"The final Vale!" He spoke, and lay silent. The dim figures in the crowded room seemed to slip away from him, his mind ceased to grasp at earthly realities, a thick darkness enveloping it and them; but the frail, wasted body still clung insatiably to life, and answered the phrases of the litany with long quavering sobs. At last it, too, resigned its hold on life. He seemed to see again, for one brief moment, the kneeling cardinals; and then to join some great current of being which swept him away beyond the consciousness of time and space. Gradually another consciousness dawned on him. Upon the golden brown clouds, which seemed to limit his vision, there was projected suddenly a huge grotesque figure; the shadow of a being more or less similar to man.
242"Is it a devil come to torment me?" he wondered incredulously.
As the shadow advanced it became smaller; he noticed that it seemed to have talons.
"It is a devil."
But even as he spoke the shadow melted about him, and out of the golden mist came a strange-looking man, with a large, ungainly head, gray hair in rather long straight wisps, and lively intelligent eyes of a clear blue. The figure was absurd, gnome-like, with a pear-shaped stomach. The finger-nails were very long. The stranger bowed, smiling, as he approached, and spoke in a pleasant voice.
"Monsieur, je suis charmé de vous voir. Etes-vous, par hazard, de notre petite planète terre?"
"I am Gioacchino Pecci," he answered.
A livelier interest was apparent on the other's face; the smile became ironical.
"It is curious," he said after a pause. "It is curious that we should have reached the same paradise. On earth, Your Holiness, I was Ernest Renan."
"But is this paradise?" said Leo uneasily. "Je n'ai jamais cru----"
"It is the paradise of the incredulous," answered Renan. "There are many paradises: 243that state of being which on earth was called hell is the paradise of those given over to animal passions. The paradise of the ascetics is an eternal Shrove Tuesday, with the eternal prospect of an eternal Ash Wednesday; the case of Tantalus reversed and made pleasurable. All good Buddhists have attained Nirvana. The righteous Mahometan is distracted by the charms of innumerable houris. We Epicureans enjoy that moment which is eternity; and every man is justified in his own eyes."
"It is charming," said Leo.
"It is more," said Renan; "it is rational. How puerile is the mortal conception of paradise! Man has imagined a place where virtue is rewarded and vice punished. He believes in it with a passionate conviction, because he is not quite sure. He forgets that virtue must be disinterested, or it ceases to be virtue. If man is capable of a free and unhampered choice between vice and virtue, if the distinction between them be clear and precise, and the reward or punishment entailed by the choice definite and finally revealed, mankind, then, is obviously divided into two parts: the astute and the infatuate. One feels immediately that both the reward and 244the punishment are excessive; or else that vice and virtue have ceased to exist. However, in mortal things there is always an element of doubt, and perhaps the chief glory of man is born from it. Our choice is not entirely free, the distinction is not absolutely clear, the reward is purely hypothetical."
"Ah, M. Renan," said Leo, "why are you here? You were always a believer at heart; one might almost say a scholastic. You invented a system of doubt, as others might a system of faith; even your doubts were affirmations. Science with you was only a synonym for God, and round it you constructed an hierarchy of saints and martyrs, a church suffering, militant, triumphant. Lucian----"
"He is here," said Renan.
"Lucian," continued Leo, "imagined the soul of Plato inhabiting a paradise constructed after the model of his own Republic. I imagine you projected into that strange future which you announced in your Dialogues Philosophiques."
