances are far more characteristic of the real man. ‘‘ For my part, gentlemen, I believe in Absolute Truth.... It exists, and we must strain every nerve to reach it.’’* ‘“Good is good, evil is evil.’’ ‘‘Error is sterile, essentially perishable.’’ ‘‘I am convinced that virtue will some day prove definitely to have been the best part. . . . An immense moral, and perhaps intellectual, degradation would follow if ever religion disappeared from the world.’’* So that Barres, how-

1 Quoted by Giraud, Maurice Barres, p. 62, from an article in Les Taches ad Eencre, November 5, 1884.

2 Maurice Barrés, Ernest Renan, a lecture at the Sorbonne, published in 1923.

3 René d’Ys, Ernest Renan en Bretagne, 1904, p. 237. Cf. Pommier, pp. 277-8. 4 Preface to Feuilles déttachées.

INTRODUCTION X1X ever impatient with his hesitations and ambiguities, could testify after his death to the abiding influence of his work. ‘‘ Renan aroused grief and reprobation and wrath in the Catholic world; yet to us [young men] he brought a love of Catholicism. . . . Almost all that is serious in the world of to-day (he would tell us) came from Christianity; and he brought us

back to the sources of that seriousness.’’! He is ~ thus the inspirer of the New Apologetics. The old Catholic orthodoxy rested, among other things, on the infallibility of the Bible, on its infallibility even in pure matters of history; St. Thomas Aquinas is most emphatic on this point. Renan discovered, what German rationalists and others had discovered before him, that this theory is an untenable absurdity. But he saw also, what not all the others had seen, that there were spiritual. values in Catholicism independent even of its grossest historical errors. This became the basis of Alfred Loisy’s apologetics, so long as Loisy remained within the Church at all; and it commands the sympathies of many modern Frenchmen whose Catholicism, when not merely political, expresses mainly their abhorrence of the crudities which too often disfigure Protestantism and Rationalism.

1 Barrés, Joc. czt., pp. 5, 7- xx INTRODUCTION

These Souvenirs appeared by instalments in the Revue des Deux Mondes from 1876 onwards. The first chapter was written in the autumn of 1875, under the vines and fig trees of a hotel garden at Ischia, most beautiful of all islands in the Bay of Naples. The Prayer on the Acropolis was certainly not written on the spot; and, though it has sometimes been spoken of as his masterpiece, it is rather cloying for British taste, and we may be permitted to doubt whether it will wear so well as. the rest of the book, The remaining chapters were composed on other holidays, at Ischia again, at Venice, and at Tailloires in Savoy. It is possible that this autobiography, like Preterita, may be read in later centuries by thousands who will completely ignore the enormous mass of Renan’s and Ruskin’s other writings. For in the Souvenirs, as in his Preface to the companion Feuilles détachées, he takes the reader into his confidence, and unfolds his ripest self. The confidence is not complete; here, as elsewhere, ‘‘ he hid his real mind when he wrote . . . he never said more than he wanted to say.’’! It is not only that his memory or his courage fails him on certain points of fact, which have been conscientiously corrected by Pommier and others.” In this book his whole life is dramatized ! René @’Ys, p. 228.

2 Compare, for instance, p. 299 of this present volume with Pommier

INTRODUCTION : xxi with conscious art, as in Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit. While he seems to be giving us so much, he is sometimes imposing gently upon his public, much as a cat caresses herself against her master. “‘I was educated by women and priests; there you have the whole explanation of my qualities and my defects.’’* To the last, his massive learning was. allied with the suave exterior courtesies of the - seminary. And the semi-monastic seclusion of his earlier life, even after he had broken loose from the seminary, stamped the personal side of his work with some of the characteristics which we may find in medieval monastic chroniclers. In his treatment of love between men and women, he has something of the greasy touch of a priest, even when he differs most profoundly from the Church. In face of worldly business, as he tells us himself, he was a child; and he looked upon his fellow-men, with all their business and their loves and hates, with something of a child’s insatiable curiosity; he described it all with the

