“You have that thing which is so rare,” Michelet had once said to a younger writer, “that thing which they all [all the literary men] lack: the sense of the people and its sap. In my own case, I feel, as I reread what I have sent you [the first volume of the History of the Revolution], how much I still lack myself… . My poetry is sometimes obscure, inaccessible to the great number.”
The French bourgeoisie, who in the great Revolution had seized power from the feudal aristocracy, had, through all the readjustments of the forms and accouterments of government and in the teeth both of monarchist reaction and of socialist working-class revolt, maintained its position as the dominant class; and, except when spasmodically reawakened by the Royalists, the Bonapartists or the clergy, its revolutionary tradition grew feeble. The word “revolution” was coming to connote working-class interference from below with bourgeois property arrangements. The nineteenth century in France was a great literary period, and a period perhaps comparable, for fiction and history, to the Elizabethan period for poetry or the Italian Renaissance for painting. But this literature, for all the immense range in it of the social imagination, was no longer a revolutionary literature. The enthusiasm for science of the Enlightenment persisted without the political enthusiasm of the Enlightenment; and since the Romantic movement, the conception of the literary art was becoming more elaborate and subtle than the mere eloquence, polish and skill which had distinguished the eighteenth century. And Michelet, for all his attempts to reaffirm, to keep always in the foreground of his activity, the original revolutionary principles, was turning out to be one of the chief ornaments of this highly developed literature. With his novelist’s sympathetic insight into different kinds of human beings, his sense of social and moral complexity and his artistic virtuosity, he was to live to be read with delight by people who did not share his opinions.
Nevertheless, he was to pass out of fashion. The writer of an article called Why Michelet Is No Longer Read predicted in 1898, on the occasion of the Michelet centenary, that the celebration would not do Michelet justice. Michelet is no longer read, he says, because people no longer understand him. Though he was followed in his day by the whole generation of 1850, he commits for the skeptical young men of the end of the century the supreme sin of being an apostle, a man of passionate feeling and conviction. Michelet created the religion of the Revolution, and the Revolution is not popular today, when the Academicians put it in its place, when persons who would have been nothing without it veil their faces at the thought of the Jacobin Terror, when even those who have nothing against it manage to patronize it. Besides, Michelet attacked the priesthood, and the Church is now treated with respect.
Let us take a last look at him, in Couture’s drawing, before passing on to his successors: the Michelet of 1842, with his mask of determined will, which seems always to have been straining, never relaxed—the long plebeian jaw, the self-assertive chin, the set mouth, the fine trenchant nose with its distended and mettlesome nostrils, the eyes deep and sharp, sheltering a sensibility taxed by interior struggle, beneath eyebrows as heavy as wings, which make the creases of perpetual effort.
Now look at Renan and Taine. With Michelet, the man has created the mask. But here it is the profession that has made it: Renan, with his great belly, his pudgy hands, his round and puffy face, his heavily-drooping porcine eyelids—the most intelligent and honest of all the French abbés, but still fundamentally a French abbé; Taine (in Bonnat’s portrait), with his spectacles and his myopic-looking eyes, his bald dome, his wilting imperial, his high conversational eyebrows—the most brilliant of all the French professors, but still from tip to toe a French professor. Michelet, the man of an unsettled and a passionate generation, has forged his own personality, created his own trade and established his own place. Renan and Taine, on the other hand, are the members of learned castes. Both, like Michelet, set the search for truth above personal considerations: Renan, who had studied for the priesthood, left the seminary and stripped off his robe as soon as he knew that it was impossible for him to accept the Church’s version of history, and the scandal of the Life of Jesus cost him his chair at the Collège de France; and the materialistic principles of Taine proved such a stumbling-block to his superiors throughout his academic career that he was finally obliged to give up the idea of teaching. But, though rejected by their professional colleagues, they came before long to be accepted as among the official wise men of their society, a society now temporarily stabilized. Both ended as members of the Academy (“When one is someone, why should one want to be something?” Gustave Flaubert wondered about Renan)—whereas it is only a few years ago that Michelet and Quinet were finally given burial in the Panthéon.