"Doubt must be systematic," answered Renan; "but there is no need for system in religion. The essence of a creed is in its assertions, not in its arguments. Its arguments 245are nearly always a series of after-thoughts, of apologies; its reason is always à priori; the very fact that an argument should be considered necessary is blasphemous and heretical. You exaggerate my scholasticism; but there was always in me the nature of a priest, and I could not put away from me my education, as I could put off my ecclesiastical dress. I imported the unction of a priest into the region of philosophic doubt, and by that means invented a substitute for faith. Science, in limiting the field of its researches, has increased the mystery which lies beyond. I became, as it were, the priest of an unknown God; and the first article of my creed was, that perhaps he did not exist at all. 'Sois béni pour ton mystère,' I cried in my Magnificat; 'béni pour t'être caché, béni pour avoir reservé la pleine liberté de nos c?urs.' The Dialogues Philosophiques were written at a time when the whole thought of France was depressed and reactionary. They were a play of intelligence upon contemporary ideas. Progress does not tend to establish a scientific aristocracy at the head of its affairs; science is progressive because it has saturated the commercial classes with its ideals; it has increased production, and 246economised in by-products. This alliance between democracy and the scientific spirit is the unique characteristic of our age. I think, myself, that society is tending to adopt the Chinese model. Kingship, the State, the present conventions of society, may continue to exist in atrophied and rudimentary forms; but I imagine the whole earth in a few thousand years regulated by examinations and trade-unions, with an effete mandarinate surviving amid the débris of the ancient order, like the solitary column of Phocas in the Roman Forum, or the teeth in an embryonic whale."
"In this paradise," said Leo with an elusive smile, "you have, doubtless, infinite leisure for the discussion of these academic questions."
"Naturally," answered Renan; "and we have a little Academy modelled on the Académie Fran?aise. I hope, Monsieur, to have the honour of welcoming you among us, and of replying to your discours de réception; it is an amiable duty which my colleagues have delegated to me. Sometimes; it is what remains of my mortal vanity, Monsieur; I imagine that I have some talent in these things."
Leo had intended to be ironical; but his 247own vanity was now flattered. One ambition is always left to those who occupy a throne; it is to be considered equal with the great.
"Your response, Monsieur, will be my apotheosis," he replied. "But, tell me, are you become a socialist? Your prophecy of the reformation of the earth on the Chinese model seems to point that way."
Renan smiled.
"No," he said; "the Chinese are not a socialistic nation. They have not the notion of the State which is peculiar to socialism. But they are a nation governed by trades-unions and examining boards; and through the same institutions we may arrive at the same stagnation. Our progress at present seems to follow that direction, because the aim of our materialistic civilisation is to make everything cheap, food, education, state-offices; and its final effect will be to make men cheap, then we shall have large, flat, arid masses of humanity, to whom few luxuries will be possible, and the forms of our civilisation will become stereotyped. As it was with Babylon, Assyria, and Egypt, as it is with China, so it will be with us. Evolution is the progress from homogeneity to heterogeneity; but the process is not indefinite.
248"After a race or a nation has produced a great number of diverse personalities, it becomes decadent and tends to produce a single type: the process of evolution is arrested, and the race may either lie dormant for centuries if like the Chinese it has been prolific and exists in sufficient numbers; or, if sparse and scattered like the Ph?nicians, they may be completely annihilated by their more vigorous neighbours. Socialism is neither a remedy nor a disease, but it may be a symptom. No society has been free from socialistic groups. Jerusalem had its ebionim; there was the eclectic philosophy of Rome under Nero, the Flavians, and the Antonines; primitive Christianity was communistic, and Neo-Christianity under Joachim of Flora and St Francis was an imitation of it. The Jacobins had communistic notions. The poor, the humble, the oppressed have always been liable to the dreams of millenarism; and the difference between the Maccabean aspiration, which was, according to Daniel, to establish the kingdom of God upon earth, and the aspiration of Robespierre, who wished 'to found upon earth the empire of wisdom, of justice, and of virtue,' is merely the difference of time and place. A beautiful, but intangible 249vision; a divine inspiration! Like all divine inspirations, alas! it is by its nature impracticable. Imagine a sudden uprising of the proletariate, a vast social movement, an European revolution. Slowly, after its momentary chaos, a new cohesion would take effect. The abstract virtues, from which the movement had had its derivation, would become personified in our most popular legislators; the new constitution would include, beside the disadvantages of an untried mechanism, many errors latent in the old patterns which it would necessarily follow; and we should discover, after a series of futile and extravagant adventures, that the laws which govern society are essentially natural laws, the slow growth of tacit acceptance, and not merely the dusty records of a popular legislating assembly. Mankind does not learn the lesson easily. One revolution engenders another, and eventually the habit becomes ingrained. The history of mine own country, from 1789 through the nineteenth century, a history of revolution, of the conflict between ideals and realities, is a signal and a reminder to the nations."
