should have looked for from the writer of the _Vie de Jésus_. The story
of the disintegration of a faith is supposed commonly to have something
tragic about it. We expect it to be a story of heart-breaking
disenchantments, of painful struggles, of fierce recoils against
ancient beliefs and the teachers who bolstered them up; of indignation
at having been so long deceived; of lamentation over years wasted in
the service of falsehood. The confessions of St. Augustine, the
biography of Blanco White, the letters of Lamennais, at least agree in
the witness which they bear to the bitter pangs and anxieties amid
which, in their case, the eventful change came about. Even Cardinal
Newman's _Apologia_, self-restrained and severely controlled as it is,
shows no doubtful traces of the conflicts and sorrows out of which he
believed himself to have emerged to a calmer and surer light. But M.
Renan's story is an idyl, not a tragedy. It is sunny, placid,
contented. He calls his life the "_charmante promenade_" which the
"cause of all good," whatever that may be, has granted him through the
realities of existence. There are in it no storms of passion, no
cruelties of circumstances, no deplorable mistakes, no complaints, no
recriminations. His life flows on smoothly, peacefully, happily, with
little of rapids and broken waters, gradually and in the most natural
and inevitable way enlarging itself, moving in new and wider channels
and with increased volume and force, but never detaching itself and
breaking off from its beginnings. It is a spectacle which M. Renan, who
has lived this life, takes a gentle pleasure in contemplating. He looks
back on it with thankfulness, and also with amusement It makes a
charming and complete picture. No part could be wanting without
injuring the effect of the whole. It is the very ideal of the education
of the Rousseau school--a child of nature, developing, amid the
simplest and humblest circumstances of life, the finest gifts and most
delicate graces of faith and reverence and purity--brought up by sages
whose wisdom he could not in time help outrunning, but whose piety,
sweetness, disinterestedness, and devoted labour left on his mind
impressions which nothing could wear out; and at length, when the time
came, passing naturally, and without passion or bitterness, from out of
their faithful but too narrow discipline into a wider and ampler air,
and becoming, as was fit, master and guide to himself, with light which
they could not bear, and views of truth greater and deeper than they
could conceive. But every stage of the progress, through the virtues of
the teachers, and the felicitous disposition of the pupil, exhibits
both in exactly the due relations in which each ought to be with the
other, with none of the friction of rebellious and refractory temper on
one side, or of unintelligent harshness on the other. He has nothing to
regret in the schools through which he passed, in the preparations
which he made there for the future, in the way in which they shaped his
life. He lays down the maxim, "On ne doit jamais écrire que de ce qu'on
aime." There is a serene satisfaction diffused through the book, which
scarcely anything intervenes to break or disturb; he sees so much
poetry in his life, so much content, so much signal and unlooked-for
success, that he has little to tell except what is delightful and
admirable. And then he is so certain that he is right: he can look down
with so much good-humoured superiority on past and present, alike on
what he calls "l'effroyable aventure du moyen âge," and on the march of
modern society to the dead level of "Americanism." It need not be said
that the story is told with all M. Renan's consummate charm of
storytelling. All that it wants is depth of real feeling and
seriousness--some sense of the greatness of what he has had to give up,
not merely of its poetic beauty and tender associations. It hardly
seems to occur to him that something more than his easy cheerfulness
and his vivid historical imagination is wanted to solve for him the
problems of the world, and that his gradual transition from the
Catholicism of the seminary to the absolute rejection of the
supernatural in religion does not, as he describes it, throw much light
on the question of the hopes and destiny of mankind.