Both Renan and Taine, of the generation twenty or thirty years younger than Michelet, had felt his influence, and combining, as Michelet had done, immense learning with artistic gifts, were to continue his re-creation of the past. Renan tells us with what excitement he read Michelet’s history at school: “The century reached me through the cracks in a broken cement… . With amazement I discovered that there were laymen who were serious and learned; I saw that there existed something outside of antiquity and the Church … the death of Louis XIV was no longer the end of the world for me. Ideas and feelings appeared that had never had any expression either in antiquity or in the seventeenth century.”
Three years after Renan left the seminary, the Revolution of 1848 occurred, and “the problems of socialism,” as he says, “seemed, as it were, to rise out of the earth and terrify the world.” Renan attempted to deal with these problems in a book called The Future of Science, in which he presented a vision of progress recalling those of the eighteenth century, but conveyed in the sermonizing accents and bathed in the altar-light which he had brought over from Saint-Sulpice. What humanity needs, he says, is not a political formula or a change of bureaucrats in office, but “a morality and a faith.” Augustin Thierry, the historian, and others considered the book too “daring” for the public: it would be better for him to “insinuate” his ideas with an article here and there. “The French insistence upon clearness and discretion, which sometimes, it must be confessed, restrains one from saying more than a part of what one thinks, from doing justice to the depth of one’s thought, seemed to me,” he wrote forty years later, when he finally brought the book out, “a tyranny at that time. The French language is adapted only to the expression of clear ideas; yet those laws that are most important, those that govern the transformations of life, are not clear, they appear to us in a half-light. Thus, though the French were the earliest to perceive the principles of what is now known as Darwinism, they turned out to be the last to accept it. They saw all that perfectly well; but it lay outside the usual habits of their language and the mold of the well-made phrase. The French have thus disregarded precious truths, not because they have not been aware of them, but because they have simply cast them aside, as useless or as impossible to express.” But he took the advice of his elders and refrained from bringing out his book. And the general cooling-off of the French bourgeois in regard to political-social issues may be seen very clearly in Renan. He continues to hope for progress; but it is a hope that still looks to science without paying much attention to political science, whose advances, indeed, he tends to disregard, as he says the French naturalists had done with Darwinism. Where Michelet had forfeited his posts rather than take the oath of allegiance to Louis Bonaparte, Renan considered it a matter of no consequence: “My opinion is that only those should have refused who had directly taken part in former governments … or who at the time had the definite intention of entering into a conspiracy against the new one. The refusal of others, though admirable in itself if it is prompted by a delicacy of conscience, is in my opinion regrettable. For besides depriving the public service of those who are best fitted to fill it, it implies that everything that is done and everything that happens ought to be taken seriously… . In my own case, nothing has yet been asked of me; I confess that I don’t consider myself sufficiently important to make an exception among my colleagues, who are no more partisans of the present regime than I am. It is clear that for a very long time we must stand aside from politics. Let us not keep the burdens, if we do not want the advantages.”
Yet there is here still an ideal of public service. Renan ran for the Chamber of Deputies in 1869 on a platform of, “No revolution; no war; a war will be as disastrous as a revolution.” And even when the war was in progress and the Prussians were besieging Paris, he took an unpopular line in advocating peace negotiations.
The French bourgeois intellectual after 1870 found himself in the singular position of belonging at the same time to a dominant class and a defeated nation, of at the same time enjoying advantages and submitting to humiliation; and this paradox produced curious attitudes. Edmond de Goncourt, in his journal, gives an illuminating picture of Renan during the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune—we see him praising the Germans, to whom in his field he owed so much, in the face of the loud protests of his companions; waving his short arms and quoting Scripture against the prophets of French revenge; maintaining that for the “idealist,” the emotion of patriotism had been rendered obsolete by Catholicism, that “the fatherland of the idealists is the country where they are allowed to think.” One day when he had been standing at the window watching a regiment pass by amidst the shouts of the crowd, he contemptuously turned away: “There’s not a man among them all,” he cried, “who is capable of an act of virtue!”
