Book Reviews [pp. 331-334]

Book Reviews.
here quoted of the soliloquy following after the inter view with the ghost: "The undiscovered country
from whose bourne no traveler returns"-and this in
the face of an incident that contradicts half the burden
of the soliloquy. The next essay, "The Humorous
in Literature," is rambling nonsense, not worth printing the first time, still less the second. "The Bollandists" is a very interesting account of the little
known and less appreciated work of the Jesuit society founded by Bolland to write a complete cyclopedia of the "Lives of the Saints." This remarkable work, begun in I629, has continued with only
one break to the present time, and bids fair to go on
a generation or two more. One cannot lay down
this paper (by the Rev. George T. Stokes, in the
Contemporary Review) without a warm admiration
for the character and work of the society, especially
of its founders. Matthew Arnold's essay, "Isaiah
of Jerusalem," already much read and quoted on this
side the sea, is simply a plea to the revisers to preserve the beauty of the old translation of Isaiah, even
at the sacrifice of verbal exactness, because literary
beauty is an invaluable religious force in the sacred
books of a people. A pleasant article by Thomas
Wright, "The Journeyman Engineer," discusses in
an optimistic way the readers of the "penny novel
serials" (which appear to be much the sort of literature that Pomona used to read in the Rudder
Grange); these readers, he says, are of the "genteel" class-young ladies in the millinery business,
and so on; and they will read the next grade higher
of fiction by preference whenever they can get it for
a penny.
Renan's Recollections.'
ERNEST RENAN is sixty years of age. He is
known chiefly to American readers as the author
of a Life of Jesus, which was published in I863,
which in five years ran through five editions, and
which was translated into most of the continental
languages. He was intended for the church, and
following the guidance of his early introduction to
the Oriental tongues, he became a student and master
of the Semitic languages, and to-day probably has
no living superior in that department of learning.
He was by nature religious, and by training scholarly.
He first accepted the teachings of authority, but the
questions that arise in every mind prone to philosophy, and speculation, and complete acquisition,
kept him in the paths of investigation, until the
doubts which authority would silence were answered
for him by solutions that brought him to grounds of
belief different from his teachers and his church.
He has in all reverence and honesty passed over the
whole gamut of Christian religious thought, from the
permanent and rigid dogmas of Roman Catholicism
to a complete and unqualified disavowal of belief in
1 Recollections of my Youth. By Ernest Renan.
Translated by C. B. Pitman. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. For sale by A. L. Bancroft & Co.
what is known and accepted as Christianity in its
most liberal expression. These recollections of his
youth are not a narrative of the events of his early
life, such as make up the substance of most biograph ical writings. "The recollections of my childhood,"
he says, "do not pretend to form a complete and
continuous narrative. They are merely the images
which arose before me, and the reflections which
suggested themselves to me while I was calling up a
past fifty years old, written down in the order in
which they came. The form of the present
work seemed to me a convenient one for expressing
certain shades of thought which my previous writings
did not convey. I had no desire to furnish information about myself for the future use of those who
might wish to write essays or articles about me."
With such prefatory warning, and with the further
expression that "the one object in life is the development of the mind, and the first condition for the
development of the mind is that it should have liberty," he gives hints of the progressive development
of his own religious opinions, as he passed from one
place of study to another in his youth. His teachers
are placed before you as they were intellectually and
religiously, and his own struggles and doubts as they
arose and conquered him, until, in the honesty of
his being, he broke the promise of early intent and
gave up the life of the priesthood, for which he had
made all the primary preparation. As he writes of
his youth, the conclusions of his maturity often
come uppermost, and interpolate themselves between
the stages of his earlier development, and at intervals we meet his best conclusions concerning the
truths of religion, philosophy, and life. Whether
Renan agrees with the reader a little or differs from
him a great deal, one must reflect that he is reading
the work of one who is most deeply learned in all
the beginning and maturity of Christian learning.
If he cannot solve the reason of the differences between himselfand the author, the author, at any rate,
does not come within the range of his pity or his
criticism, by reason of lack of learning upon this subject, to which he has given most of the thinking of
his life. He is one of the most elegant writers
of his time, and in this work the grace and simplicity of his style will allure many readers who
might be repelled from another who reached conclusions so wide apart from most modern religious
thought. His morality is on a plane above our criticism. His conclusions may be a bewilderment to
the church in which he was fostered, but the immaculateness of his life and the purity of his purposes are evidenced throughout this last work of his
and in every expression of his pen. He is grateful
to the priests who taught him for the rigid morality
of his life, but he does not concede to every one the
right to doubt what have been accepted as great religious truths. "There are, in reality," he writes,
"but few people who have a right not to believe in
Christianity. If the great mass of people only knew
332
[Sept.