Who reads Renan

Novel history

This concerns a novel as a form of history writing and a novelist, Virginia Woolf, as a historian. It explores Woolf's writerly and historical relationship to the 19th-century religious and cultural historian Ernest Renan (1823–92) and the means by which, in a fleeting moment in The Years (1937), the novelist employed Renan – his reputation rather than his work – to advance her own writing. Or, you may read it as a historicist – or at least a historian's – exhaustion of a fragment of Woolf's text, in order to determine some of the meanings attached to Renan and to religious criticism in general, in early 20th-century British culture. This ‘exhaustion’ of a passage in a novel is not much like Georges Perec's 1974 listing of every single thing and person that passes in one street in Paris, over three days (Perec, 2010[1975]). The pursuit here, of a little shard of writing, is more like what Jacques Derrida disapproved of in historians: what he suggested was their (our) dogged, exhaustive, and exhausting pursuit of something – an idea, a fragment of speech caught in a court transcript held in an archive – to its origin; he attributed to historians the belief that there was an origin in the first place and argued that the search for it constituted a kind of sickness, or fever (Derrida, 1996[1995]). But – contra Derrida – the historian's ‘origin’ is a made, not a found, thing – a thing made in writing about it, and sometimes called ‘context’ (Steedman, 2001: 1–37). The choices of ‘context’ to explain the event, person, or thing being accounted for are multiple, and while they are not arbitrary, there is always something else that could have been adduced by way of explanation. A road not taken here is the uses of Renan (the use of religious criticism in general) by modernist writers who, from the late 19th century onwards, came to read the New Testament as a kind of novel. The Years was written before James Joyce published Finnegan's Wake (1939), in which Renan and his religious history appears; Woolf may have noticed – though did not note – Joyce's use of Renan in Ulysses (1922; see Benjamin, 2011; Kershner, 1998; Wood, 2008[1999]; also John, 1988). Woolf's fiction – her ‘history’ – was created out of many other accounts of the period 1860–1940 in Britain. I have behaved as Renan said a historian should, and ‘proceed[ed] by induction’ (see below), working outwards from a tiny fragment of the novel to find something of what went into the making of one of its characters. The pursuit involves a resigned envy: being of the fictional variety, Woolf's history has not been undone by other historians, as Renan said all ‘little conjectural’ accounts would be undone, including this one. After 80-odd years, Woolf's history still happens in the way she wrote it, every time someone opens a copy of The Years.

Someone reads Renan

Stefan Collini has said that ‘even now [2019], it is difficult to move around in nineteenth-century intellectual history without bumping into Ernest Renan’ (Collini, 2019: 11–12). I was reading The Years when I bumped into him, just lately in 2023, and Collini's observation made me wonder why it hadn’t happened before, what with two degrees in history and 40 years’ worth of teaching 18th- and 19th-century ‘thought’, off and on. All that discourse on ‘historiography’ and ‘history and theory’, all those accounts delivered to generations of students, of eschatological Christianity shaping the development of historical thinking in the West, hadn’t, it seemed, brought me face to face with the one of the most notable 19th-century religious historians. But I was wrong; even though I couldn’t remember the occasion, I must have been at the same 1980s ‘Theory Party’ as Renan, probably introduced by Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), which carried much of the freight of ‘Theory’ to 1980s and 1990s history students and those who taught them. The ‘Theory Party’ was an ’80s equivalent of what I’ll call the ‘Poets’ Party’, which W. H. Auden invented in 1937 to explain developments in 20th-century literary culture to the long-dead Lord Byron (Auden, 1991[1937]; Said, 1995[1978]; Steedman, 2018: 234–5). ¹ ‘Poets’ Party’, ‘Theory Party’ … they were all awkward affairs, at which a historian might feel uncomfortable: you didn’t know anybody; you were dowdily dressed in the doughty empiricism attributed to you; there were distressing quarrels between little knots of historians and postmodernists erupting all over the room (Ankersmit, 1998; Evans, 1997; Himmelfarb, 1987; Jenkins, 1991). What do I know about Theory? you thought, as you pressed yourself up against the wall (though you had read Edward Said).

