“I have just finished re-reading with real admiration and consolation your “Hopes of the Human Race.” May I ask these questions: 1. Is it in, or coming into, a second edition? If the latter, is it too much to suggest that the note on p. 3 could, if not omitted, be modified? I appreciate the motive for its insertion, but it makes the lending and recommending of the book difficult. 2. Who is ‘one of the greatest men of Science’—p. 20? 3. Where is there an authentic appearance of the Pope’s reply to Odo Russell—p. 107?
“Yours sincerely,
“A. P. Stanley.”
I afterwards learned from Dean Stanley, one day when I was visiting him at the Deanery after his wife’s death, that he had read these Essays to Lady Augusta in the last weeks of her life, finding them, as he told me, the most satisfactory treatment of the subject he had met; and that after her death he read them over again. He gave me with much feeling a sad photograph of her as a dying woman, after telling me this. Mr. Motley the historian of the Netherlands, having also lost his wife not long afterwards, spoke to Dean Stanley of his desire for some book on the subject which would meet his doubts, and Dean Stanley gave him this one of mine.
Dean Stanley, it is needless to say, was the most welcome of guests in every house which he entered. There was something in his high-mindedness, I can use no other term, his sense of the glory of England, his love of his church (on extremely Erastian principles!) as the National Religion, his unfailing courtesy, his unaffected enjoyment of drollery and gossip, and his almost youthful excitement about each important subject which cropped up, which made him delightful to everyone in turn. There was no man in London I think whom it gave me such pleasure to meet “in the sixties and seventies” as the “Great Dean”; and he was uniformly most kind to me. The last occasion, I think, on which I saw him in full spirits was at a house where the pleasantest people were constantly to be found,—that of Mr. and Mrs. Simpson, in Cornwall Gardens. Renan and his wife were there, and I was so favoured as to be seated next to Renan; Dean Stanley being on the other side of our tactful hostess. The Dean had been showing Renan over the Abbey in the morning, and they were both in the gayest mood, but I remember Dean Stanley speaking to Renan with indescribable and concentrated indignation of the avowal Mr. Gladstone had recently made that the Clerkenwell explosion had caused him to determine on the disestablishment of the Irish Church.
I have found an old letter to my friend describing this dinner:—
“I had a most amusing evening yesterday. Kind Mrs. Simpson made me sit beside Renan; and Dean Stanley was across the corner, so we made, with nice Mrs. W. R. G. and Mr. M., a very jolly little party at our end of the table. The Dean began with grace, rather sotto voce, with a blink at Renan, who kept on never minding. His (Renan’s) looks are even worse than his picture leads one to expect. His face is exactly like a hog, so stupendously broad across the ears and jowl! But he is very gentlemanly in manner, very winning and full of fun and finesse. We had to talk French with him, but the Dean’s French was so much worse than mine that I felt quite at ease, and rattled away about the Triduos at Florence (to appease the wrath of Heaven on account of his Vie de Jésus), and had some private jokes with him about his malice in calling the Publicans of the Gospels ‘douaniers,’ and the ass a ‘baudet!’ He said he did it on purpose; and that when he was last in Italy numbers of poor people came to him, and asked him for the lucky number for the lotteries, because they thought he was so near the Devil he must know! I gave him your message about the Hengwrt MSS., and he apologised for having written about the ‘mesquines’ considerations which had caused them to be locked up, [to wit, that several leaves of the Red Book of Hergest had been stolen by too enthusiastic Welsh scholars!] and solemnly vowed to alter the passage in the next edition, and thanked you for the promise of obtaining leave for him to see them.
“I also talked to M. Renan of his Essay on the Poésie de la Race Celtique, and made him laugh at his own assertion that Irishmen had such a longing for ‘the Infinite’ that when they could not attain to it otherwise they sought it through a strong liquor ‘qui s’appelle le Whiskey.’”
Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff’s delightful volume on Renan has opened to my mind many fresh reasons for admiring the great French scholar, whose works I had falsely imagined I had known pretty well before reading it. But when all is said, the impression he has left on me (and I should think on most other people) is one of disappointment and short-falling.
M. Renan has written of himself the well-known and often laughed-at boast: “Seul dans mon siècle j’ai pu comprendre Jésus Christ et St. François d’Assise!” I do not know about his comprehension of St. Francis, though I should think it a very great tour de force for the brilliant French academician and critic to throw himself into that typical mediæval mind! But as regarded the former Person I should say that of all the tens of thousands who have studied and written about him during these last nineteen centuries, Renan was in some respects the least able to “comprehend” him. The man who could describe the story of the Prodigal as a “délicieuse parabole,” is as far out of Christ’s latitude as the pole from the equator. One abhors æsthetics when things too sacred to be measured by their standard are commended in their name. Renan seems to me to have been for practical purposes a Pantheist without a glimmer of that sense of moral and personal relation to God which was the supreme characteristic of Christ. When he translates Christ’s pity for the Magdalenes as jealousy “pour la gloire de son Père dans ces belles créatures;” and introduces the term “femmes d’une vie équivoque” as a rendering for “sinners,” he strikes a note so false that no praise lavished afterwards can restore harmony.