"You treat Christianity and Jacobinism as cognate ideas," said Leo, after a pause. "There is surely this distinction between 250them, that one was almost entirely religious, and the other almost entirely political."
"Ah," said Renan, with a deprecating smile, "all religions are political, just as all politics are religious. Christianity with its notion of mankind as a brotherhood, and the Papacy with its notions of a spiritual empire, a suzerainty, over all peoples, have destroyed the ancient conception of the unity of Church and State. The religion of the Greeks was embodied in their laws; and the politics of the Jews, in their religion. The ideal conception of religion as something quite distinct from the State has proved unworkable, if not disastrous. All the churches have had to smite their mystics with the thunders of excommunication, to extinguish the inward light, to restrain the free play of thought. Even the most primitive form of Christianity, the Messianic notion, was purely political. If we are to talk on social questions we cannot separate religion from politics. The distinction between them is artificial; they are merely the opposite poles of a single idea."
"Ah, well!" said Leo, shrugging his shoulders; "the progress of humanity is a chim?ra if it ends merely in stagnation. 251These bleak, arid masses of mankind living without pleasures in their Chinese frugality, what future have they before them?"
"An awakening," said Renan prophetically; "the Kings of Uruk reigning over a decadent civilisation, Sardanapalus foreseeing the stagnation of his people did not dream of a future which they had helped to create. The process of evolution acts in tides; there is a continuous ebb and flow; the seed lies hidden in the ground until the wizardry of Spring calls it forth, and rain and sunlight nourishing it into new life, it ripens for the harvest. Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen. In the ruined palaces of Nineveh the beasts of the desert bring forth their young, and the green lizards creep out from the crevices to sun themselves upon a fragment of some boastful inscription; but the music which echoed in its painted halls, the dancing and the choirs, the great processions of its Kings, its wisdom and folly, its vain desires and failures, its tears and laughter, these have their being still, they move mysteriously in us, a breath would quicken them into life again, we can rebuild them in moments that seem to have all the profundity of time."
"Poet!" said Leo, with a smile creasing 252about his lean jaws. "The world does not become socialist, it becomes Chinese; our civilisation tends to a variety of forms, becomes uniform, and then again becomes diverse in endless recurrence. Continue, Monsieur, but let us keep within the bounds of our own age. Socialism is a definite political force; and even if it do not triumph completely it must create certain new conditions. I, myself, have condemned socialism in one of my encyclicals. I have denied the sacred right of insurrection. Human institutions, which we may think have survived their usefulness, are in reality only waiting for their transformation, their character is moulded from outside. We may sometimes fail to understand their mission, or to grasp the reasons which impel them to follow certain paths, because these reasons are pale reflections of some unappreciated causes. The world seems to progress, within the limits of natural laws, by a series of unforeseen developments. The future is latent in us; but the force which impels it is hidden."
