BOOK OF THE MOMENT.

THE APOTHEOSIS OF THE CELT.

[COPYRIGHT IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BY THE New York Times.] M. RENAN is without question the greatest intellectual of the Celts. In saying this I do not, of course, mean to put the Celtic race into an ethnological watertight compartment, or even to say that you can pick out this or that man, or the people of this or that district and say that they are Celts pure and unadulterated. You may talk accurately of an Arab sire, or a Wyandotte or Leghorn as pure bred, but you cannot say that of men or women. Human beings are not bred with that perfection of purity secured by the professional breeder of hens or horses. What I mean by writing of Renan as being intellectually the greatest of the Celts is that his mind was essentially a Celtic mind. It shows all the strengths and all the weakness, all the mystic fascination and all the sympathy of comprehension, all the gentleness and all the pathos which we associate with the moral, the intellectual, and, above all, the literary temperament cf the Celt. The other elements in Renan's brain seemed gradually to atrophy and leave him, as his countrymen called him during the zenith of his career, " Breton Bretonnant "—a phrase which Mr. Robertson happily renders as " A Breton Bretonizing."

Renan, in spite of his Gascon mother, was a Celt to the tips of his fingers as well as in all his mental movements and functionings. Ile carried every Celtic characteristic to the very furthest point. Indeed, if one may be guilty of a bull, as surely one may in such a context, he carried one of them, that is his peculiar sense of ironic humour, even beyond the furthest possible point. He not only made jokes against himself and indulged in a liberal irony over his personal feelings, but he really and not merely whimsically enjoyed laughing at himself. Another point, which at first looks like being un-Celtic, though, as a matter of fact, it is not necessarily so, was his conscious moderation and therewith his intellectual good taste and breeding. He never, or very, very seldom, forced the note. He never indulged in torrents of words ; never let his rhetoric run away with him. He could be " lovely and dim " on occasion; like all Celts, but he never, like the majority of Celtic writers, made either the loveliness too sugary or the dimness too opaque. In a word, he always remembered so to be a visionary as ,not to forget that he was a scholar, a philosopher, and above all, a citizen of the world. Again, his overmastering _sense of humour in the truest and most refined sense, looks a little un-Celtic. But here once more it is only because we do- not generally find the Celtic elixir so .pure, so unclouded, so strong—a vintage wine without a drop of reproach or a grain of sediment—that we arc surprised that a Celt should be so much of a literary exquisite as Renan. Such a quality is quite natural in, a Greek of the period of Euripides, and by the Ilyssus, but not in the realms of Fata Morgana. Take, for example, the deliciously humorous passage in the Souvenirs in which Renan says that he often wished that he had been brought up in a country:in which there was slavery. He would have been able to show his essential goodness and humanity by the way in which he would have treated those who were " bond " to him. He puts the thing so charmingly and with such an engaging: smile that one forgets to call it inhuman or fantastic, or in bad taste. Again, how penetrating and how full of the best type of humorous irony, of the half-wink to the initiated, is the apparently grave passage in which he tells us, " I have been brought up by women and priests ; the explanation of my qualities and of my defects is all there." Again, as Mr.. Robertson reminds us, what could be more perfect than the aside, " There is in my awkwardness (gaucherie) a priestly disdain and a womanly disdain. In my way of feeling, I am three-fourths woman." It was characteristic that this passage should have been introduced by a declaration that the women of Brittany are much superior to the men, and scold them Anyone who has ever been among the Bretons must admit the truth of this indictment. The

superiority of character in the females of the race is patent even to the tourist. The Breton girls and mothers seem to have all the good and none of the- bad qualities of the males. This is largely true also of the Welsh, the Highlanders, and the Irish. Renan's true attitude of mind is also to be found in the sly sincerity of his declaration that if he were to have another life he would like to be a woman.

Renan's comprehension of the woman's mind makes some of his generalizations in regard to women extraordinarily poignant and interesting, even if, as we must in the case of all generalizations, be on our guard against admitting them. For example, what could be more penetrating than his explana- tion, or attempted explanation, of why women seem naturally and inevitably half in love with Priests, and especially with the celibate clergy ? The fact is due, suggests Renan, to a kind of intellectual annoyance and wounded amour, propre. Women, as Pope said, while they make power all their end, make, and are obliged to make, beauty all their means. But here is a set of men who have deliberately banged the door, as a woman might say, against woman's prime method of achieving her end, the exercise of her beauty, her fascination, in a word her power of sex. Her power over the good priest is unrealizable. That is so galling and humiliating. But no one willingly endures such losses without a struggle. You cannot be quite certain that you cannot pierce the soutane coat of mail till you have tried. And so, consciously or unconsciously, woman tries. Again, curiosity always makes one try a closed door, and all women are curious, or should be so. Women are always rattling the handle, as it were. And then we stupid men wonder why they should be so greatly taken up with the clergy ! A keen player always wants to beat a champion—or a man who holds a record.

