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THE POETRY of the CELTIC RACES, and OTHER Essays of Ernest Renan

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THE POETRY of the CELTIC RACES, and OTHER Essays of Ernest Renan THE Scott Library THE SCOTT LIBRARY. THE POETRY OF THE CELTIC RACES. OF THE SAME PUBLISHERS. Uniform zvit/t this volume. LIFE OF JFSUS. By Ernest Ren an. ANTICHRIST. By Ernest Renan. MARCUS AURELIUS. Ky Ernest Renan. LIFE OF RENAN. By Francis Esi-inassb. Trice 1/6 and 2/6. ,*. FOR FULL LIST OP THE VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES, SEE CATALOGUE AT END OF BOOK. Poetry of the Celtic Races, and other essays by ernest Renan. THE WALTER SCOTT PUBLISHING CO., LTD. LONDON AND FELL1NG-ON-TYNE. NEW YORK: 3 EAST 14TH STREET. PC ft 14. % sx "Che, non men die saver, dubbiar m'aggrata." Dante, Inferno, Canto xi. 93. " Car aussi ce sont icy mes humeurs et opinions; ie les donne pour ce est en qui ma creance, non pour ce qui est a croire : ie ne vioe icy qu'a descouvrir moy mesme, qui seray par adventure aultre demnin, si nouvel apprentissage me change." Montaigne, Essais, Liv. I. Chap. 25. " Good sense and good nature are never separated, though the ignorant world has thought otherwise." Dkyden, Essay on Satire. CONTENTS. INTRODUCTION IX THE POETRY OF THB CELTIC RACES I WHAT IS A NATION ? 61 ISLAMISM AND SCIENCE . 84 FAREWELL TO TOURGENIEF 109 THE DEITY OF THE BOURGEOIS 113 INTOLERANCE IN SCEPTICISM . 126 MARCUS AURELIUS 138 SPINOZA 162 HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL 187 NOTES 217 — Note. The Translator wishes to acknowledge gratefully the suggestions and criticisms given to him by Mr. Bernard Bosanquet, LL.D., Mr. Joseph Brewis, and Mr. Henry Ilooton. INTRODUCTION. In the history of modern European thought there are few more interesting contrasts, than that which results from a consideration of the attitude of the eighteenth and the nineteenth century sceptic towards popular beliefs and superstitions. If we further limit our view to France, and further still, to two French men of letters, each of whom fitly represents his own epoch, the contrast, in that it is focussed into smaller compass, is perhaps the more striking. Voltaire and at Renan have least one thing in common : each of them in his time was the bete noire of his orthodox contemporaries, each of them was proclaimed to be the Antichrist foretold of old. The name of Voltaire to this day brings a shudder to many worthy persons, while Renan's Life of Jesus caused the publication, in France alone, of fifteen hundred controversial books and pamphlets within a year of its publication. But they are sceptics with a difference : Voltaire's opinion of dogmatic and theocratic Christianity— so far as one can gather that remarkable man's real opinion of anything—was summed x INTRODUCTION. " up in his well-known phrase, Ecrasez rinfamel" "I wish you," he wrote to D'Alembert in 1760, "to crush the Infamous One—that is the great point." Renan was an iconoclast of another type. He always retained a profound veneration for the simple religious life in which his childhood and youth had been passed. He had left the it with regret, and had kept, if not the form, much of "is the spirit of the old faith. "Simple faith," he says, if true faith ; and I confess that I should be inconsolable, those I learned that my writings had scandalised one of 1 folk of childlike soul who so truly worship in spirit." Where Voltaire could only find cause for a burst of brilliant with a raillery, Renan sees something to be treated gentle a and loving touch; Voltaire's mocking laughter becomes a barely perceptible smile, and his pitiless analysis sym- are pathetic synthesis. Both Voltaire and Renan critics; but the former attacks, the latter explains, and in so doing twain. For proves himself to be the greater critic of the the critic par excellence neither concludes nor excludes; his aim is to understand without believing, to find other without people's enthusiasm useful and suggestive sharing free illusion. In fairness it, above all to have a mind from it must be added however that, if Voltaire's scepticism tends ever towards cynicism, that of Renan sometimes approaches that perilously close to undue sensibility, the sensibility of the delights in feeding upon the religious emotion orthodox, without feeling bound to pay for the pleasure by an affirmation of its legitimacy. 