ERNEST  RENAN  255

They  call  him  Mvolous :  but  for  fifty  years  he  devoted  his
strength  to  minute  and  patient  research,  and  died  in  harness,
leaving  forty  scholarly  volumes  behind  him.  They  call  him
elusive  and  shifty :  but  he  never  varied  in  his  main  course,  and,
when  he  presented  alternative  hypotheses,  he  did  so  out  of  broad-
mindedness  and  candour.  They  call  him  pliant,  effeminate,  a
moral  weakling :  but  he  went  boldly  through  a  spiritual  ordeal
from  which  most  men  of  the  rugged  and  strenuous  type  Avould
shrink  and  seek  refuge  in  dogmatism  or  compromise.  They  call
him  selfish  and  a  Hedonist,  whilst  he  preached  and  practised
absolute  renunciation  to  whatever  was  not  the  ideal.  They
rebuke  him  for  his  smiling  benevolence,  as  if  cheerfulness  was
not  the  supreme  grace  of  the  strong,  and  indulgence  the
privilege  of  the  pure.
Democratic  France,  whom  he  criticised  unsparingly,  and,  we
believe,  unjustly,  understands  him  better  than  the  cultured  few
he  tried  so  hard  to  please.  She  instinctively  reveres  him  as  one
of  her  spuitual  masters.*

*  It  is  instructive  to  note  that  the  two  most  famous  adepts  of  Renanism,
Jules  Lemaitre  and  Anatole  France,  showed  no  lack  of  conviction  and
decision  when  called  upon  to  act :  they  took  opposite  sides  in  the  Dreyfus
crisis,  but  with  equal  energy.  This  holds  true  of  Barres  and  Bourget,  wliom
Professor  Irving  Babbitt  places  among  the  Rcnanians,  although  they  are
more  obviously  the  followers  of  Taine  (and  in  a  minor  degree  of  Stendhal).
