In order to have a foretaste of the contrast between the two men it was sufficient to recall Renan’s opening speech three years before, when he succeeded Claude Bernard. His thanks to his colleagues began thus—
“Your cenaculum is only reached at the age of Ecclesiastes, a delightful age of serene cheerfulness, when after a laborious prime, it begins to be seen that all is but vanity, but also that some vain things are worthy of being lingeringly enjoyed.”
The two minds were as different as the two speeches; Pasteur took everything seriously, giving to words their absolute sense; Renan, an incomparable writer, with his supple, undulating style, slipped away and hid himself within the sinuosities of his own philosophy. He disliked plain statements, and was ever ready to deny when others affirmed, even if he afterwards blamed excessive negation in his own followers. He religiously consoled those whose faith he destroyed, and, whilst invoking the Eternal, claimed the right of finding fault even there. When applauded by a crowd, he would willingly have murmured Noli me tangere, and even added with his joyful mixture of disdain and good-fellowship, “Let infinitely witty men come unto me.”
On that Thursday, April 27, 1882, the Institute was crowded. When the noise had subsided, Renan, seated at the desk as Director of the Academy between Camille Doucet, the Permanent Secretary, and Maxime du Camp, the Chancellor, declared the meeting opened. Pasteur, looking paler than usual, rose from his seat, dressed in the customary green-embroidered coat of an Academician, wearing across his breast the Grand Cordon of the Legion of Honour. In a clear, grave voice, he began by expressing his deep gratification, and, with the absolute knowledge and sincerity which always compelled the attention of his audience, of whatever kind, he proceeded to praise his predecessor. There was no artifice of composition, no struggle after effect, only a homage to the man, followed almost immediately by a confession of dissent on philosophic questions. He was listened to with attentive emotion, and when he showed the error of Positivism in attempting to do away with the idea of the Infinite, and proclaimed the instinctive and necessary worship by Man of the great Mystery, he seemed to bring out all the weakness and the dignity of Man—passing through this world bowed under the law of Toil and with the prescience of the Ideal—into a startling and consolatory light.
One of the privileges of the Academician who receives a new member is to remain seated in his armchair before a table, and to comfortably prepare to read his own speech, in answer, often in contradiction, to the first. Renan, visibly enjoying the presidential chair, smiled at the audience with complex feelings, understood by some who were his assiduous readers. Respect for so much work achieved by a scientist of the first rank in the world; a gratified feeling of the honour which reverted to France; some personal pleasure in welcoming such a man in the name of the Académie, and, at the same time, in the opportunity for a light and ironical answer to Pasteur’s beliefs—all these sensations were perceptible in Renan’s powerful face, the benevolence of whose soft blue eyes was corrected by the redoubtable keenness of the smile.
He began in a caressing voice by acknowledging that the Academy was somewhat incompetent to judge of the work and glory of Pasteur. “But,” he added, with graceful eloquence, “apart from the ground of the doctrine, which is not within our attributions, there is, Sir, a greatness on which our experience of the human mind gives us a right to pronounce an opinion; something which we recognize in the most varied applications, which belongs in the same degree to Galileo, Pascal, Michael-Angelo, or Molière; something which gives sublimity to the poet, depth to the philosopher, fascination to the orator, divination to the scientist.
“That common basis of all beautiful and true work, that divine fire, that indefinable breath which inspires Science, Literature, and Art—we have found it in you, Sir—it is Genius. No one has walked so surely through the circles of elemental nature; your scientific life is like unto a luminous tract in the great night of the Infinitesimally Small, in that last abyss where life is born.”
After a brilliant and rapid enumeration of the Pastorian discoveries, congratulating Pasteur on having touched through his art the very confines of the springs of life, Renan went on to speak of truth as he would have spoken of a woman: “Truth, Sir, is a great coquette; she will not be sought with too much passion, but often is most amenable to indifference. She escapes when apparently caught, but gives herself up if patiently waited for; revealing herself after farewells have been said, but inexorable when loved with too much fervour.” And further: “Nature is plebeian, and insists upon work, preferring horny hands and careworn brows.”
He then commenced a courteous controversy. Whilst Pasteur, with his vision of the Infinite, showed himself as religious as Newton, Renan, who enjoyed moral problems, spoke of Doubt with delectation. “The answer to the enigma which torments and charms us will never be given to us.... What matters it, since the imperceptible corner of reality which we see is full of delicious harmonies, and since life, as bestowed upon us, is an excellent gift, and for each of us a revelation of infinite goodness?”
Legend will probably hand to posterity a picture of Renan as he was in those latter days, ironically cheerful and unctuously indulgent. But, before attaining the quizzical tranquillity he now exhibited to the Academy, he had gone through a complete evolution. When about the age of forty-eight, he might bitterly have owned that there was not one basis of thought which in him had not crumbled to dust. Beliefs, political ideas, his ideal of European civilization, all had fallen to the ground. After his separation from the Church, he had turned to historical science; Germany had appeared to him, as once to Madame de Staël and so many others, as a refuge for thinkers. It had seemed to him that a collaboration between France, England, and Germany would create “An invincible trinity, carrying the world along the road of progress through reason.” But that German façade which he took for that of a temple hid behind it the most formidable barracks which Europe had ever known, and beside it were cannon foundries, death-manufactories, all the preparations of the German people for the invasion of France. His awakening was bitter; war as practised by the Prussians, with a method in their cruelty, filled him with grief.