1 itttdes dllistoitc Religieuse. INTRODUCTION. xi We can account, in some measure, for the difference in attitude between Voltaire and Renan by the product-of- the-century theory, of which Taine and Sainte-Beuve were so greatly enamoured. But I am inclined to lay more stress upon the influence of heredity and early environ- ment. Voltaire was a Parisian by birth, and most essentially French in temperament; Renan was a Breton. It would be a somewhat forced application of a well-worn phrase to say, that if you scratch Renan you find a Breton. At the same time, too much importance cannot be attached to the fact that beneath his Gallicism, with its brilliant wit and genius for critical analysis, there lay a deep substratum of the Celtic spirit, its naive intuition, its romanticism, its dreamy idealism. Through his mother he inherited a strain of his father was a Breton. Gascon blood ; pure Joseph Ernest Renan was born on February 28th, 1823, at Treguier, a little town in Brittany. He came of a race of seafarers, and, in all probability, was a descendant of St. Renan (or Ronan), one of the migrants who in great numbers came to Brittany from Wales and Ireland during the fifth Renan's were of humble century, parents position ; they had two means of subsistence, the one a small coasting- " " vessel, the other a little general shop. But they had a hard to make ends meet— the Renans were tradi- fight — tionally unable to save money and at last, when Ernest was a child of five, the climax of the family misfortunes was reached. One dark night the father in going back to his ship, fell from the quay at St. Malo and was drowned. He left the family deeply in debt, but the xii INTRODUCTION. creditors accepted an offer made by Ernest's sister, Henriette, then a girl of fifteen, to pay off her father's debts by degrees. This she accomplished after twenty years of labour and sacrifice. She began by keeping an infant school, and, finding it successful, she settled at Lannion, a town of more importance than Treguier. How- ever, convent schools began to spring up, Henriette's academy was abandoned for lack of pupils, and the Renans returned to Treguier. And then Ernest's educa- tion began. The good sister and a cousin in the priesthood paid his first school-fees, but he soon relieved them of the burden by gaining a scholarship in the ecclesiastical seminary of the town. He was a model pupil, studious, of his rather docile, and great piety ; indeed, un-boyish " qualities earned him the nickname of Mademoiselle," and much teasing from his less effeminate schoolfellows. He ever retained an affectionate memory of the old priests who were his earliest preceptors. Narrow their ideas might be, but they were good and honourable men, and they honestly strove to instil their own simple virtues into the minds of their pupils. Another portrait of this period of Renan's life which he depicts with tender art is that of the beautiful little girl, Noemi, whom he loved, child as he was, and after whom in latter years he named his first-born daughter. Renan's boyhood in Brittany, that land of desolate moors and grey skies, was an education in romanticism. Treguier itself, with its convents and ancient a survival of the of faith cathedral, ages and ecclesiasticism ; the surrounding country, dotted with little chapels of local INTRODUCTION. xiii saints unknown to the rest of Christendom—Tudwal, and and a hundred old the Iltud, — more; churchyards fronting grey sea which covers, so the Breton legend tells, the city of Is, whose spires may be seen in the hollow of the waves when the sea is rough, whose bells can be heard pealing when the day is calm and still : —such was the scene of Renan's early years, and it left indelible impres- sions on his memory and his temperament. At the age of fifteen a great change came over Renan's life, but for which he would have probably spent the remainder of it as a country cure, or perhaps as a professor of theology in the College of Treguier. The Abbe Dupanloup, whose successful conversion of Talleyrand had given him fame in the Catholic circles of France, was in 1838 at the head of a great ecclesiastical preparatory school in Paris—St. Nicolas du Chardonnet. His pupils were recruited in two ways. He had under his charge many boys belonging to aristocratic families. From these he received large fees; and this enabled him to give a gratuitous education to boys of poor birth but exceptional ability. To obtain the latter the Abbe used to send emissaries to different parts of France. Renan fell under the notice of one of these recruiting-agents, when, in the year 1838, he had won all the prizes of his class in the Treguier College. A summons from the Abbe reached him during his summer vacation, and in three days he was in Paris. "This was the gravest crisis of my life," he writes in his Souvenirs; 1 "the young Breton does not bear trans- 1 Souvenirs cfEn/ance et dejeunesse (1SS3). xiv INTRODUCTION. planting. The keen moral repulsion which I felt, added to a complete change in my habits and mode of life, brought on a very severe attack of home-sickness." So severe indeed was his home-sickness, that he became seriously " I think that ill, almost to the point of death.
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