ERNEST RENAN.

FROM THE FRENCH OF M. SAINTE BEUVE.

(Nouveaux Lundis. June 29th, 1862.)

HERE have been complaints for a considerable time, that in the

TH

field of imagination and invention, properly so called, there appears no new work, no new talent of the first order, taking its rank immediately and commanding recognition by brilliant and incontestable tokens; these complaints cannot be made in the world of erudition and criticism; they would be unjust, and one might immediately answer them by citing names which have pushed themselves forward within the last ten or twelve years, and, which since the time of their appearance, have been acquiring a genuine celebrity. In the front rank of this powerful and brilliant generation stands M. Renan. Although the starting-point, and the main subject of his studies would seem likely to circumscribe at first the circle of his public and of his readers, he has, ever since his entrance upon his career, contrived to extend it, by the superiority and variety of his views, by the new manner in which he regards and presents each question, and by the rare distinction of the form which he employs. His review articles in particular, and even his simple newspaper articles, which laid aside the usual forms, and presented each an individual whole, at once drew attention to him as master of a new style. There are persons who narrow and lessen the subjects which they handle; there are some who dry them up; he lifts up and ennobles them; he transforms them without altering their nature; he clothes them with a happy mixture of gravity and elegance; above all he fixes them, and puts them in their place, and exactly at their proper point, in their relations with other regions, on the chart of the intellectual world. He therefore gained respect from the first; he had a charm of seriousness. Each of his learned writings, his Studies in Religious History, his Philosophical and Literary Essays sold rapidly, and with the educated public, he had reached that most desirable degree of consideration and sustained interest, beyond which there is only vogue with its capriciousness. Recent and very unexpected incidents have given him this likewise, and have thrown him, so to speak, into the tide of a popularity, for which he did not seem suited, and for which he certainly had no ambition. In any country, where knowledge is appreciated for its own sake, where men's characters are honored for their intrinsic worth, where people prefer to enter upon a controversy, if need be, with a

man of merit, rather than to apostrophize and insult him, where people do not proceed with ideas as they do with everything else, by fits and starts, by leaps and bounds, there would not be all this noise, and we should be going and listening to M. Renan, grave, measured, elegant, and always respectful, and taking the liberty to discuss him when we

come out.

I should wish to relate briefly, and without any large number of conjectures, the history of this lofty intellect which stands distinct from those of our other contemporaries, and which owes a portion of its character and originality to its origin. Mr. Ernest Renan, who is not yet forty years old, was born in 1823 in Brittany-in Lower Brittany, let us not forget-at Tréguier. He belonged to a sea-faring family; by his father's side he belonged to the pure Breton race -to that staid, gentle, inflexible race, of which he has spoken so beautifully in his Essay on Lamennais. His roots go down into it, he has preserved its foundation; and among those who are accustomed to recognize and to unravel the essential elements which survive in spite of moral transformations, I shall not surprise any one by saying that, under his most consummate philosophic form he still maintains certain traits derived from his first race, traits which he himself has noted as the most profound and lasting, "faith, earnestness, antipathy to what is vulgar, contempt for what is frivolous "—yes, faith, a kind of faith, not in the supernatural, but in the divine; and one might indeed say, that, in his manner of looking at Nature, history, and humanity, M. Renan dissolves and disseminates the divine, but does not destroy it.

Born the last of the family, twelve years after the others — after a sister who stood by him in his youth, and was like a second mother to him, who would never leave him, and whom he has had the misfortune to lose quite recently during a scientific pilgrimage to the East, to which she was still his companion, he received and fostered within him, without squandering them, the domestic virtues and affections. His worthy mother, of whom he is the living likeness, is still alive to rejoice in such a son; and to have had the honor of seeing her once is enough to give one a feeling of the piety, tenderness, and quaintness which must have presided at this early home education. Sent to school in his native town,- to a small college kept by ecclesiastics,he studied with success till the age of sixteen: the masters in this college were priests belonging to the country, chips of the old block, grave and learned, giving instruction in polite literature with solidity and good sense, and anterior to every invasion of what may be termed clerical Romanticism or neo-catholicism. M. Renan has ever cherished their memory with deep gratitude.

On coming to Paris, being recruited, and called, by virtue of his provincial success, to the small seminary then under the direction of an abbé already celebrated, M. Dupanloup, a man of eloquence and zeal, but of a zeal not always sure, he seemed to fall into quite a new world; coming from under the influence of a Christian classical education, with its severity and soberness, he was placed under a very different régime; he came in contact for the first time with Parisian worldly catholicism of that very singular kind, which, in its different varieties, we have seen spring up, grow day by day, and flourish ;—a catholicism agitated and agitating, superficial and material, feverish, eager to profit by all the sensations, all the hobbies, and all the fashions of the age, by all the passing trains of pleasure or of war, at every turn putting fire under your stomach, and lighting coals on your head: there has arisen from it that fair array of youth, whom we know, and whom we see at work. After spending three years at this small seminary, M. Renan entered St. Sulpice, and in the first place, the maison d'Issy, with a view to studying philosophy for a couple of years. On his arrival in the world of St. Sulpice, he seemed, on the contrary, to be returning to his old surroundings in Brittany; surrounded by grave, quiet men, by learned teachers (the abbé Gosselin), some of them profound and highly original (the abbé Pinault, for example) he began to develop his own originality; he says:

