tance as the means by which man is to arrive at the necessary truths about his own nature.

II

Renan and the Historical Spirit

Renan himself was so admirably endowed for historical study that in thus exalting it he may be suspected of viewing life too exclusively from the angle of his own special faculty. “All the misfortunes of men," says the dancing-master in Molière, “all the fatal reverses that fill the world's annals, the blunders of statesmen and the shortcomings of great captains arise from not knowing how to dance." We cannot, however, easily overrate the importance of the revolution that took place early in the last century in the manner of understanding history. Renan himself was one of the first to see in this new historical sense the chief acquisition and distinctive originality of the nineteenth century.1 "History," says Sainte-Beuve, "that general taste and aptitude of our age, falls heir, in effect, to all the other branches of human culture." 2 A few believers in direct vision, like Emerson, protested: "Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticisms." But in this matter Emerson's voice was that of one crying in the wilderness. The fascination of what he calls "masquerading in the faded wardrobe of the past" has made itself felt more and more, until it has come, in such forms as the historical novel, to appeal to the veriest Philistine.

In itself, this imaginative and sympathetic understanding of the past was worth acquiring, even at the cost of some onesidedness. The old-fashioned historian had an entirely inadequate notion of the variable element in human nature. He had before him in writing a sort of image of man in the abstract which he supposed to hold good for all particular men "from

1 Essais de morale et de critique, p. 104. 2 Nouveaux lundis, I., p. 103.

China to Peru"; he used very similar terms in speaking of Louis XIV. and a king of the Merovingian dynasty, and judged them in the main by the same standard. A historian like Renan, on the contrary, uses all his art in bringing out the differences that separate men in time and space. He has little to say about man in general, but he makes us feel the ways in which an Athenian of the time of the Antonines had ceased to resemble an Athenian of the age of Pericles, how the mental attitude of a Greek differed from that of a Jew, in what respects an inhabitant of Rome was unlike an inhabitant of Antioch. "The essence of criticism," he tells us, "is the ability to enter into modes of life different from our own." 99 1 In this definition he favors once more his own talent, which excels in nothing so much as in seizing and rendering the finest shades of thought and feeling, in making the most subtle distinctions. He has in a high degree what he himself calls "the direct intuition of the sentiments and passions of the past." 2 For this gift of historical divination there is needed, in addition to exact scholarship, a perfect blending of those feminine powers of comprehension and sympathy to which Goethe has paid tribute at the end of the second Faust. Renan himself is fond of insisting on this feminine side of his nature. "I have been reared by women and priests. In this fact lies the explanation both of my virtues and my faults. . . In my manner of feeling I am three-fourths a woman." 3 Elsewhere he ascribes this predominance of feminine traits to the entire Celtic race, and especially to his own branch of it.4

With his native aptitude for noting minute changes, Renan was peculiarly fitted to receive the new theories of evolution. The German scholarship and speculation, which he did so much to make known in France, are permeated by this idea of gradual growth and development. The old psychology had studied man 2 Essais de mor. et de critique, p. 110. 3 Feuilles détachées, p. xxx-xxxi. Cf. also Souvenirs, p. 90 f. 4 Essais de mor. et de critique, p. 385.

1 Souvenirs, p. 72, line 31.

from the static point of view; in the philosophy of Renan, even God evolves. For him, the great modern achievement is to "have substituted the category of becoming for the category of being, the conception of the relative for the conception of the absolute, movement for immobility."1 One who has found, like Renan, how much may be explained by the historical method, is tempted to use it to explain everything. He is curiously loath to grant that a work of art, for example, may be valuable by virtue of its universal human truth, and not simply as the mirror of a particular type of man or civilization. "It is not Homer who is beautiful," he says, "but Homeric life, the phase in the existence of humanity described by Homer." "If the Ossianic hymns of Macpherson were authentic, we should have to place them alongside of Homer; as soon as it is proved that they are by a poet of the eighteenth century, they have only a very trifling value." 2 Renan's historical finesse does not compare favorably here with the vigorous good sense of Dr. Johnson, who remarks characteristically of Ossian: "Sir, a man might write such stuff forever if he would only abandon his mind to it."