In Orientalism, Said designated Ernest Renan a significant player in the Great Game of Western language study and history writing, which during the long 19th century ‘fashioned … a body of texts and a philologically rooted process by which the Orient took on a discursive identity that made it unequal with the West’ (Said, 1995[1978]: 156). A recent assessment of Renan by Robert Priest shows Said highlighting the role of the academic disciplines in Europe's history of domination, racism, and anti-Semitism:

Ranging across Renan's scholarly output, Said positioned Renan as a key personality who, through the authority of philology, helped translate the new forms of Orientalism into European educated culture. Renan exemplified the European scholar who used knowledge about the Oriental other as a form of domination. (Priest, 2015a: 319)

Orientalism makes much of Renan's Semitic studies and publications: ‘Semitic was the scientific study to which Renan turned right after the loss of his Christian faith.’ Said argued that his historical study of Semitic languages and cultures enabled Renan's critical relationship with Christianity and that his first ‘study of Semitic (finished in 1847, published first in 1855) … [was also] his first full-length Orientalist and scientific study’. This early linguistic and cultural history underpinned his ‘late major works on the origins of Christianity and the history of the Jews’ (Said, 1995[1978]: 140–1). ²

I had – still have – no memory at all of this extensive introduction to Ernest Renan, provided by Orientalism. When, just lately, I did consciously encounter Renan, I reread Said's book, taking particular note of his unkind observation that ‘few of the standard or contemporary works in either linguistic history or the history of Orientalism cite Renan with anything more than cursory attention. His Semitic opus was proposed as a philological breakthrough, from which in later years he was always to draw retrospective authority for his positions (almost always bad ones) on religion, race, and nationalism’ (Said, 1995[1978]: 141). These ‘bad positions’ included Renan's anti-Semitism and the racial determinism he espoused, which encompassed both Judaism and Islam (Pasto, 1998; Priest, 2015a: 309–30; Said, 1995[1978]: 27). But how sarky of Said! How dismissive! thought I, to admonish Renan like a small child for being ‘bad’. This was not a historically considered response, but a reaction to Said's use of language. The self-gratifying and post-romantic notion of one's own fabulous responsiveness to text is no excuse. I do know that. ³

By then – the rereading of Said – I had read (some) Renan and some commentary on his work, and knew that his contemporary reputation as scholar and public intellectual was more connected to the seven volumes of L’histoire des origines du christianisme (1863–81) than to his linguistic work, and that his late-career pronouncements on nationalism and the making of national identity continued to have cultural and intellectual resonance well into the 20th century (Anderson, 1991[1983]: 199–203). ⁴ I had learned also that among all the other things it did, Renan's late autobiographical Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse (1883) inscribed a romantic reverie of childhood that afforded him very high cultural status in France and beyond. So in 2022, I had a place to put Renan in my historical imagination: I read his Vie de Jésus (1863, the first volume of L’histoire des origines) knowing something of his intellectual biography.

In 2023, the encounter with the Vie was not of the kind I might have had 10 years before, in the byways of critical commentary on Colm Tóibín's The Testament of Mary (2012). Tóibín's is a modern ‘Jesus-novel’, that is, ‘a prose-narrative constructing a portrait of the person of Jesus, set in a distinct historical context; the story of Christ written as a human life’ (Holderness, 2015: 3–7). Contemporary critics frequently dismissed Renan's Vie de Jésus as ‘a novel’, which was a way of discounting the popularity of ‘Lives of Jesus’ narratives. These were semi-fictional biographies of Jesus: ‘From the late 1830s to the end of the nineteenth century, scholarly preoccupation with the historicity of the Gospels generated a form of biblical literature generically classified as “Lives of Jesus”’ (Priest, 2015b: 111–17, 123–4, 151–3, 192–5; Stevens, 2010: 24–83). In 2014, Emmanuel Carrère's The Kingdom took the Jesus novel into the realms of autobiography and auto-fiction. But neither the Jesus novel nor the ‘Lives of Jesus’ narrative was the pathway for me as a reader; I met Renan as if for the first time, in a novel published in 1937.