(p. 107), who contrasts it with the fact that in 1857, when Renan was

hoping for the professorship of Hebrew, ‘‘ he sent letter after letter to

Berthelot . . . begging him to work upon two men who held professor-

ships at the College de France ” in favour of his candidature. Renan’s

descriptions of his relations with Berthelot and Henriette are idealized

in the Souvenirs. See Pommier, pp. 89, 90, 104, 109, 132-138, 176. 1 Feuilles dtétachées, p. xxx.

xxii INTRODUCTION child’s half-unconscious power of mimicry, pointed, here and there, with the child’s delicate malice. In satire, he had the feline touch to perfection. When his fellow-scholar and _ fellow-rationalist Strauss, writing to Renan from victorious Germany, and calling upon France to acknowledge her defeats in war as punishment of her sins, was so culpably tactless as to print the correspondence without asking his friend’s leave, and to sell it in aid of the German wounded, Renan replied in a letter which has never been excelled in delicate irony. ‘‘ God forbid that I should wrangle with you on points of copyright! Moreover, the work for which you have compelled my contribution is a work of humanity; and, if my poor prose has managed to procure a few cigars for the men who pillaged my little house at Sévres, I am grateful to you for having enabled me to act up to some of the precepts of Jesus which seem to me most authentic.’’

But the highest value of this, as of all great autobiographies, resides in the life that les behind it. Renan’s learning has been severely criticized by specialists, and his scientific work will probably be soon out of date. Yet that learning was enormous in extent, even when we have made all deductions that the professional philosopher will make from his

INTRODUCTION Xx1ii philosophy, the Orientalist from his philology, and the historian from his originality or accuracy. The claim on p. 329 of this present book is, naturally enough, exaggerated.! Yet nobody has ever laboured harder to acquire all the knowledge possible to his - own age; whatever blasphemies Renan might sometimes utter against Knowledge, his life was, in fact, devoted to her with a single-minded persistency which is rare in any generation. He was the most learned of all the great autobiographers, even more learned for his age than St. Augustine, and Augustine’s equal in literary power; only he had far less “fire in his belly.’”’ Here he shows the defect of his qualities, and we may take our text from his own words (p. 314): ‘‘I have long since given up taking the omnibus; the conductor came to look upon me as a passenger who did not know what he was about.’’ If Renan had jostled for fame as we creatures of common clay jostle for the omnibus, he would not only have deserved less success, but secured less. Yet, at the other extreme, our irresolution does not always help the public; it may become a public

1 The original French seems to me somewhat stronger than Mr. Pitman’s version ; like much of Renan’s prose, it is so subtie as almost to defy exact translation, but I think we should get nearer by rendering : ‘‘ Henceforth I shall learn little more ; I see clearly nearly all the truth that the human mind, at this stage of development, is capable of apprehending.”

XXiV INTRODUCTION hindrance, not only to the omnibus, but to intellectual progress; the bus conductor is not seldom a wiser man in his generation than many children of light. Renan yielded almost as deeply as Amiel to the luxury of flitting from flower to flower and committing himself to none; he was an accomplished model of the Higher Epicureanism. Yet, at the back, there was always what Turner claimed as the secret of his own.success—‘‘ damned hard work.’’ Common folk who contemplate all human activities from their own quiet and detached standpoint may be called lotus-eaters; but Renan played this part at such Olympian heights that we range him among the gods.

‘* But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong, Like a tale of little meaning tho’ the words are strong.”

Barres makes Rénan explain the practical conservatism which underlay his licence of abstract thought. ‘‘ Une seule [raison] suffra; mon hygiéne s’oppose a ce que je désire voir modifier avant que je meure la forme des institutions’’; and the sting is not less effective because the reader might almost accept this sentence as an actual quotation from the Souvenirs.‘

1 Le Jardin de Bérénice, preface. ‘*One reason will suffice : considerations of personal health forbid my desiring any modification in our institutions during my own lifetime.”