The outline of his story is soon told. It is in general like that of
many more who in France have broken away from religion. A clever
studious boy, a true son of old Brittany--the most melancholy, the most
tender, the most ardent, the most devout, not only of all French
provinces, but of all regions in Europe--is passed on from the teaching
of good, simple, hard-working country priests to the central
seminaries, where the leaders of the French clergy are educated. He
comes up a raw, eager, ignorant provincial, full of zeal for knowledge,
full of reverence and faith, and first goes through the distinguished
literary school of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet, of which Dupanloup was
the founder and the inspiring soul. Thence he passed under the more
strictly professional discipline of St. Sulpice: first at the
preparatory philosophical school at Issy, then to study scientific
theology in the house of St. Sulpice itself at Paris. At St. Sulpice he
showed special aptitudes for the study of Hebrew, in which he was
assisted and encouraged by M. le Hir, "the most remarkable person," in
his opinion, "whom the French clergy has produced in our days," a
"savant and a saint," who had mastered the results of German criticism
as they were found in the works of Gesenius and Ewald. On his faith all
this knowledge had not made the faintest impression; but it was this
knowledge which broke down M. Renan's, and finally led to his retiring
from St. Sulpice. On the one side was the Bible and Catholic theology,
carefully, scientifically, and consistently taught at St. Sulpice; on
the other were the exegesis and the historical criticism of the German
school. He came at length to the conclusion that the two are
incompatible; that there was but a choice of alternatives; and purely
on the ground of historical criticism, he says, not on any abstract
objections to the supernatural, or to miracles, or to Catholic dogma,
he gave up revealed religion. He gave it up not without regrets at the
distress caused to friends, and at parting with much that was endeared
to him by old associations, and by intrinsic beauty and value; but, as
far as can be judged, without any serious sense of loss. He spent some
time in obscurity, teaching, and studying laboriously, and at length
beginning to write. Michel Lévy, the publisher, found him out, and
opened to him a literary career, and in due time he became famous. He
has had the ambiguous honour of making the Bible an object of such
interest to French readers as it never was before, at the cost of
teaching them to find in it a reflection of their own characteristic
ways of looking at life and the world. It is not an easy thing to do
with such a book as the Bible; but he has done it.
As a mere history of a change of convictions, the _Souvenirs_ are
interesting, but hardly of much importance. They are written with a
kind of Epicurean serenity and dignity, avoiding all exaggeration and
violence, profuse in every page in the delicacies and also in the
reticences of respect, not too serious to exclude the perpetual
suggestion of a well-behaved amused irony, not too much alive to the
ridiculous and the self-contradictory to forget the attitude of
composure due to the theme of the book. He warns his readers at the
outset that they must not look for a stupid literalness in his account.
"Ce qu'on dit de soi est toujours poésie"--the reflection of states of
mind and varying humours, not the exact details of fact. "Tout est vrai
dans ce petit volume, mais non de ce genre de verité qui est requis
pour une _Biographie universelle_. Bien des choses ont été mises, afin
qu'on sourie; si l'usage l'eût permis, j'aurais dû écrire plus d'une
fois à la marge--_cum grano salis_". It is candid to warn us thus to
read a little between the lines; but it is a curious and unconscious
disclosure of his characteristic love of a mixture of the misty and the
clear. The really pleasant part of it is his account, which takes up
half the volume, of Breton ways and feelings half a century ago, an
account which exactly tallies with the pictures of them in Souvestre's
writings; and the kindliness and justice with which he speaks of his
old Catholic and priestly teachers, not only in his boyish days at
Tréguier, but in his seminary life in Paris. His account of this
seminary life is unique in its picturesque vividness. He describes how,
at St. Nicolas, under the fiery and irresistible Dupanloup, whom he
speaks of with the reserved courtesy due to a distinguished person whom
he much dislikes, his eager eyes were opened to the realities of
literature, and to the subtle powers of form and style in writing,
which have stood him in such stead, and have been the real secret of
his own success.
Le monde s'ouvrit pour moi. Malgré sa prétention d'être un asile
fermé aux bruits du dehors, Saint-Nicolas était a cette époque la
maison la plus brillante et la plus mondaine. Paris y entrait à
pleins bords par les portes et les fenêtres, Paris tout entier,
moins la corruption, je me hâte de le dire, Paris avec ses
petitesses et ses grandeurs, ses hardiesses et ses chiffons, sa
force révolutionnaire et ses mollesses flasques. Mes vieux prêtres
de Bretagne savaient bien mieux les mathématiques et le latin que
mes nouveaux maîtres; mais ils vivaient dans des catacombes sans
lumière et sans air. Ici, l'atmosphère du siècle circulait
librement.... Au bout de quelque temps une chose tout à fait
inconnue m'etait révélée. Les mots, talent, éclat, réputation
eurent un sens pour moi. J'étais perdu pour l'idéal modeste que
mes anciens maîtres m'avaient inculqué.