Bumping into Renan

In Virginia Woolf's The Years, in the ‘1908’ section of her ‘historical novel’, Eleanor Pargiter is visited at the family home by her brother Martin, back from his travels – vaguely related to a military career – in India and Africa. On a blustery March day, Martin is let into the house by a servant, goes to look for his sister in the drawing room, and finds it empty: ‘She was not there. But she had been there, for there was a book on the table … propped up against the teapot.’ He picks it up and looks: ‘“Renan”, he read. “Why Renan?” he asked himself, beginning to read as he waited’ (Woolf, 2016[1937]: 137). Eleanor is in the study, sorting through strips of newspaper cuttings, reading some aloud to their terminally ill father, Colonel Abel Pargiter. When she returns to the drawing room, Martin asks his sister his earlier question, ‘Why Renan?’, repeating it twice. She is embarrassed: ‘She flushed slightly. It made her shy, for some reason, that he had found the book there, open’ (ibid.: 138). Why Eleanor is embarrassed – Renan's dilettantish reputation? Being found reading a work of religious history in the first place? – will be considered at the end of this article.

The ‘1908’ chapter of The Years is much concerned with reading, and with the historical veracity of text. Martin glances at the newspaper cuttings that Eleanor has brought in from the study, obituaries of their uncle Digby, Colonel Pargiter's brother. Later, when Martin has gone to check on their father, Eleanor answers his question about Renan by reference to them:

She had always wanted to know about Christianity – how it began; what it meant, originally. God is love, The kingdom of Heaven is within us, sayings like that she thought, turning over the pages, what did they mean? The actual words were very beautiful. But who said them – when?… It was what a man said under a fig tree, on a hill, she thought. And then another man wrote it down. But suppose that what that man says is just as false as what this man – she touched the press cuttings with her spoon – says about [her deceased uncle] Digby? (Woolf, 2016[1937]: 141–2)

Eleanor has picked up Renan in order to learn something.

As a character, or indeed as a 40-odd-year-old ‘real person’ of 1908, Eleanor could have been reading (trying to read) any one of the 40 or so books Renan published in his lifetime, as well as the posthumous works published between 1892 and 1908. She – the fictional Eleanor – could have read about half of these works in English translation. Her creator, Virginia Woolf, could have read several more of Renan's publications, in French and in English, published between 1908 (the year she has Eleanor reading Renan) and 1935, when The Years took on its final form (Radin, 1977; Woolf, 1978). It is unclear whether Eleanor is reading Renan in French or in English. When Martin leaves the room, she returns to the book but is distracted by a door banging upstairs, the wind buffeting the windows: ‘It was difficult to fix her mind on Renan.… French she could read easily of course’, she muses, ‘and Italian; and a little German. But what vast gaps there were, what blank spaces, she thought leaning back in her chair, in her knowledge!’ (Woolf, 2016[1937]: 142). The textual evidence is that she's reading in English, because why contemplate yourself as a good reader of French unless having trouble fixing on the English from which your mind wanders, there and then? And then, because her very next thought is that despite everything distracting her, ‘she liked it’, my money is on Vie de Jésus as the book in her hand. It was first published in 1863; the first English translation was in 1864, with several late 19th-century impressions and reprints. Also in 1864, there was a popular edition prepared by Renan; shorn of footnotes and scholarly apparatus, it was ‘novel-ish’ in appearance, says Robert Priest. Boiled down to the central narrative, it was simply called Jésus, and sold very cheap. It is unlikely that Eleanor is reading the popular Jésus (Priest, 2015b: 4–5, 156–8). It appears not to have been translated into English.