INTRODUCTION XXV

Yet he postponed health to work; and he died in harness, less than ten years after the farewell pages of this book. Little by little he approached that stage which he has described in Marcus Aureltus : ‘“His wisdom was absolute; in other words, his boredom was unlimited ’’ ; yet he worked steadily on. His dear old master in Brittany, Abbé Pasco, had devoted his dying prayers to Renan’s return, and almost his last words had been: ‘‘ Do not despair of Ernest Renan; J promise you, he will come back to God.’’ Yet, in Pasco’s sense, he came no nearer than we find him in the last words of these Souvenirs, protesting against the weakness which had brought the priests to the deathbed of his friend Littré. He had often said: ‘‘ The most important act of our lives is death’’; and this was not belied in his own end. He had long suffered from the maladies incidental to excessive brain-work and lack of exercise; personal experience persuaded him that St. Paul’s terrible skolops en sarki, the ‘‘ thorn in the flesh,’’ was plain prosaic rheumatism.! In 1889 he wrote: ‘““In my better moments, I can walk my two bp ;

little kilometres a day.’’ He grew a little stronger during that fine summer, labouring at the two con-

1 Feutlles détachées, p. 211. By a small characteristic slip, of the kind that would have distressed an accurate textual scholar, Renan here misquotes the Greek, writing & for 77.

XXVI1 INTRODUCTION cluding volumes of his Hzstozre d’Israel; but he was burning the candle at both ends, for he walked even less than before, and began to rise early after sleeping late. In his country-house of Rosmapamon, by the Breton sea, he spent his evenings in the open air, sitting beside his wife with the heather at their feet and the ocean for their horizon; early next morning he was in the garden, admiring the blackbirds and jays as they plunged their beaks into his fruit, and interested in everything. The last two volumes went well under his. hand; he could confess: ‘‘I have serious doubts as to personal immortality; yet nearly all my actions aim at a goal beyond this life; I love my work as it shall be after my death; I feel as if I shall then be far more truly alive than I am to-day.”’ He dreamed, when at last the two concluding volumes should be printed, of settling down into a dozing contentment, reading novels, ‘‘ the novel of to-day.” In November he went in search of sunshine to Cap Martin in Provence; the warmth and the blue sea took him back to Syria and the days when his imagination had overflowed in the Vze de Jésus. He felt that the end was near; but “‘ let us die calmly, in communion with Humanity and the Religion of the Future.’’ Yet his insatiable curiosity had its inextinguishable regrets, which break out in the

INTRODUCTION XXV1l preface to Feuzlles détachées, with his appeal to ““my dear children’’ of the new generation. ‘‘ How many things you will know forty or fifty years hence, which I shall never know! How many problems you will see solved! How will the inmost soul of the Kaiser William II. develop? What will be the end of the conflict of European nationalities ? What turn will the social question take? Will the Socialist movement, in the proper sense of that term, come to anything? What will be the coming fate of the Papacy? Alas! I shall die without seeing anything of these things save by conjecture, and to your eyes these riddles will be accomplished facts.’’ In December, on the journey home, he suffered from the cold; and on New Year’s Day he attended a public ceremony where, by mismanagement, he was kept standing for three-quarters of an hour in a chilly atmosphere, and came home exhausted. Next day shingles developed; then neuralgic pains; he began to lose heart, though there were still bright intervals for body and mind. At Easter he took a little holiday; in July he went down to Rosmapamon. But there he grew steadily worse; the revision of a chapter in his fourth volume gave him special trouble : “‘T may truly call this Bexoni, the child of my pain.’’ Neuralgia became almost chronic, and his digestion

XXVII1 INTRODUCTION began to fail. On September 15, after a party where he had seemed almost his old self among a few friends, he had a bad night and a fainting-fit. The doctor advised Paris; but the trains went wrong, and Renan had to drive two hours on a chilly evening in an open carriage. When they reached his home at the Collége de France, Renan thanked his wife for having ‘‘ brought him back to die ’’; to his old friend Berthelot, he quoted, ‘‘ The days of our years are threescore and ten’’; he was then just over sixty-nine and a half. On September 30 he was plainly worse; there was nat only pain, but heart-failure. He saw his wife’s distress in her face, and bade her take courage; then he added: ‘‘I die in communion with Humanity and the Religion of the Future.’’ ‘‘ Then the dying man began to speak of the Church. ‘ This is the moment at which she used to seize upon dying men. She was strong indeed; she regulated men’s lives; what a force there is in doing the same thing every day at the same hour!’ . . . When his wife asked what she would do without him, he said: ‘Why, you will keep my work going; you will continue my life.’’’' Next morning he fainted again; and when he revived his mind was wandering; he