The volume by Mr. Robertson, which is the bracket for this article, is a very interesting one, and I recommend it to all who really care about Renan. I hold that it is in certain ways an unfair book, though not, of course, consciously, and in many ways a book of little discernment, and little true comprehension. But that does net affect its general readability. Mr. Robertson may be a Celt for all I know by physical lineage, but by mental descent he is a hard- shell Scotsman of the most Teutonic sort—a Scotsman of the kind that Lamb delighted to chaff—the Scotsman who " stops a metaphor like a suspected person " and will never allow you a morsel of irony, even if you are starving for it, or a drop of the water of humour. Lamb, it will be remem- bered, recounted how, when introduced to one of Burns's, sons, he could not help wishing that it had been the father. The Scotsman to whom he made this innocent confidence at once pointed out to him that that would have been impossible, since the poet was dead ! But though there are lots of things in Renan that Mr. Robertson does not under- stand, and will never understand even if he were to re-read the whole of Renan with the intensest desire to be more sympathetic, I feel sure that Renan, who loved the ironic accident so greatly, would have been immensely amused to see Mr. Robertson employing the instruments of a destructive agnosticism : " What are your reasons ?— What right have you to assume that Where is your

dence ? " Here is a Critic pounding Renan for his superstition and regretting 'his • intellectual cowardice, his unwillingness to face facts, his willingness to how the knee to the chimeras of religious sentimentalism, chimeras as dangerous and as despicable in Mr. Robertson's eyes as any that mankind has hatched in the fetid pools of cowardice and credulity.

Renan with his soft voice and Olympian air, and with a gleam in his eye " like a cat under the bed," as the Irishman put it, would have declared that he must be in the right when he got shot at by both sides. His own generation called him a blasphemer, a sceptic, an infidel, and an enemy of the Divine; a denier of Christ. And now, " lo and behold ! " the newer generation is shaking its head over his sinful lapses into religiosity. " I used to be told I was more sceptical than the sceptics. Now I am more superstitious than the orthodox." And then to increase and intensify this triumph of irony we see coming round the corner the votaries of the newest scepticism and the newest agnosticism, or rather, the votaries of a new creed, ready to declare that Mr. Robertsbn is com- pletely out of date, that his old-fashioned syllogistic methodi, demands for proof, and so forth, are fond things vainly imagined, and insisting that till he can get a touch of relativity

and understand such things as the " Life Urge," or " evolu- tionary creation," he is as deep in ignorance as the Egyptians in their fog. So passes the glory of martyrdom.

There is a delicious passage in which Mr. Robertson, after talking of Renan's " half-ironical effort to extract a theory of Cosmic Purpose from the spectacle of Mother Nature duping, as it were, all her children to secure her ends by fol- lowing their own," continues as follows :—

" The very conception of Cosmic Purpose is theistic, being an attribution to Infinite Causation of the human mode of the Finite. For the logical Rationalist the Infinite transcends the concept of purpose as it transcends the concept of Mind, both being terms of finite relation. If we are to use words with a clear meaning (which is not the religious way), Cosmic Purpose implies that everything which happens shall happen, to all eternity ; which leads us nowhere. It is only the poets who can seriously pretend to -reduce infinity and Eternity to a ' divine event to which the whole creation moves.' If we must divagate in these matters, it is better to err unseriously with Ronan than solemnly with Tennyson and the rest. They are all conducted by the instinct of the tradition of the Day of Judgment—a characteristic product of the day of no judgment."

That, of course, is not the whole story of Mr. Robertson's attitude towards Renan's life and religion. Still, it is a good sample, as is his somewhat grudging comment upon Renan's final credo in the " Probabilities " of the " Dialogues." He calls it " a winning adaptation of the religious theory of things to the temper of agnostic science." However, he conyforts himself a little by thinking that when Renan looked religious he was in reality only pulling our legs. Yet somehow Mr. Robertson, I cannot help noting, makes rather a wry face over the theological bitters which he has to pretend are delicious. It is thus he speaks of the " Probabilities " :-

" It is not, of course, a statement of ` Probabilities' in any admissible sense of that term. It is a winning adaptation of the religious theory of things to the temper of agnostic science, without any proffer of philosophic or scientific reasons for the continued ascription of finite mode to the infinite processus. The hypothesis is put as a choice preferable to a suggested ' only alternative,' the mere negative ` there is no universal soul,' which is of course even less significant, since the term is not only without definition but, for the rationalist, without analogy, whereas for the religionist it calls up at once ` God' and ' spirit,' with all their connotations. The real alternative for the thinker is the simple avowal that Infinite Causation is for him incogitable. And that was, in fact, Renan's own position. ' What we call infinite time,' he declares in the preface to the Pennies, ' is perhaps a minute between two miracles. " We do not know." That is all that can be clearly said on that which is beyond the finite.' That is his real philo- sophic conclusion. The corollary : ` Deny nothing ; affirm nothing ; hope. Keep a place in the funerals for music and incense,' is the maxim of Renan the paternal humanist, the preacher of comfort to his kind. As he said, ii faut les getter."