III

Renan as a Historian of Christianity

It was Renan's ambition, however, to be something more than a mere historian and philologist. It should be remembered that the second article of his creed is the negation of the supernatural,. "that strange disease,” as he describes it elsewhere, “that to the shame of civilization has not yet disappeared from humanity.": All his early training had turned him toward the study of religion. After his conversion from Catholicism to science, there was superadded the desire to apply his new faith, to prove that the positive methods of history and philology are adequate to explain what 1 Averroès, p. ii. 2 Ibid., p. 190 f. 3 Ibid., p. 48.

has always been held to be wholly beyond them. Theology assumes that there is a realm of mystery into which the ordinary reason is unable to enter. There can be no real triumph for the rationalist until this main assumption of theology is attacked and discredited. It was with all this in mind that Renan wrote when a very young man: "The most important book of the nineteenth century should have as its title 'A Critical History of the Origins of Christianity." 999 1 Renan devoted over thirty years of his own life to the accomplishment of this great task. The result is embodied in the seven volumes of his Origines du Christianisme, and the five complementary volumes of his Histoire du peuple d'Israël. These works, though not perhaps the most important of the century, are, at all events, the most considerable that have appeared in France for one or two generations.

It is quite beyond the scope of the present study to discuss in detail Renan's treatment of the grave questions that necessarily confront a historian of Christianity. The method of this treatment is evidently borrowed from Germany. He has pressed the French talent for expression into the service of German research, and thrown into general circulation ideas that had previously been the property of a few specialists. German scholars, however, had left to scriptural exegesis at least a semblance of special privilege. Renan's work is significant by the very boldness with which he abolishes the distinction between sacred and profane learning, and puts the narratives of the Old and New Testaments on precisely the same footing as those of Livy and Herodotus. The Bible, instead of being absolutely inspired and all of a piece, thus becomes purely human and historical and bears the impress of all the changing circumstances of time and place. The book of Ecclesiastes was once thought to be the word of God; Renan sees in it only the "philosophy of a disillusioned old bachelor." 8

It is usual to contrast this historical method of Renan with

1 Avenir de la sc., p. 279. 2 The "Higher Criticism" has recently attempted in the "Polychrome" Bible to make this element of relativity plain even to the eye. 3 Dialogues phil., p. 27.

the irreligion of the eighteenth century, founded entirely on reasoning and often as intolerant in temper as the dogma it attacked. This temper is well exemplified by Voltaire's warfare upon the supernatural, especially by the famous watchword of his crusade upon Catholicism, "Écrasez l'infâme." The militant atheism of former times was, as has often been remarked, a sort of inverted faith. "There is no God, and Harriet Martineau is his prophet." We can accept the contrast between Renan and this type of disbeliever, provided we remember that Renan's philosophy also carried with it no small share of dogmatic rationalism, and something, too, of the mocking irreverence that in France, at all events, nearly always accompanies it. This element comes to the surface more and more as he grows older. There are even moments when he deserves the epithet his enemies have given him,—that of an "unctuous Voltaire." This flippancy in dealing with religious matters is often amusing enough in itself, but one would have preferred to see a man like Renan follow the counsel of the ancient sage and "not speculate about the highest things in lightness of heart."

We cannot be too careful to distinguish these different elements in a nature as complex as Renan's. He has some points in common with Voltaire, and still more with the critics of Germany. On the other hand, he resembles by his sentimental cult for Christianity a Catholic apologist like Chateaubriand. It was to this last trait that he owed much of his power to influence his own generation. For religion, even after it has lost all effective hold on the reason and character, still lingers in the sensibility. When it has ceased to appeal to us as truth, it continues to appeal to us as beauty. As Renan puts it, "We are offended by the dogmas of Catholicism and delighted by its old churches."1 We are thrilled with emotion by mediæval architecture, by the poetry of Christian rites and ceremonies, by the odor of incense, or, like Renan himself, by the Canticles to the Virgin.2 This mood may 2 Souvenirs, p. 58.

1 Dialogues phil., p. 328.