M. RENAN ON HIMSELF.
THE interesting dissertation on himself, which M. Renan delivered last week in his speech to the Celtic Society at Quimper, in Lower Brittany, was in every respect characteristic. M. Renan resembles one of our own great men, Matthew Arnold, in a certain gift for talking well concerning himself. We used to hear of the tediousness of egotism. But the man who has a genius for egotism can never be tedious when he devotes himself to one of the chief subjects of his genius. Certainly M. Renan, like Mr. Arnold, has not yet exhausted the significance of the world within him. Even in the brilliant book which he wrote on his memories of his youth he hardly wrote better of himself than he spoke last week, for he delineated with greater power than ever that curious blending of a disbelief in truth and a distaste for error, a dislike of dogmatism and a repulsion for religions indifference, a joy in the delivery of moral shocks and sympathy for that moral and intellectual quiescence which is most susceptible to such shocks, by which his writings have been so conspicuously distinguished. And while manifest- ing all these qualities with the full freshness of earlier years, M. Renan throughout goes on caressing himself with the quaint tenderness of one who knows that no one else can caress him with half the insight with which he can caress himself. When he disclaims for the Bretons any touch of fanaticism, and claims for them in its place a superstition which imposes its caprices on no one, he is but uttering an apology for himself. When he inveighs against the harshness and rigour of judgment:which appears to be turning the world into the semblance of a boxing-match, he inveighs against qualities which are the very opposite of his own. And yet, when he passes an animated panegyric on the qualities of a torpedo, and remarks with pleasure that one of the crew of a torpedo-boat which had recently passed down the Seine had borne the name of Renan, he admits that the incident had interested him chiefly because he also had been a torpedo-man, and had administered a tolerably severe electric shock to a world which would much have preferred to go on slumbering. Probably, too, that was the one "good deed " on the performance of which he felt that he might pride himself, and which gave him a right, as he said, to the habitual cheerfulness in which his life is wearing away. He was the outcome, he declared, of long generations of ignorance and unconsciousness, the heir of peasants and sailors who had passed their lives in that tranquil calm of which genius ie the ultimate flower. He felt very grate-
ful to those peasants and sailors who had hoarded for him the imaginative qualities for which at length he had found a voice, —a voice, apparently, if we may judge by the effect of what he taught upon his own mother, which was anything but the interpretation of the brooding ancestral reveries out of which his own intellect grew. He claimed for the Bretons,—and again he meant himself,—an illimitable tolerance even for intolerance, so long as intolerance was confined to opinion, and did not pass from theory into action. The Bretons he accounted a very religious people, a people quite willing that everybody "should compose for himself his romance of the infinite." Evidently M. Renan has been engaged all his life in doing this for him- self; yet he told his audience at Quimper that be sometimes caught himself furnishing his memory against the future life with thoughts that might occupy it " throughout all eternity." One of the best of these thoughts would be, he told them, the re- membrance of that day's festival, and of the kind feelings which had been expressed towards him. We shall, we hope, hardly be thought guilty of that interference with other people's " romance of the infinite" which M. Renan so much condemns, if we remark that for a thought on which he is to feed " throughout all eternity," this does seem to us a little poverty-stricken,— wanting at once both in romance and in infinitude. Surely it did not take the brooding reveries of generations of sturdy peasants and sturdier sailors to bring to perfection an imagina- tion which could feed "throughout all eternity " on the kind flattery of a Celtic Society for a distinguished Oriental scholar and still more distinguished sentimental heresiarch ! Would not a day's,—or perhaps an hour's,—meditation on the friendly compliments of such a Society pretty well exhaust their significance, and leave eternity free for meditations in a higher key ?
We call attention to this genial anti-climax, not because we take it quite seriously, but precisely because we take it, as M. Renan means a great deal that he writes and says to be taken, not very seriously. How is it possible to take a man very seriously who puts forth pleas for religion in the shape of any " romance of the infinite" which it pleases human caprice to construct, and at the same time takes nothing but delight in the delivery of any shock which will most completely shatter such " romances of the infinite " as most of his own contemporaries and compatriots do actually construct ? What M. Renan really pleads for is the exercise of the understanding and the imagination, whether in construction or in destruction, or in both ways. He professes almost osten- tatiously in the same breath his disbelief in truth and his con- tempt for error. If he delights in genius and the romantic virtues, like instinctive courage and instinctive chivalry, which grow out of long ages of reverence, yet he takes care to insist that it is only because genius, courage, and chivalry provide the world with keen emotions, vivid awakenings from sleep, vivid admirations, vivid passions, that he feels this delight. He does not attach to the "dreams of the infinite " which even genius constructs, any solid worth as indicating the final goal of man. On the contrary, he finds the key to his own unabated cheerfulness in what he calls the " freshness of his illusions," and in the pride with which he recalls the shock he has given to those who really supposed that they had grasped eternal truth. When he realises that he . has run mach the greater part of his own career and is near the end, and yet fortifies himself for eternity with the flimsy cor- diality of after-dinner praises, he must mean to proclaim to all the world that his conception of eternity is so far from serious, that he loves to piece out his picture with a great deal of acknow- ledged tinsel. The illusions he has dispelled will furnish him with a great part of his theme for eternal meditation, for is it not those dispelled illusions which have brought him fame P The illusions he has cherished and refused to part with, will furnish him with other portions of that theme, for are they not essential to his own "romance of the infinite "P and if he had not a "romance of the infinite" of his own, he would hardly have been the man to dispel the " romance of the infinite " dear to most of his contemporaries. But, alike for the illusions he has dispelled and the illusions he has retained, he makes no claim beyond that which a child makes for the soap-bubbles which it sends up into the air to glitter for a moment and then burst for ever,—namely, that they are bright, and buoyant, and add a charm to the passing hour.
Nevertheless, M. Renan, though he encourages people to cherish illusions which they know to be illusions, is very eager to insist on a kind of learning which shall go hand-in-hand with imagination, and which shall undermine convictions which claim to be built on anything but the vagaries of romance. Exact knowledge, adequate for the purposes of scepticism, he rates almost as high as he does the mist of sentiment which is to succeed to the inheritance from which every genuine faith is to be ousted. The gift of learning is necessary in order that serious belief may be compelled to give place to conscious romance; but the gift of romance is necessary in order that learning may not exhaust the air in which alone the mind and heart can live. Such appears to be M. Renan's thought, and he felicitates himself on having manifested the exact compound of learning with delight in illusion, which first undermines austere creeds, and then fosters mild superstitions in their place. A superstition that does not impose itself on others, but just amuses us with its glimmering of moral foreboding, is M. Renan's beau-id4a1 of religion. ` Sublimate your faith into legend, but saturate yourselves with the legend, even so far as to mould your action after your conviction is gone,'—that is the upshot of M. Renan's teaching ; and he flatters himself, not without justice, that he has embodied that teaching in his life. We believe he has ; that his honeyed words have not only robbed his readers of much truth, but soothed them into acquiesence in an airy and fanciful suspense not inconsistent with Epicurean enjoyment. He could hardly have done more than be has done, first to undermine a true creed, and then to lull to sleep the wild cravings by which unbelief is sometimes brought back to faith.
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