Well, unless I am very greatly mistaken, there are things coming in Metaphysics, in Biology, in Mathe- matics, the foundation of all the Science, and, last of all, in psychological experiment, and perhaps coming very quickly, which will make all this sublimated rationalism a thing for tears or laughter, according to one's temperament. However, I must leave Mr. Robertson to the uneasy grumble of the older generation—my own as well as his, of course. I do so not without a certain admiration for his courage and his determination to mumble his hard biscuit rather than adopt any new-fangled type of false teeth, as he would perhaps put it. Though I may be inclined to describe them more genially as " the triumphs of modem dentistry," I like his unflinching refusal to be comforted, lest he should be taken in in the process.

Though I am not concerned to break a lance with Mr. Robertson in a tournament which in my opinion is com- pletely out of date and for a prize which has already withered in the hands of the Queen of Beauty, I am most willing, and indeed should like, to meet him on another ground, that is his belittlement of, or, shall I say, very grudging praise of, Renan's dramatic works. Instead of thinking the two Caliban plays, and The Priest of Nemi and The Abbess of Jouarre rather good, I am of opinion that all these plays are remark- able from the point of view of dramatic art, and even more so from Renan's very interesting and curious belief that philo- sophic truth can be only expressed dialectically—i.e., in the form of dialogue. Ultimately, declared Renan, it would probably be necessary for the metaphysician to use plot as well as dialogue if he is to express his full meaning. Even this might not be enough, and he would have to call in the art of Music to express conceptions inexpressible in words. Therefore Opera might at last become the medium of Philosophy.

The idea is a fascinating one and appeals to those who, as I do, like to hear the other side, even though they may feel pretty sure that they will have to reject it. The other side may have an clement of truth in it, which can he got in no other way. In any case, I am sure that the Thames Philosophiques of Renan are not jokes, or fantasies, or pieces of whimsical irony, but magazines of sound thought. I do not agree, but indeed disagree very strongly, with the anti-democratic trend of Caliban, but for all that it is full of wonderful satire, and I should like nothing better than to be able to quote largely from it on this occasion. Take, for example, the wonderful story of Caliban's coup d'etat at Milan. Caliban in Renan's sequel to The Tempest is supposed to have come back, partly . forgiven and partly ignored, with his old master to the duke- dom of Milan. There he becomes a Proletarian agitator and skilfully engineers a revolutionary coup d'etat while Prospero is dreaming over his books of magic. The scene, laid in the Square at Milan just before the revolution conies off, is most vivid and amusing. There is a great crowd and much animated conversation. Caliban goes up and down among the people talking revolution. Another quite delightful scene is that in the Great Hall in which the crowd express their delight at the social revolution that has come about and the happiness that will ensue. One or two criticisms arc made, but they are drowned with the cry, " Down with all who distrust the people !"

There is an even more amusing passage after the revolution has succeeded and Caliban is lodged in the Ducal palace and gets into the bed of the Sovereign of Milan. Another very exquisite piece of irony is to be found in Prospero's conversation with some of his old courtiers who think the time has come to make terms with the Proletariat. Take, for example, the speech of one of them :—

" Heavens ! Everything's relative. Men are made by their position, not by themselves. Caliban's the man of the present situation—he's saving us. If we resist we shall only exasperate him."

The Priest of Nemi is full of sly hits impartially delivered against Ritualistic Religion and Latitudinarianism, Freedom and Strict Government, Democracy and Aristocracy, Humani- tarianism and Realism in Politics. The Abbess of Jouarre, which Mr. Robertson rather primly condemns for its impro- priety (I should have preferred to condemn it because of Renan's assumption that you must be sexual even when the greatest things are at stake), is a very able philosophical reflection. Especially is this the case in the passage in which the aristocratic soldier who serves in the Terror explains why he put his sword at the disposal of the men he hates and condemns as the enemies not only of France, but of the human race. It is a passage which, if properly understood, explains how certain we are to cicceat our own ends if we try to spread freedom to other countries not by example but by anything approaching force or external pressure. Renan saw that so clearly and rationalized it so ably that it is a notable contribution to the art of practical politics.

J. ST. LOE STRACHEY.