M. RENAN'S GAIETY.
"A'said a lady a short time since, in gentle depre- ciation of a friend ; "he is an intelligent creature, dnit he has a cork soul." The sentence, which was not uttered of M. Renan, seems to us to describe precisely the defect which for us destroys, or at least grievously impairs, the value of his personality. He has charm, he has pleasantness, he has on many subjects incisiveness of perception ; but he has a cork soul, one so light that it does not even perceive the weight of the topics he discusses. He talks of God, and he means some spiritual influence which corporate humanity is to develop when it is sufficiently far advanced; he speaks of the soul, and only intends the mind when it is moved by some hot emotion; and he writes of sin, but he only thinks of a breach in a code -of his own devising,—nay, he hardly means even that, for -conviction of sin is a feeling he has not felt, and, if we judge him aright, could not by possibility feel. Theology is for him as light a thing as literature, and he expects to await the judgment of God, if there is any, much as a hitherto successful playwright expects to await the judgment -of the theatre on a first night. He has a cork soul, in fact, like so many more, Englishmen as well as Frenchmen; but the thing peculiar to himself is that he is proud of it, for it is this quality in him which he calls gaiety of heart, and all through his souvenirs displays as a recommendation, and leaves, in the semi-jocular, semi-earnest will he has published this week, to be distributed among French miners, of all men in the world, because they need it so much, and with explosions to come perhaps in the next minute, it will do them so much good ! It is thoroughly French, all that, as well as thoroughly Renanian, and one is tempted to stop a moment and reflect what this gaiety of heart which Frenchmen have claimed for centuries really is, and whether, after all. it is so well worth the having. When it is a mere euphuism, as it sometimes is for 'courage,' it is of course a gift ; for fear can benefit no man, and the man or woman who can encounter, say, a rocket-battery, or cancer, with a certain gaiety, may claim, if it be but sincere, an inner force which most good men would rather envy than grudge to its pos- sessor. We have seen a man racked with a mortal disease who could no more help jesting than breathing, and certainly it is not to him that our depreciation of gaiety extends. But most men, and especially Continental men, give to " gaiety " a meaning different from " courage," and with that meaning we hardly see that it is an admirable quality at all. It makes life, perhaps, a little pleasanter at times for those around, and that is a benevolence, though an unconscious one ; but it is in itself nothing but the power of regarding facts, and especially events and thoughts, as less burdensome than they are,—that is, in fact, of amiably lying to oneself after the Harold Skim- pole fashion. He is the most perfect example of gaiety we can recall in literature known to all men. Care weighed nothing with him, especially pecuniary care ; and debts being light to a man of that mood, he was at no more pains to shake them off than any other light thing. Why should one brush snowflakes from a pea-jacket ?—it only makes the jacket wetter. Nothing presses when nothing weighs, and gaiety is the capacity of levitation applied to all ponderable things. Is there much good in that as a permanent quality of one's nature ?—and if so, what good ? Joy is a great thing, a sweet tonic for the mind ; and joyousness, which is the capacity of receiving joy, is a faculty without which the soul cannot be completely healthy ; while gladness—Englishmen have forgotten to use the word, but it signifies the emotion caused by protracted joy—is happiness itself, the ideal to which we all aspire, and which all hope, perhaps unreasonably, that we shall some day attain. (It may be otherwise, and our reward may be only a perpetuity of effort the object of which we can understand.) But what does gaiety, if our definition even approaches accuracy, do for us ; what gift does it confer ? A little more power of deceiving ourselves, which may, in some rare cases, be a little more power to bear, but is much more frequently a little more facility in evading that bearing which nevertheless must be encountered. The gay poet is the writer of verses about the surface of things ; the gay politician is the statesman to whom all results, except his own overthrow, are practically indifferent ; the gay theologian is the theologian for whom, like M. Renan, there is no theology, no study of God, but only a study of how man may most lightly endure the vacuum created by his absence. To all alike, to Horace, to Lord Palmerston when that mood was on him, to M. Renan, the sense of weight in the atmosphere is wanting; they are cork souls, and float lightly whither the breezes will. In a child such gaiety is both beautiful and loveable, for a child should be free of
pressure, and, moreover, that in a child which proves childhood is an essential grace ; but in a grown man there is surely in gaiety, such as we have defined it, some want of manliness. " Gaily as to a dance went our heroes," writes the highly admiring Frenchman, thinking the while how he would have pointed his toes. " We shut our teeth," writes the English Lieutenant, "and so in among the bullets again." Which is the manlier, and which will conquer in the end, the " hero " whose gaiety is half vanity or thoughtlessness, or a faculty of not seeing the bullets, or the lad who, having no power of levitation, sees them a great deal too clearly and goes on ? There must be something in the power of perception, something in the power of measurement, something in the power of self-compression ; and all these powers, by the very necessity of the case, must be wanting to him who under the gravest emergencies, or during the gravest thoughts—and the thoughts of a theologian on theology must always be grave—is only gay.
