ERNEST REN AN. 837 



offered to a new France the counsels and the warnings of a clear- 

 sighted and devoted friend. In his writings there was no ground 

 on which he did not venture. In the midst of his great historical 

 and exegetical work, his translations of Job, Ecclesiastes, and the 

 Song of Songs, his superintendence of the difficult undertaking of 

 the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, his contributions to the 

 literary history of France — contributions which are triumphs of 

 minute and accurate erudition — and while drawing up, year by 

 year, for the Asiatic Society, a survey of all the new works on 

 Oriental subjects, he was giving to the world his views and his 

 visions of the universe and humanity, of life and of morals, now 

 under the severer form of the Philosophic Dialogues, now in the 

 light and softly ironical guise of the dramatic sketches — Caliban, 

 L'Eau de Jouvence, Le Pretre de Ne'nii, L'Abbesse de Jouarre ; 

 and, in addition to all this, he was working hard at the reform of 

 the higher education, and finding time to write those exquisite 

 fragments of autobiography which are collected under the title 

 Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse. 



In this expansion of all his faculties of thought and action, 

 favored by the triple life of the study, the world, and the family, 

 Penan was happy ; and his joy in life and its activities gave to 

 his philosophy a sunny optimism which might at first sight seem 

 hardly reconcilable with the absence of all certitude, all meta- 

 physical or religious conviction. People were surprised and a 

 little shocked to find the author of the Moral and Critical Essays, 

 the writer of those unforgettable pages on the dreamy melancholy 

 of the Celtic races, the critic who poured reprehension on the fri- 

 volity of the Gaul and the bourgeois theology of Beranger, preach- 

 ing at times a gospel of light-heartedness which Beranger himself 

 would not have disavowed, and regarding life as an amusing en- 

 tertainment of which we are at once the puppets and the specta- 

 tors, and the wires of which are pulled by an amused but indiffer- 

 ent Demiurge. To many readers Renan became the mere apostle 

 of dilettanteism, for whom religion was but an empty dream of the 

 imagination or the heart, morality but an assemblage of conven- 

 tions and conveniences, and life an illusive phantasmagoria which 

 one must not be duped into taking seriously. 



Nevertheless, those who best knew his work — and, above all, 

 those who best knew his life — knew that this dilettanteism, this 

 apparent epicureanism, did not really lie at the foundation of his 

 mind and heart ; that it was in part the result of the inward con- 

 tradiction between his deeply religious nature and his conviction 

 that there is no such thing as knowledge, except of phenomena, 

 no such thing as certitude, except of finite things ; and, for the 

 rest, he was too sincere to affirm anything on subjects which could 

 not be brought within the range of positive cognizance. His life 



