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Updated: June 19, 2025
And hence, again, portraits and memoirs, Boswell's "Johnson," or Renan's "Ma Soeur Henriette"; grotesque or lovely things, as the case may be, and always pathetic, which tell us that men have always admired and always loved; leaving us to explain, by substituting the image of our own idols, why in that case more specially they did so. Poor people!
A theory of this sort, to find general acceptance in France, must start with concrete history, and not be history held in solution in the cloudy shapes of myths which vanish as soon as touched. M. Renan's process is in the main the reverse of Strauss's.
There is a complete edition of Theodore Parker's works, Channing's works, a volume or two of Robertson, one of Furness, the English translation of Strauss' Life of Christ, Renan's Jesus, and half a dozen more similar books, intermingled with volumes of history, biography, science, travels, and the New American Cyclopedia. The Radical and the Atlantic Monthly are on the table.
Paul and the Bible from the perversion of them by mistaken men." Although he calls the treatise in which he addresses himself to this endeavour St. Paul and Protestantism, therein following Renan's phraseology, in the treatise itself he speaks rather of St. Paul and Puritanism; and this he does because here in England Puritanism is the strong and special representation of Protestantism.
M. Renan's Histoire d'Israel may almost be called skittish. The French are more tolerant of those excesses than the English. It is a digression, but he who would fail can reach his end by not taking himself seriously.
In inquiring into the life of Jesus, the very first thing to do is to establish firmly in the mind the true relations of the fourth gospel to the first three. Until this has been done, no one is competent to write on the subject; and it is because he has done this so imperfectly, that Renan's work is, from a critical point of view, so imperfectly successful.
Only, in building up the new, let us not lose grip upon the irreplaceable things of the old! It was not long after M. Renan's visit that, just as we were starting for a walk on a May afternoon, the second post brought my husband a letter which changed our lives. It contained a suggestion that my husband should take work on the Times as a member of the editorial staff.
Even Cardinal Newman's Apologia, self-restrained and severely controlled as it is, shows no doubtful traces of the conflicts and sorrows out of which he believed himself to have emerged to a calmer and surer light. But M. Renan's story is an idyl, not a tragedy. It is sunny, placid, contented.
For vivid word pictures of scenes in the life of Jesus his book is unsurpassed. Renan's inability to appreciate the more serious aspects of the work of Christ appears constantly, while his effort to discover romance in the life of Jesus is offensive.
In no kind of writing was Renan's command of style more notable than in the description of scenery; and in his pictures of his native Brittany in the essay on "The Poetry of the Celtic Races," as well as in his analysis of national qualities, two of his most characteristic powers are admirably displayed.
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