And he describes how Dupanloup brought his pupils perpetually into
direct relations with himself and communicated to them something of his
own enthusiasm. He gained the power over their hearts which a great
general gains over his soldiers. His approval, his interest in a man,
were the all-absorbing object, the all-sufficient reward; the one
punishment feared was dismissal, always inflicted with courtesy and
tact, from the honour and the joy of serving under him:--
Adoré de ses élèves, M. Dupanloup n'était pas toujours agréable à
ces collaborateurs. On m'a dit que, plus tard, dans son diocèse,
les choses se passèrent de la même manière, qu'il fut toujours
plus aimé de ses laïques que de ses prêtres. Il est certain qu'il
écrasait tout autour de lui. Mais sa violence même nous attachait;
car nous sentions que nous étions son but unique. Ce qu'il était,
c'était un éveilleur incomparable; pour tirer de chacun de ses
élèves la somme de ce qu'il pouvait donner, personne ne l'égalait.
Chacun de ses deux cents élèves existait distinct dans sa pensée;
il était pour chacun d'eux l'excitateur toujours présent, le motif
de vivre et de travailler. Il croyait au talent et en faisait la
base de la foi. Il répétait souvent que l'homme vaut en proportion
de sa faculté d'admirer. Son admiration n'était pas toujours assez
éclairée par la science; mais elle venait d'une grande chaleur
d'âme et d'un coeur vraiment possédé de l'amour du beau.... Les
défauts de l'éducation qu'il donnait étaient les défauts même de
son esprit. Il était trop peu rationnel, trop peu scientifique. On
eût dit que ses deux cents élèves étaient destinés à être tous
poètes, écrivains, orateurs.
St. Nicolas was literary. Issy and St. Sulpice were severely
philosophic and scientific, places of "_fortes études_"; and the writer
thinks that they were more to his own taste than the more brilliant
literary education given under Dupanloup. In one sense it may be so.
They introduced him to exactness of thought and precision of
expression, and they widened his horizon of possible and attainable
knowledge. He passed, he says, from words to things. But he is a writer
who owes so much to the form into which he throws his thoughts, to the
grace and brightness and richness of his style, that he probably is a
greater debtor to the master whom he admires and dislikes, Dupanloup,
than to the modest, reserved, and rather dull Sulpician teachers, whom
he loves and reveres and smiles at, whose knowledge of theology was
serious, profound, and accurate, and whose characteristic temper was
one of moderation and temperate reason, joined to a hatred of display,
and a suspicion of all that seemed too clever and too brilliant. But
his witness to their excellence, to their absolute self-devotion to
their work, to their dislike of extravagance and exaggeration, to their
good sense and cultivation, is ungrudging and warm. Of course he thinks
them utterly out of date; but on their own ground he recognises that
they were men of strength and solidity, the best and most thorough of
teachers; the most sincere, the most humble, the most self-forgetting
of priests:--
Beaucoup de mes jugements étonnent les gens du monde parcequ'ils
n'out pas vu ce que j'ai vu. J'ai vu à Saint-Sulpice, associés à
des idées étroites, je l'avoue, les miracles que nos races peuvent
produire en fait de bonté, de modestie, d'abnégation personelle.
Ce qu'il y a de vertu à Saint-Sulpice suffirait pour gouverner un
monde, et cela m'a rendu difficile pour ce que j'ai trouvé
ailleurs.
M. Renan, as we have said, is very just to his education, and to the
men who gave it. He never speaks of them except with respect and
gratitude. It is seldom, indeed, that he permits himself anything like
open disparagement of the men and the cause which he forsook. The
shafts of his irony are reserved for men on his own side, for the
radical violences of M. Clémenceau, and for the exaggerated reputation
of Auguste Comte, "who has been set up as a man of the highest order of
genius, for having said, in bad French, what all scientific thinkers
for two hundred years have seen as clearly as himself." He attributes
to his ecclesiastical training those excellences in his own temper and
principles on which he dwells with much satisfaction and thankfulness.
