ERNEST RE NAN. 831 



ERNEST RENAN. 



SKETCH OF HIS LIFE AND WORK. 

 By GABEIEL MONOD* 



"VTOTHING could be simpler, or more of a piece, than the life 

 -L-^ of Ernest Renan. Study, teaching, and the joys of family 

 life are its whole fabric, and fill it from end to end. For diver- 

 sions, a little travel and the pleasures of conversation — friendly 

 dinners, and a few frequented salons. Twice, indeed — urged by 

 the thought that a man of his standing owed something of his 

 time and strength to the public service — he solicited the popular 

 vote : once in 1869, as deputy for the Seine and Marne ; and again 

 in 1876, as senator for the Bouches du Rhone. But he carried 

 into these electoral contests no trace of the fever of ambition, and 

 when he saw that he was not likely to command a spontaneous 

 majority he retired from the field without vexation and without 

 regret. 



He was a native of Treguier (Cotes du Nord), one of those 

 ancient episcopal cities of Brittany which have retained their 

 ecclesiastical character even down to our own time. The humble 

 house is still to be seen, close under the great cathedral founded 

 by St. Yves, where Renan was born on the 27th of February, 1823, 

 and the little garden, planted with fruit trees, where he played 

 when quite a child, letting his eyes wander over the still and sad 

 horizon of the hills which skirt the river bank. His father — a 

 captain in the merchant navy, who also carried on a small trade — 

 was of ancient Breton descent, the name of Renan being that of 

 one of the oldest of the Armorican saints. He transmitted to his 

 son the dreamy imaginative nature and the disinterested simplici- 

 ty of his race. His mother was of Lannion, a little commercial 

 town which has nothing of the monastic look of Trdguier. Pious 

 as she was, she had an elasticity and joyousness of nature which 

 her son inherited from her, and which he attributed to her Gascon 

 origin. Renan has too often insisted on the co-existence of the 

 two natures in himself — the Breton seriousness and the Gascon 

 vivacity — for us to venture to contradict him on this point ; but 

 the serious side of him was first and last and strongest in all he 

 wrote, or did, or thought. 



For the rest, life began for him austerely, and more than au- 

 sterely ; it was hard and painful. While he was yet a child, his 

 father was lost at sea ; and it was only by the most self-denying 

 economy that his mother could provide for the education of her 



* From his article in the Contemporary Review. 



