the strongest influence over her brother, and her published letters reveal a mind almost equal, a moral nature superior, to his own.
It was not mathematics but philology which was to settle the gathering doubts of Ernest Renan. His course completed at Issy, he entered the college of St Sulpice in order to take his degree in philology prior to entering the church; and here he began the study of Hebrew. He saw that the second part of Isaiah differs from the first not only in style but in date; that the grammar and the history of the Pentateuch are posterior to the time of Moses; that the book of Daniel is clearly apocryphal. It followed from his training that, if you admit one error in a revealed text, you incriminate the whole. Secretly, Renan felt himself cut off from the communion of saints, and yet with his whole heart he desired to live the life of a Catholic priest. Hence a struggle between vocation and conviction; owing to Henriette, conviction gained the day. In October 1845 Renan left the seminary of St Sulpice for Stavistas, a lay college of the Oratorians. Finding himself even there too much under the domination of the church, a few weeks later he reluctantly broke the last tie which bound him to the religious life and entered M. Crouzet’s school for boys as an usher.
It is always dangerous to educate a really great mind in only one order of truth. Renan, brought up by priests in a world ruled by authority and curious only of feeling and opinion, was to accept the scientific ideal with an extraordinary expansion of all his faculties. He was henceforth ravished by the splendour of the cosmos. At the end of his life he wrote of Amiel, “The man who has time to keep a private diary has never understood the immensity of the universe.” The certitudes of physical and natural science were revealed to Renan in 1846 by the chemist Marcellin Berthelot, then a boy of eighteen, his pupil at M. Crouzet’s school. To the day of Renan’s death their friendship continued. Renan was occupied as usher only in the evenings. In the daytime he continued his researches in Semitic philology. In 1847 he obtained the Prix Volney - one of the principal distinctions awarded by the Academy of Inscriptions - for the manuscript of his “General History of Semitic Languages.” In 1847 he took his degree as Agrégé de Philosophie; that is to say, fellow of the university, and was offered a place as master in the lycée of Vendome. In 1848 a small temporary appointment to the lycée of Versailles permitted him to return to the capital and resume his studies.
The revolution of 1848 aroused in Renan that side of him which loved the priesthood because “the priest lives for his fellows.” He for the first time confronted the problems of Democracy. The result was an immense volume, The Future of Science, which remained in manuscript until 1890. L’Avenir de la science is an attempt to conciliate the privileges of a necessary élite with the diffusion of the greatest good of the greatest number. The difficulty haunted Renan throughout his life. By the time he had finished his elaborate scheme for regenerating society by means of a devoted aristocracy of knowledge, and the diffusion of culture, the year 1848 was past, and with it his fever of Democracy. In 1849 the French government sent him to Italy on a scientific mission. He remained eight months abroad, during which he forgot his anxiety about the toilers’ lot. Hitherto he had known nothing of art. In Italy the artist in him awoke and triumphed over the savant and the reformer. On his return to Paris Renan lived with his sister Henriette. A small post at the National Library, together with his sister’s savings, furnished him with the means of livelihood. In the evenings he wrote for the Revue des deux mondes and the Débats the exquisite essays which appeared in 1857 and 1859 under the titles Études d’histoire religieuse and Essais de morale et de critique. In 1852 his book on Averroès had brought him not only his doctor’s degree, but his first reputation as a thinker. In his two volumes of essays Renan shows himself a Liberal, but no longer a Democrat. Nothing, according to his philosophy, is less important than prosperity. The greatest good of the greatest number is a theory as dangerous as it is illusory. Man is not born to be prosperous but to realize, in a little vanguard of chosen spirits, an ideal superior to the ideal of yesterday. Only the few can attain a complete development. Yet there is a solidarity between the chosen few and the masses which produce them; each has a duty to the other. The acceptance of this duty is the only foundation for a moral and just society. The aristocratic idea has seldom been better stated.
The success of the Études d’histoire religieuse and the Essais de morale had made the name of Renan known to a cultivated public. While Mademoiselle Renan remained shut up at home copying her brother’s manuscripts or compiling material for his work, the young philosopher began to frequent more than one Parisian salon, and especially the studio of Ary Scheffer, at that time a noted social centre. In 1856 he proposed to marry Cornélie Scheffer, the niece and adopted daughter of the great Dutch painter. Not without a struggle Henriette consented not only to the marriage, but to make her home with the young couple, whose housekeeping depended on the sum that she could contribute. The history of this romance has been told by Renan in the memorial essay which he wrote some six years later, entitled Ma Sœur Henriette. His marriage brought much brightness into his life, a naturalness into his style and a greater attention to the picturesque. He did not forsake his studies in Semitic philology, and in 1859 appeared his translation of the Book of Job with an introductory essay, followed in 1859 by the Song of Songs.
Renan was now a candidate for the chair of Hebrew and Chaldaic languages at the College de France, which he had desired since first he studied Hebrew at the seminary of St Sulpice. The death of the scholar Quatremere had left this post vacant in 1857. No one in France save Renan was capable of filling it. The Catholic party, upheld by the empress, would not appoint, an unfrocked seminarist, a notorious heretic, to a chair of Biblical exegesis. Yet the emperor wished to conciliate Ernest Renan. He offered to send the young scholar on an archaeological mission to Phoenicia. Renan immediately accepted. Leaving his wife at home with their baby son, Renan left France, accompanied by his sister, in the summer of 1860. Madame Renan joined them in January 1861, returning to France in July. The mission proved fruitful in Phoenician inscriptions which Renan published in his Mission de Phénicie. They form the base of that Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum on which he used in later years to declare that he founded his claim to remembrance. He wished to complete his exploration of the upper range of Lebanon; he remained, therefore, with Henriette to affront the dangerous miasma of a Syrian autumn. At Amshit, near Byblos, Henriette Renan died of intermittent fever on the 24th of September 1861. Her brother, himself at death’s door, was carried unconscious on board a ship waiting in harbour and bound for France. The sea air revived him, but he reached France broken apparently in heart and health. His sister in her last days had entreated him not to give up his candidature for the chair of Hebrew, and on the 11th of January 1862 the Minister of Public Instruction ratified Renan’s election to the post. But his opening lecture, in which, amid the applause of the students, Renan declared Jesus Christ “an incomparable Man,” alarmed the Catholic party. Renan’s lectures were pronounced a disturbance of the public peace, and he was suspended. On the 2nd of June 1864, on opening the newspaper, Renan saw that he had been transferred from the chair of Hebrew at the College of France to the post of sub librarian at the National Library. He wrote to the Minister of Public Instruction: “Pecunia tua tecum sit!” He refused the new position, was deprived of his chair, and henceforth depended solely upon his pen.
Henriette had told him to write the life of Jesus. They had begun it together in Syria, she copying the pages as he wrote them, with a New Testament and a Josephus for all his library. The book bears the mark of its origin—it is filled with the atmosphere of the East. It is the work of a man familiar with the Bible and theology, and no less acquainted with the inscriptions, monuments, types and landscapes of Syria. But it is scarcely the work of a great scholar: Renan’s debt to the school
