Ernest Renan . ould have given them. For dates, scenes, inci-dents, the many-colored story which those whohave played great parts dress up, and leave to bepublished twenty years after their funeral, he hadno taste. His education at the seminary made himwhat he had proved to be as an historian, whetherhe was rendering St. Paul, Marcus Aurellus, orhimself, in his faultless French. Always inter-ested, and Interesting, he was yet detached fromhis subject. Now the virtue of detachment wouldbe fatal to Rousseau; It forbids self-portraitureexcept from a religious point of view; and Renannever had bee
Ernest Renan . ould have given them. For dates, scenes, inci-dents, the many-colored story which those whohave played great parts dress up, and leave to bepublished twenty years after their funeral, he hadno taste. His education at the seminary made himwhat he had proved to be as an historian, whetherhe was rendering St. Paul, Marcus Aurellus, orhimself, in his faultless French. Always inter-ested, and Interesting, he was yet detached fromhis subject. Now the virtue of detachment wouldbe fatal to Rousseau; It forbids self-portraitureexcept from a religious point of view; and Renannever had been, as the spiritual writers name It,an Interior man. He looked at the world withhis own eyes, but the vision was not directed tofeelings; it sought after facts as a clue to this moral quality the training which hereceived In abstract systems, where philosophersthemselves appeared only as a set of syllogismsto be sustained or demolished, could not fail toreact. And so the picturesque died out for want. Ernest Renan, 1892. From the painting by Bonn ECCLESIASTES 193 of color, and that which M. Bourget has welltermed the violent energy of life was exhaustedby an asceticism of the imagination far moreeffective than hair-shirt or knotted cords wouldhave been. From that medium Renan, though strugglingvaliantly, never got quite free. Though otherscould not have written about his first years unlesshe had shown the way, we must agree with Turge-nieff that he was never meant for a was, indeed, a being apart. Many Liberalsfelt it and did not like him; the orthodox weresensible of it in another way—they shuddered asat an apostate priest. He knew himself how littlehe could compete with genuine poets, with Alfredde Musset, for example, who is here suggested byforce of contrast, or with Heine, who was muchtoo sensuous ever to be a Koheleth meditating uponthe fatal sameness of things. Thus the Reminiscences are not psychology, asare Rousseaus Confessions. But they g
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