But what did Renan mean by virtue? On what did he base his code? Renan’s work, for all his smiling indulgence, has a certain austerity behind it. In what school had this virtue been learned? It was the ecclesiastical discipline which had made him: the sense of duty and the self-sufficiency which contributed to the very moral courage he was to display in opposition to the Church had been derived from his training for the priesthood, from that Catholicism which, as he said, had made patriotism obsolete, but in which he had ceased to believe. It is almost as if virtue were with Renan a mere habit which he has been induced to acquire on false pretenses. Though his devotion had been at first directed to the ends of the Enlightenment, to the scientific criticism of the Scriptures which supplemented the polemics of Voltaire, the Enlightenment itself, as I have indicated, was in a sense on the wane with the attainment by the French bourgeoisie of their social-economic objects; and Renan’s virtue came more and more to seem, not like Michelet’s, a social engine, but a luminary hung in the void. In a hierarchy of moral merit drawn up in one of his prefaces, he puts the saint at the top of the list and the man of action at the bottom: moral excellence, he says, must always lose something as soon as it enters into practical activity because it must lend itself to the imperfection of the world. And this conception gave Michelet concern: he rebuked “the disastrous doctrine, which our friend Renan has too much commended, that passive internal freedom, preoccupied with its own salvation, which delivers the world to evil.” It is curious to contrast the tone of Renan’s speech at the inauguration of a medallion of Michelet, Quinet and Mickiewicz at the Collège de France in 1884 with that of his combative predecessors. Renan’s emphasis is all on the importance of the calm pursuit of truth, though the turmoil may be raging around us of those who are forced to make a practical issue of it. But he corrects himself: “No, we are posted in sign of war; peace is not our lot.” Yet the relation between the rioter in the street and the scholar in his study seems to have been completely dissolved.
In The Origins of Christianity, Renan’s attitude toward his own time appears very plainly through his story. In any sense in which it is possible to describe human productions as impartial, this enchanting account of the decline of the ancient world and the rise of the Christian religion may be said to be impartial. The effort toward universal comprehension and justice is one of the most impressive things about Renan. But his very artistic form has its bias, the very fall of his sentences has its bias; and before he has finished his story, he has undeniably tipped the scales. In The Origins of Christianity, which begins with a volume on Jesus and ends with a volume on Marcus Aurelius, it must be confessed that somehow or other Marcus Aurelius gets the better of it. The Life of Jesus, which the Goncourts characterized as “Michelet Fénelonized,” has always seemed to me the least successful section. Renan makes Jesus a “charming doctor,” tends, in fact, to make him a sort of Renan, and minimizes the symbolic tragedy which was to fascinate and sustain the world. He does better perhaps with Paul, but makes us dislike him. The episode we remember best is Paul’s arrival in Athens to preach the Christian gospel and his outcry against the Greek statues: “O chaste and lovely images,” Renan cries out in his turn, “of the true gods and goddesses!—this ugly little Jew has stigmatized you with the name of idols!” And so when Renan comes to the Apocalypse, which he interprets as a radical tract directed against the Roman Empire, he does not fail to put the whole exploit in an ironical light from the beginning by commenting on the extreme inappropriateness of John’s having selected the little island of Patmos, more suitable, as Renan remarks, for some delightful classical idyl of the type of Daphnis and Chloë, for the forging of his fulminations and the concoction of his esthetic monstrosities. The truth is that the moral earnestness of the Jews, to whose literature Renan has devoted his life, is coming to seem to him unsympathetic. And when we arrive at Marcus Aurelius, Renan’s preference for the Graeco-Roman culture as contrasted with the agitation of the Christians unmistakably emerges and has the last word. We can note how, almost imperceptibly, his interest and emphasis have shifted since he published the Life of Jesus nearly twenty years before. “Marcus Aurelius and his noble masters,” Renan had written then, “have had no enduring effect on the world. Marcus Aurelius leaves behind him delightful books, an execrable son, a dying world. Jesus remains