They are, he considers, the result of his Christian and "Sulpician"
education, though the root on which they grew is for ever withered and
dead. "La foi disparue, la morale reste.... C'est par le caractère que
je suis resté essentiellement l'élève de mes anciens maîtres." He is
proud of these virtues, and at the same time amused at the odd
contradictions in which they have sometimes involved him:--
Il me plairait d'expliquer par le détail et de montrer comment la
gageure paradoxale de garder les vertus cléricales, sans la foi
qui leur sert de base et dans un monde pour lequel elles ne sont
pas faites, produisit, en ce que me concerne, les rencontres les
plus divertissantes. J'aimerais à raconter toutes les aventures
que mes vertus sulpiciennes m'amenèrent, et les tours singuliers
qu'elles m'ont joués. Après soixante ans de vie sérieuse on a le
droit de sourire; et où trouver une source de rire plus abondante,
plus à portée, plus inoffensive qu'en soimême? Si jamais un auteur
comique voulait amuser le public de mes ridicules, je ne lui
demanderais qu'une chose; c'est de me prendre pour collaborateur;
je lui conterais des choses vingt fois plus amusantes que celles
qu'il pourrait inventer.
He dwells especially on four of these virtues which were, he thinks,
graven ineffaceably on his nature at St. Sulpice. They taught him there
not to care for money or success. They taught him the old-fashioned
French politeness--that beautiful instinct of giving place to others,
which is perishing in the democratic scramble for the best places, in
the omnibus and the railway as in business and society. It is more
curious to find that he thinks that they taught him to be modest.
Except on the faith of his assertions, the readers of his book would
not naturally have supposed that he believed himself specially endowed
with this quality; it is at any rate the modesty which, if it shrinks
into retirement from the pretensions of the crowd, goes along with a
high and pitying sense of superiority, and a self-complacency of which
the good humour never fails. His masters also taught him to value
purity. For this he almost makes a sort of deprecating apology. He saw,
indeed, "the vanity of this virtue as of all the others"; he admits
that it is an unnatural virtue. But he says, "L'homme ne doit jamais se
permettre deux hardiesses à la fois. Le libre penseur doit être réglé
en ses moeurs." In this doctrine it may be doubted whether he will find
many followers. An unnatural virtue, where nature only is recognised as
a guide, is more likely to be discredited by his theory than
recommended by his example, particularly if the state of opinion in
France is such as is described in the following passage--a passage
which in England few men, whatever they might think, would have the
boldness to state as an acknowledged social phenomenon:--
Le monde, dont les jugements sont rarement tout à fait faux, voit
une sorte de ridicule à être vertueux quand on n'y est pas obligé
par un devoir professionnel. Le prêtre, ayant pour état d'être
chaste, comme le soldat d'être brave, est, d'après ces idées,
presque le seul qui puisse sans ridicule tenir à des principes sur
lesquels la morale et la mode se livrent les plus étranges
combats. Il est hors de doute qu'en ce point, comme en beaucoup
d'autres, mes principes clericaux, conservés dans le siècle, m'ont
nui aux yeux du monde.
We have one concluding observation to make. This is a book of which the
main interest, after all, depends on the way in which it touches on the
question of questions, the truth and reality of the Christian religion.
But from first to last it docs not show the faintest evidence that the
writer ever really knew, or even cared, what religion is. Religion is
not only a matter of texts, of scientific criticisms, of historical
investigations, of a consistent theology. It is not merely a procession
of external facts and events, a spectacle to be looked at from the
outside. It is, if it is anything, the most considerable and most
universal interest in the complex aggregate of human interests. It
grows out of the deepest moral roots, out of the most characteristic
and most indestructible spiritual elements, out of wants and needs and
aspirations and hopes, without which man, as we know him, would not be
man. When a man, in asking whether Christianity is true, leaves out all
this side of the matter, when he shows that it has not come before him
as a serious and importunate reality, when he shows that he is
unaffected by those deep movements and misgivings and anxieties of the
soul to which religion corresponds, and treats the whole matter as a
question only of erudition and criticism, we may acknowledge him to be
an original and acute critic, a brilliant master of historical
representation; but he has never yet come face to face with the
problems of religion. His love of truth may be unimpeachable, but he
docs not know what he is talking about. M. Renan speaks of giving up
his religion as a man might speak of accepting a new and unpopular
physical hypothesis like evolution, or of making up his mind to give up
the personality of Homer or the early history of Rome. Such an interior
attitude of mind towards religion as is implied, for instance, in
Bishop Butler's _Sermons on the Love of God_, or the _De Imitatione_ or
Newman's _Parochial Sermons_ seems to him, as far as we can judge, an
unknown and unattempted experience. It is easy to deal with a question
if you leave out half the factors of it, and those the most difficult
and the most serious. It is easy to be clear if you do not choose to
take notice of the mysterious, and if you exclude from your
consideration as vague and confused all that vast department of human
concerns where we at best can only "see through a glass darkly." It is
easy to find the world a pleasant and comfortable and not at all
perplexing place, if your life has been, as M. Renan describes his own,
a "charming promenade" through it; if, as he says, you are blessed with
"a good humour not easily disturbed "; and you "have not suffered
much"; and "nature has prepared cushions to soften shocks"; and you
have "had so much enjoyment in this life that you really have no right
to claim any compensation beyond it." That is M. Renan's experience of
life--a life of which he looks forward to the perfection in the
clearness and security of its possible denials of ancient beliefs, and
in the immense development of its positive and experimental knowledge.