"Yes," answered Renan; "some internal conscience directs all progress, and is the force which impels humanity on its way. This conscience has a secret action long before it finds a voice. Its influence at first is something 253subterranean and obscure; its bias is necessarily against the official creeds, but it moves against them slowly, informing them with the new spirit. I like to find this conscience acting through the poorer and humbler classes of the people, the folk who are of the soil, whose faith is something native and spontaneous, whose life and happiness depends upon the sun and rain. It is significant that all the gods were originally agricultural gods, that the history of every nation begins in Eden. To the artisan, the dweller in towns, whose whole life consists in turning out from a machine certain articles of a stereotyped pattern, the universe is simply a piece of mechanism; he is himself merely a machine, or part of a machine, performing a certain number of invariable motions to produce a definite and invariable result. He lacks inspiration, he has no vivid knowledge of the great element of chance which moves, like one of those primitive elemental gods, behind all human affairs, at times compassionate and friendly to man, at times bursting out into a sudden fury of wanton destruction. He demands a fixed wage, fixed hours of work, fixed prices for the commodities which he consumes, the certainty of a pension in his old 254age. In a world of fluctuations and vicissitudes he demands absolute security. He is confident that he is going to do great things, that he has already worked wonders. With the aid of science and art, which he starves, he is going to make the earth pleasant and beautiful. He is quite confident that in a few generations he will be born in an incubator, and die, without pain, of sheer satiety. For him a fantastic assembly of politicians, removable at his own will, represents Providence and the divine wisdom. Is he less absurd than the savages who employ rain-makers and witch doctors? I do not think so. Clearly he is not a person from whom we can expect any but the most crude and mechanical readings of life; his vague, restless, childish discontent, that hunger for barren and tawdry pleasures which is characteristic of half-educated minds, that lack of intercourse with the great elemental forces of Nature, can issue in nothing but his own mental, moral, and physical damnation.
"For any new readings of life, for any renaissance of art and religion, we must look to the simple folk, who are still close to the breasts of Earth: the folk who of old imagined Apollo as a herd in the service of Admetus; 255who found Demeter sitting by the well, and comforted her; who, after the vintage had been gathered in, took down the grotesque masks, which they had hung upon the vines to scare the birds and foxes from the grapes, and acted in them, singing the hymns of Dionysos to the music of pipes and flutes. Poetry, religion, love, the three things which quicken life to new effort, are never far from the soil. The great conventional middle-classes, even those heretics from Philistia, the followers of Comte and Marx, the mediocre intelligences whose political principles are communist, and whose religious principles are positivist, these have little influence on the future. Socialism differs from all previous Utopian dreams simply because it lacks their vital energy; it is material and mechanical where the older ideas were spiritual and natural; it is lacking in a sense of morality, in a sense of beauty, in a sense of truth. You will not find the conscience of humanity in any of these creeds."
"It seems," said Leo, "that we do not know where we are going."
"You have said that human institutions are only waiting for their transformation," Renan replied. "An institution represents a need. It has been formed by the spontaneous action of the community; but the moment it 256has been thus constituted it becomes fixed, and ceases to represent the living, developing forces which deposited it. Christianity at first was perfectly fluid; the teaching of Paul was unsystematic, local, momentary; but Christianity became a religion, not of inspiration but of authority, it crystallised into an hierarchy and perished. In the same way the idyll of St Francis and his companions crystallised into an order, and perished. They exist among us as monuments, these institutions; but the same forces which crystallised them are now dissolving them; the moment they cut themselves off from the stream of life they perished. I do not think that the future will differ essentially from the past. Socialism is simply the cry of the poor against the rich. Dives is well-clad and fares sumptuously every day; no other crime is alleged against him, but these are sufficient to ensure his damnation. Perhaps the maker of the parable saw some peculiar virtue in poverty and suffering, which filled the heart with a spiritual grace, and uplifted it with moral fortitude. Perhaps he saw the wealth of Dives as poverty, as a lack of spiritual experience.
"Socialism, however, does not share this 257view; on the contrary, it asserts that wealth is the sole condition of spiritual grace and moral fortitude, and it is therefore bent on sharing with Dives the good things of this world. Consequently socialism has against it the two most deeply-rooted of human instincts, the instinct of acquisition and the family instinct; because it denies the right of possession and the right of bequest. How deeply-rooted the notion of property is we can see exemplified in France, where the abolition of the right of primogeniture has not had the effect which was expected of it, even the peasants in certain departments having held out against it. But if the power of bequest were entirely abolished, would people marry? The object for a legalised relation is gone, and the production of our kind becomes subject to the hazard of personal choice. It is possible that the State would have to intervene and make maternity an honourable profession under its own control, and that Plato's ideal of the State as a foster-mother would be realised. This notion has, I confess, a singular attraction for me. The substitution of a stock derived from careful selection of parents for our present inferior stock; the careful breeding of an aristocratic 258caste, appeals to the imagination, as it shows the State actually realising what has always been its ideal.