for humanity an inexhaustible principle of moral regeneration. Philosophy, for the majority, is not enough; they must have sainthood.” But in the volume on Marcus Aurelius (published in 1881) Renan manages to give us the impression that the Romans, through their legal reforms, were tending by themselves and independently of the evangelism of the Christians, to put humanitarian principles into practice. Was Christianity necessary, after all? we are prompted to ask ourselves. Will not a society sufficiently developed arrive at this point of view by itself? Marcus Aurelius has all Jesus’ love of virtue and is a Roman gentleman as well; and, ruminating sadly on human affairs as he wages his uncongenial warfare against the forces battering in the Empire, he is presented as the perfect exemplar for the French intellectual world of the period after 1870—disillusioned with its political tradition, resigned to its national defeat, disgusted with contemporary tendencies, but persisting in the individual pursuit of such ends, the private cultivation of such qualities, as still seem to be valuable in themselves. “His [Marcus Aurelius’] virtue was based, like ours, upon reason, upon nature. Saint Louis was a very virtuous man and, according to the ideas of his time, a very great king, because he was a Christian; Marcus Aurelius was the most pious of men, not because he was a pagan, but because he was an emancipated man. He was an honor to human nature, and not to a particular religion… . He has achieved the perfect goodness, the absolute indulgence, the indifference tempered with pity and scorn. ‘To be resigned, as one passes one’s life in the midst of false and unjust men’—that was the sage’s program. And he was right. The most solid goodness is that which is based on perfect ennui, on the clear realization that everything in this world is frivolous and without real foundation… . Never was there a more legitimate cult, and it is still our cult today.” Such a morality is attractive to read about, but it will let down rather than support its generation. What kind of champions can be recruited by a preacher who is obliged to have recourse for his sanctions to the stoicism of Marcus Aurelius?—by one who begins by assuring us that we should value the saint above all men, but ends by recommending as a model a sage who plays the man of action with no conviction of the action’s value?
Renan himself was, however, sustained to accomplish his historical work. And The Origins of Christianity is a masterpiece—perhaps the greatest of all histories of ideas. What Renan can give us incomparably, what we get out of him so that we never forget it, is the sense of the way in which doctrines, conceptions, symbols, undergo continual transformations at the hands of different persons and races. With a sensitiveness of intelligence and a subtlety of presentation which have never been excelled, he follows the words and the story of Jesus as they pass into varied combinations and with every new combination become themselves something new: the Christianity of the Apostles is no longer the Christianity of Jesus; the Christianity of the Scriptures is modified as it is attracted toward the Greeks or the Jews; the Christianity of the Rome of Nero is something entirely different from the primitive Christianity of Judea. Our ideas are all spun from filaments, infinitely long and mingled, which have to be analyzed with an infinite delicacy.
But note that the emphasis with Renan is thus chiefly upon the relativity of religious and philosophical conceptions. There is a relativity, too, in Michelet—his actors play different roles in different historical situations, according to their personal capacities in relation to varying circumstances; but the dominating values are not in doubt. With Renan, of the later generation, the values themselves are beginning to waver; we find him talking about “the clear realization that everything in this world is frivolous and without real foundation.” Note, furthermore, that whereas with Michelet we are in the midst of human happenings, among which the propagation of ideas figures merely as one of many kinds of activity, with Renan we are occupied primarily with ideas, behind which the rest of human history is merely filled in as a background—it is the frame on which the web has been woven, but what we are concerned with is tracing the web. Renan’s function is to take us through the texts of the religion and wisdom of antiquity—even though by a spell of imagination he is creating about us as we read them the social atmosphere of the times in which they were written. Though The Origins of Christianity is still Michelet’s organic history, it is the history no longer of the man as a whole but of man’s formulated ideas.