ERNEST RENAN 111 



to separate one from the other. Now, to explain the development 

 of his mind would oblige me to analyze his works in their natural 

 sequence, and I do not propose to do so. The only one of his 

 many books which it would be unpardonable not to mention is his 

 Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse, one of the most charming 

 pieces of autobiography which has ever been written. The French 

 people gave this little book the most enthusiastic welcome — a wel- 

 come which they had never given before to a book of the same 

 kind, except perhaps to the JAemoxres d'Outre-Jombe. I suppose 

 Renan wrote it during one of his vacations in his native province, 

 when his growing age and failing health discouraged longer jour- 

 neys and when nostalgia drew him back to the haunts of his boy- 

 hood. At least, when I read those pages, I seem to hear the sea- 

 voices of Brittany and smell the goemon. Here is told the story of 

 his intellectual development to the time of the great crisis of his 

 life, his departure from Saint Sulpice, but a few digressions carry 

 the tale a little farther. The tone is familiar and the reminiscences 

 are not complete but fragmentary, yet they offer us in an exquisite 

 form the essential facts of his growth, the facts which he alone 

 could tell us; the rest might as well be told by others or left untold. 

 For with few exceptions (and Renan was not one of them) the 

 fate of any great writer, scientist or artist has been largely de- 

 termined before he was thirty. The initial struggle is the thing, 

 not the victory. 



Renan died in Paris in October 1891. The work in which he 

 himself took most pride was his edition, together with two col- 

 leagues of the Institut, of the whole body of Semitic inscriptions; 

 this great undertaking placed within the reach of the few scholars 

 interested in it, the fundamental materials wherewith to rebuild 

 the past with greater accuracy. However, he will be chiefly re- 

 membered, among a large elite, by his noble efforts to purify the 

 religious spirit, by his conception of history and philosophy as 

 scientific disciplines, by his broad humanism and, last but not 

 least, by the charm and the unaffected elegance, the simplicity, the 

 perfect cadence of his prose. He was one of the leading philos- 



