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The year 1880-81, however, was marked for me by three other events of quite a different kind: Monsieur Renan's visit to Oxford, my husband's acceptance of a post on the staff of the Times, and a visit that we paid to the W.E. Forsters in Ireland, in December, 1880, at almost the blackest moment of the Irish land-war.
Renan's Vie de Christ is an exquisite evasion, a jewelled confession of failure. But there are equally wonderful things at Thessaly's house, Don. You must come there with me." "I shall do so without fail. It appears to me, Paul, that you have materially altered your original plan. You have abandoned the idea of casting your book in the form of a romance?" "I have yes.
Sir James Stephen holds that the Blasphemy Laws are concerned with the matter of publications, that "a large part of the most serious and most important literature of the day is illegal," and that every book-seller who sells, and everyone who lends to his friend, a copy of Comte's Positive Philosophy, or of Renan's Vie de Jesus, commits a crime punishable with fine and imprisonment.
But M. France read M. France's nature into Joan of Arc all the cold kindness, all the homeless sentimental sin of the modern literary man. There is one book that it recalled to me with startling vividness, though I have not seen the matter mentioned anywhere; Renan's "Vie de Jésus." It has just the same general intention: that if you do not attack Christianity, you can at least patronise it.
Suddenly it poised above the memory of an old book of Renan's, "The Abbess Juarre," in which the eminent skeptic had somewhat clumsily attempted to demonstrate that if the world unmistakably announced its finish within three days the inhabitants would give themselves up to an orgy of love. Well, her world might end to-morrow. Why should she not live to-night?
M. Renan shrinks from solving such a question by the hypothesis of conscious fraud. To solve it by sentiment is hardly more respectful either to the world or to truth. We have left ourselves no room to speak of the best part of M. Renan's new volume, his historical comment on the first period of Christianity.
But, that I might not wound the susceptibility of the great master, for whom I felt a profound respect, I made up my mind to delay publication until after his death, a fatality which could not be far off, if I might judge from the apparent general weakness of M. Renan. A short time after M. Renan's death, I wrote to M. Jules Simon again for his advice.
To translate it is impossible without a vast amount of conjecture; but M. Renan's version seems to deserve a place in the present collection. Of the shorter inscriptions of the Phoenicians, by far the greater number were attached either to votive offerings or to tombs.
Gladstone we are reminded of Renan's strange suggestion that an exploration of the Hindu Kush territory, whence probably came the primitive Aryans, might throw some new light on the origin of language. Nothing could well be more futile.
The "Meditations" of Marcus Aurelius; Epictetus should be read in connection. Renan's Life of Marcus Aurelius. Farrar's Seekers after God. Arnold has also written some interesting things about this emperor. In Smith's Dictionary there is an able article. Gibbon says something, but not so much as we could wish. Tillemont, in his History of the Emperors, says more.
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