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Updated: June 14, 2025
My natural tendency is to take up one task, and peg away at it till it is done." At Roberts Brothers' request, Mr. Hamerton had agreed to write a translation of Renan's notice of his sister Henriette. However, he had to give it up, not being able to get answers to his letters from M. Ary Renan.
As Renan points out, the Empire "was trying, out of homage to an exaggerated idea of the State, to isolate the individual, to snap every moral tie between man and man, to defeat a legitimate desire of the poor, the desire to press together in a little corner of their own to keep one another warm. The intolerable sadness inseparable from such a life seemed worse than death."
According to Renan, evidences that the monotheism of the Semitic races was of a very early origin, appears in the fact that all their names for deity El, Elohim, Ilu, Baal, Bel, Adonai, Shaddai, and Allah denote one being and that supreme. These names have resisted all changes, and doubtless extend as far back as the Semitic language or the Semitic race.
"In the present state of science," wrote Renan in 1848, "nothing is wanted more urgently than a critical catalogue of the manuscripts in the different libraries ... a humble task to all appearance; ... and yet the researches of scholars are hampered and incomplete pending its definitive completion."
So, too, M. Renan talks of the "superficial humanism" of a school course which treats us as if we were all going to be poets, writers, preachers, orators, and he opposes this humanism to positive science, or the critical search after truth.
Ernest Renan, speaking at the funeral of Tourguenieff, described the deceased novelist as "the incarnation of a whole people." Even more fittingly might the phrase be applied to Bjoernson, for it would be difficult to find anywhere else in modern literature a figure so completely and profoundly representative of his race. In the frequently quoted words of Dr.
Renan says of Mark's Gospel that "it is full of minute observations, coming doubtless from an eye-witness," and he asserts that Matthew, Mark, and Luke were written "in substantially their present form by the men whose names they bear." These Gospels were the work of men who knew Jesus. Matthew was one of the Twelve; John in his Epistle speaks of himself as an eye-witness.
Of course, when Mr Arnold thus wrote, the method had not been pushed ad absurdum, as it was later by his friend M. Renan in the Histoire d'Israël, to the dismay and confusion of no less intelligent and unorthodox a critic than his other friend, M. Scherer. But it is more or less the method of all Biblical criticism of this sort, and Mr Arnold follows it blindly.
There may therefore be a measure of truth in the theory of Renan, who saw in the Adonis worship a dreamy voluptuous cult of death, conceived not as the King of Terrors, but as an insidious enchanter who lures his victims to himself and lulls them into an eternal sleep.
The first one had bored me to death with her spiritualistic discourses and her pretensions to ideality; the second outraged me by telling me that Renan was a rascal. Observe that she confessed to me that she had not read his books. There are some subjects about which I lose patience, and, when a friend is slandered before my very face, the savage in my blood returns, I see red.
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