How would Descartes have rejoiced, he says, if he could have seen some
poor treatise on physics or cosmography of our day, and what would we
not give to catch a glimpse of such an elementary schoolbook of a
hundred years hence.
But that is not at any rate the experience of all the world, nor does
it appear likely ever to be within the reach of all the world. There is
another aspect of life more familiar than this, an aspect which has
presented itself to the vast majority of mankind, the awful view of it
which is made tragic by pain and sorrow and moral evil; which, in the
way in which religion looks at it, if it is sterner, is also higher and
nobler, and is brightened by hope and purposes of love; a view which
puts more upon men and requires more from them, but holds before them a
destiny better than the perfection here of physical science. To minds
which realise all this, it is more inconceivable than any amount of
miracle that such a religion as Christianity should have emerged
naturally out of the conditions of the first century. They refuse to
settle such a question by the short and easy method on which M. Renan
relies; they will not consent to put it on questions about the two
Isaiahs, or about alleged discrepancies between the Evangelists; they
will not think the claims of religion disposed of by M. Renan's canon,
over and over again contradicted, that whether there can be or not,
there _is_ no evidence of the supernatural in the world. To those who
measure and feel the true gravity of the issues, it is almost
unintelligible to find a man who has been face to face with
Christianity all his life treating the deliberate condemnation of it
almost gaily and with a light heart, and showing no regrets in having
to give it up as a delusion and a dream. It is a poor and meagre end of
a life of thought and study to come to the conclusion that the age in
which he has lived is, if not one of the greatest, at least "the most
amusing of all ages."
XV
LIFE OF FREDERICK ROBERTSON[18]
[18]
_Life and Letters of Frederick W. Robertson_. Edited by Stopford A.
Brooke. _Guardian_, 15th November 1865.
If the proof of a successful exhibition of a strongly marked and
original character be that it excites and sustains interest throughout,
that our tastes are appealed to and our judgments called forth with
great strength, that we pass continuously and rapidly, as we read, from
deep and genuine admiration to equally deep and genuine dissent and
disapprobation, that it allows us to combine a general but irresistible
sense of excellence growing upon us through the book with an
under-current of real and honest dislike and blame, then this book in a
great measure satisfies the condition of success. It is undeniable that
in what it shows us of Mr. Robertson there is much to admire, much to
sympathise with, much to touch us, a good deal to instruct us. He is
set before us, indeed, by the editor, as the ideal of all that a great
Christian teacher and spiritual guide, all that a brave and wise and
high-souled man, may be conceived to be. We cannot quite accept him as
an example of such rare and signal achievement; and the fault of the
book is the common one of warm-hearted biographers to wind their own
feelings and those of their readers too high about their subject; to
talk as if their hero's excellences were unknown till he appeared to
display them, and to make up for the imperfect impression resulting
from actual facts and qualities by insisting with overstrained emphasis
on a particular interpretation of them. The book would be more truthful
and more pleasing if the editor's connecting comments were more simply
written, and made less pretension to intensity and energy of language.
Yet with all drawbacks of what seem to us imperfect taste, an imperfect
standard of character, and an imperfect appreciation of what there is
in the world beyond a given circle of interests, the book does what a
biography ought to do--it shows us a remarkable man, and it gives us
the means of forming our own judgment about him. It is not a tame
panegyric or a fancy picture.