"I could wish, Monsieur, that the socialists would form themselves into monastic communities, practising the virtues of obedience and, if not poverty, the community of goods. Yes; they should found a little Abbey of Theleme, and take their whole rule from Rabelais. They would not practise celibacy, but eugenics; and the education of their children would be the same as that devised for Gargantua by Ponocrates. So they would increase and multiply, and the whole earth would be filled with the glory of their names. I fear that, unfortunately, the first verse of what was written above the gate of Theleme would debar many from entering. But grant that this Utopia is possible; it is surely no less possible than the monastic ideal! And granted that a great aristocratic caste would arise, a dedicated folk, surrounded by the decadent populations of helots and hetairai, and that they would be able to gather into their own hands the supreme control of things? what would be the result? They would crystallise into an hierarchy, and perish. They would rule as 259the priests ruled Egypt, and as the priests ruled medi?val Europe. They would resuscitate the double tyranny of the Church and State in one body. The whole progress of the last four hundred years has been toward individual liberty in thought and word. That ideal would be lost."
"I do not see the necessity of such ideals," said Leo. "I object to socialism because it would mean the absolute tyranny of the State, the despotism of a narrow and intolerant bureaucracy, tempered, as at present in Russia, by a more or less indiscriminate system of assassination. I have not the same objection to the tyranny of one man. A philosopher on the throne, Monsieur, your charming Marcus Aurelius for instance, may rule with wisdom and moderation; but an oligarchy of philosophers, like the Thirty at Athens: hell is naked before them and destruction hath no covering! Such experiments, as you say, infect the people with a lust for revolution. History, the only guide for political prophets, shows us that sudden disturbance of the social order breeds a whole series, whether such a disturbance occur among the ancient Greeks, or the Romans, or the French. The diverse natures of the peoples, the different 260conditions of the age in which they lived, and of their political methods do not alter the central fact. Humanity in the lump is a beast more terrible than any in Revelations."
"Ah, no!" cried Renan, with a sudden vivacity. "There is the chief glory of the human race. They will sacrifice themselves for an impossible ideal. None of us can contemplate that great tragedy of the French Revolution without feeling cleansed by it. The enthusiasm of the people has a kind of terrible grandeur. In such moments of divine delirium all men assume heroic proportions. We may pity it for its fanaticism; we may pity it for being so easily duped; but it is impossible to deny its magnificent devotion to an ideal."
Leo was unmoved.
"You consider it a great moral movement, Monsieur?"
"Moral because all petty egoisms were obliterated," answered Renan. "Men seemed for a moment to become the incarnations of ideas. Oh, on both sides. Charlotte Corday, Danton, Madame Roland, Robespierre, Desmoulins, Larochejacquelin; each individuality seems to have had its definite mission, each 261seems to have been equally necessary, equally an instrument of justice."
"You have said, Monsieur," continued Leo, after a pause, "that the socialists would revive in one form the twin tyrannies of Church and State, and destroy the ideal of individual liberty. You have also said that the ancient conception of Church and State was a unity. Would the kind of socialism which you sketch resemble the Greek State?"
"No ancient State, not even Athens, extended to its citizens the liberty which we enjoy," answered Renan. "The State intervened in the private affairs of the citizens; and Athens is notorious for having pursued the philosophers with accusations of impiety. The noble conservative families and the priesthood combined to stifle the new liberal thought. The State, however, was democratic; the people ruled, decided by their votes the policy of the State, and served on juries, or as judges. Socialism condemns democracy: it aspires to govern not by the will of the people, but according to its own interpretation of what it calls scientific principles; and it seems that in its application of these principles, it would be more bigoted and intolerant than the democratic State in Greece ever was."
262"Nothing then is permanent, which crystallises into an hierarchy, or is limited by an institution," said Leo. "It seems to me that your gospel is purel............