"Ecclesiastical education, which has serious drawbacks, when it comes to the formation of the citizen and the practical man, has excellent effects in awakening and developing originality of mind. The teaching of the University, which is certainly more regular, more solid, and better disciplined, has the disadvantage of being too uniform, and of leaving too little room for individual taste, whether on the part of the professor, or on that of the pupil. In literature, the Church is, on the whole, less dogmatic than the University. Its taste is less pure, its methods less severe, but there is less of the literary superstition of the seventeenth century in it. Matter is sacrificed in a less degree to form; there is more declamation, but less rhetoric. This is peculiarly true of the higher education. Freed from all inspection, and all official control, the intellectual arrangements of the great seminaries are those of the most perfect liberty; nothing or next to nothing being imposed upon the pupil as compulsory duty, he remains in full possession of himself; add to this absolute solitude, long hours of meditation and silence, constant devotion to an aim which is superior to all personal considerations, and it will be seen what admirable institutions such houses must be for developing the reflective faculties. Such a mode of life crushes the weak mind, but imparts a singular energy to the mind which is capable of thinking for itself."

His first doubts came to him at Issy, and resulted from physical studies, from the sciences, for which he felt he had some taste, and

which he was beginning to cultivate. These nascent doubts, however, still left room for many sorts of explanation, and the young Sulpician, in course of his transition, found himself, I imagine, in one of those phases of Christian philosophy, at one of those intermediate stations, which Malebranche, whom he was reading at that time, had known, and at which the great preacher of the Oratoire had contrived, in his time, to stop midway, and to pitch his light tents and magnificent pavilions.

But our age, ill-sheltered and open to all the winds as it is, no longer allows these ephemeral encampments; the gorgeous clouds of a Malebranche would, in our day, be very soon swept away by the tempests or by the lightest breezes that blow every morning from all the points of the compass. M. Renan, after spending these two years at Issy, came to take his theological course at the seminary of Paris, and it was there that, on seeing unfolded before him, in all its crudeness and angularity, the scholastic theology, the old doctrine of St. Thomas, "overhauled and pounded by twenty sorbonic generations," his critical sense, already awake, rebelled: he could not believe it; so many imprudently raised objections, which a stout or subtle logic fancied it could level at every blow, so many rude thrusts given to historical truth, repelled him, in spite of himself, and at last forced him to come from behind his intrenchments. "How many minds," he says somewhere, "have been initiated into heterodoxy merely by the Solvuntur objecta of theological treatises!" He studied Hebrew, however, under M. Lehir, to whose solid teaching he has paid homage; though a pupil, he was even appointed, as early as his second year, to instruct the other pupils in the elementary course. By a singular licence, he was allowed to go to the College of France to hear M. Quatremère, and on his way, numerous echoes reached him from without. This second year at St. Sulpice was 1844-45.

Nevertheless he had begun to study Germany, and through Germany he had become initiated into those sciences of modern growth, which have had so much difficulty in making their way and obtaining a footing among us, even after thirty or forty years of fixed and regular existence. I do not know in fact what our flimsy routine is waiting for, before making its acquaintance with them, and recognizing their power of method and their results. M. Renan had in particular received a very deep impression from the ideas and views of Herder: -that species of Christianity or higher religious basis, which admits all investigations, and all the consequences of criticism and examination, and which at the same time allows the existence of respect, and even of enthusiasm; which preserves and saves it by transferring it,

in some measure, from dogmatism to history, to complex and living productivity, restored his serenity, and afforded him much quiet he felt that, if he had lived in Germany, he might have found situations favorable for independent and respectful study, without being compelled to break absolutely with venerable things and names, and this by means of a sort of happy fusion of poetry with the religion of the past.

But the clearness of our minds, as well as the dryness of our forms, and the pointedness of our rules, does not tolerate such undecidedness, which is often fostering and fruitful: we must choose between yes and no. It was during the vacation of 1845, in Brittany, that M. Renan made his final reflections: all the historical and critical studies of the previous year had given a precise and stationary form to the objections which had formerly been floating about in his mind. He determined to leave St. Sulpice, without entering upon his third year, and informed his master of his resolution. M. Renan was sent to the College of Stanislas, and there spent a fortnight in the company of the abbé Gratry, a man of intellect and talent, but one whose methods could have no hold upon him. He preferred soon to withdraw to ȧ boarding school in the Quartier St. Jacques, where he gave lessons. His tender sister, at this painful crisis, came to his aid, and spared him the anxieties of material life: he was at least able to give himself up entirely to his ideas, and to those noble endeavors after progress and inner advancement to which he had devoted himself.

The nature of this intellectual emancipation on the part of M. Renan deserves to be well understood and defined. In a certain sense, it was not a struggle, a violent storm, a rending: there was no day, or hour, or solemn moment for him, in which the veil of the temple was rent from before his eyes; he was not the counterpart of Saint Paul, who on the road to Damascus, was struck and thrown down, and thereby converted. Philosophy did not appear to him one morning or one evening, like a Minerva full-armed; it did not announce itself by a peal of thunder, as it did, I imagine, in the case of Lamennais, and, to a small extent, in that of Jouffroy. He had no sweat of battle, like Jacob in his struggle with the angel, and no solitary watch of agony. Nothing of the kind; if the rending process did take place, it was in another respect, namely that of personal relations; it was no doubt painful and trying for him to have to separate himself from the venerable men, to whom he was attached by feelings of affection and gratitude; he suffered because he was obliged to cause them pain by informing them of an irrevocable determination. He was timid; he was a novice in manners; the man, whom at pres