But then, there is the subjective side, for gaiety, it is asserted, is such a source of happiness. Is it ? We cannot
answer the question as regards the individual, for no man ever pierces the veil, so thin and so impassable, which separates his inner self from the inner self of any other human being ; but it may be answered in a way as regards great masses of men. The quality of gaiety is always attributed by all observers to two European peoples in particular ; and certainly, if content be any sign of happiness, the share which either enjoys must be a most minute one. The Frenchman has been revolting for a hundred years, and has not done with that process yet. He has the finest country in Europe ; he is the one man not crashed by the competition of ever- increasing multitudes ; and he, of all mankind, did most to make his own institutions after his own design : yet it is in France, of all countries in the world, that the volcanic forces below heave up most visibly, that society is always most dreading—with reason or without reason, matters nothing—a sudden overthrow. What has his gaiety given to the Frenchman except the mutability over which he laments, as if, were his sea but stable, he could be most content. The weight which seems to press so lightly is always there, and the Frenchman out of the street is far more than the .Englishman the victim of carking care, the man of all mankind, the German soldier excepted, most likely to take on himself the right to quit an unendurable world. The French- man's gaiety, be it observed, is a genuine thing ; it is no more a pose in M. Renan than it was in Mgr. Freppel ; but it does not shield him from a capacity of misery rare among man- kind, a capacity so widely diffused, that for a generation the only literatures he has generally tolerated are his own and the Russian, both saturated through and through with pessimism and melancholia. As for the Irishman, he is gay indeed at the fair or in the shebeen, and a surface gaiety shows in him everywhere if he chances to be pleased ; but no man in the world asks more loudly for pity, for sympathy, for all the aid from his fellows that can relieve the burden of a melancholy which is in- curable, and which every now and then becomes ferocious. What does the Irishman gain from his gaiety, except a reputation for levity—often undeserved, for the foundation of the Irish character is pessimistic apprehension—and the power, no doubt in a degree a compensating power, of singing light- some songs which, however, only rise to their highest merit, when, even during the revel, you hear in them, either in words or music, the note of a pathetic wail? What Irish- man who knows Ireland will quote his country as proof that gaiety is a working recipe for happiness ? There is one gay Asiatic race, and but one, gay with all that M. Renan means by gaiety, except the benevolence which he unreasonably but gracefully imports into it ; and that is the Persian, whose literature is saturated with a gaiety that in all its forms smells of Paris ; and the Persian is perishing of his misery, literally dying out. Is it because it is happy that this brilliant people refuses any longer to fill its villages ? Gaiety of this sort, the true Continental sort, gaiety which is the ability to think of a ton as a pound while you are wriggling under it, has brought happiness to no race, though it has no doubt helped to mould Hafiz and Wronger and Moore. We can get something out of them, no doubt; but most assuredly it is not the content and the cheerfulness and the pleasure in life to secure which M. Renan distributes among the miners of France that store of gaiety which, while he has, as he says, money and glory and influence, he thinks and describes as so large. We fear they will get little good of it, except some minutes of self-deception, during which they will believe that the coal cuts easier, and the pick has a sharper end. Neither coal nor pick will alter, and gaiety will do as little for them as it will for M. Renan in finding out the secret of the Whence and Whither. It is to heavier souls than his that it is given to go far upon that quest.
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