Vie de Jésus is a highly likeable book – for the sweetness of disposition attributed to the historical Jesus by his author, for the aching sincerity of the good men and true who followed him as disciples, and for the engaged and engaging depiction of the society and terrain over which Renan's narrative ranged. ⁵ Renan had done this literally: ‘I have traversed, in all directions, the country of the Gospels’, he told his readers; ‘I have visited Jerusalem, Hebron, and Samaria; scarcely any important locality of the history of Jesus has escaped me. All this history, which at a distance seems to float in the clouds of an unreal world, thus took a form, a solidity which astonished me’ (Priest, 2015b: 68–108; Renan, 1864[1863]: 31). And the Vie would have answered some of Eleanor's questions about Christianity (‘how it began; what it meant’), though there are more answers about origins, delivered in historical and anthropological terms, than there are answers about Christianity's meaning. (As will be discussed, such answers might suit the socially engaged Eleanor as depicted by Woolf.) The phrase ‘The Kingdom of God’, which Eleanor thinks about as she looks up from the page, is explained by Renan at several points throughout the book (though there's no man on a hill under a fig tree in the Vie). Moreover, for a novelist (Woolf) who believed The Years to be a form of history writing, Renan provided an interesting commentary on the writer-as-historian working with literary text, throughout Vie de Jésus. He writes candidly, as a historian, making sure that his reader is with him, in his turns of thought: ‘It will now be seen, I think, what kind of historical value I attribute to the Gospels’, he writes early on; ‘They are neither biographies … nor fictitious legends … they are legendary biographies’ (Renan, 1864[1863]: 25). On the contradictions between the Gospels, he proposes ‘to those who believe … that history should consist of a simple reproduction of the documents which have come down to us … [that] such a course is not allowable. The four principal documents [the Gospels] are in flagrant contradiction one with another.’ But historians must not conclude that a fact is false because there are several versions of it, ‘or because credulity has mixed with them much that is fabulous’. What historians must do is ‘be very cautious … examine the texts, and … proceed carefully by induction’ (ibid.: 29).

Renan knows that may readers will dislike the biographical form of his work. When he first thought of a history of early Christianity, he wanted to write a history of doctrines ‘in which men and their actions would have hardly had a place. Jesus would scarcely have been named’. In the book he didn’t write, he would have ‘endeavoured to show how the ideas which have grown under his name took root and covered the world. But I have learned since that history is not a simple game of abstractions; that men are more than doctrines’ (Renan, 1864[1863]: 31). Renan is a writer who takes the reader into his confidence. He regrets the formality and paucity of his sources: he would get closer to ‘the character of the hero, the impression which he made around him’, if he had some kind of oral history testimony, some ‘popular narratives’, which are worth so much more than ‘formal and official history’ (ibid.: 26). He offers assurances to the reader that he is the right historian for the job, for he is one who has lost his faith:

To write the history of a religion, it is necessary, firstly, to have believed it (otherwise we should not be able to understand how it has charmed and satisfied the human conscience); in the second place, to believe it no longer in an absolute manner, for absolute faith is incompatible with sincere history. But love is possible without faith. To abstain from attaching one's self to any of the forms which captivate the adoration of men, is not to deprive ourselves of the enjoyment of that which is good and beautiful in them. (ibid.: 34)

A modest and pleasing style, a seeming sincerity of self-presentation, may have captivated the fictional Eleanor even though she cannot keep her mind on the book; but then, Life of Jesus is a text that provokes reverie, a constant looking away from the page to contemplate some gentle proposition of the author. Renan emphasises the asexual and androgynous features of Jesus's personality; his text is douce, as is its hero (Priest, 2015b: 97–100). ⁶ This proposition will later be explored in relation to Renan's own reveries of childhood and intellectual development. And we should keep the feminine douce (gentle, amiable, agreeable) rather than use the masculine doux, for all its connections with the Jesus of the Vie.

Reading Renan

Her creator's reading experience has to be a factor in the fictional Eleanor's reading (or not actually reading) Renan. Woolf may have read Renan – she certainly obtained several of his books – when she was in the process of turning the family saga The Pargiters into The Years. The Pargiters, she said, gave a true, faithful, and detailed account of a fictional family, yet there was ‘not a statement in it that cannot be verified’. It was fiction and fact, both at the same time (Sandberg, 2015: 86–7). The Pargiters was – is – structured as a series of historical essays that analyse the fictional circumstances of Woolf's characters by discussion of the social and political history of 19th-century Britain. ‘For Woolf’, says Eric Sandberg, ‘character is historically located, a question of the interaction between fiction and reality’ (ibid.: 259–60).

The passage in which Eleanor is characterised by looking into Renan was almost certainly written in 1935 (Radin, 1977: 129). ‘I must buy the Old Testament’, Woolf recorded in her writing diary in January. ‘I am reading the Acts of the Apostles. At last I am illuminating the dark spots in my reading. What happened in Rome. And there are seven volumes of Renan’ (Woolf, 1982[1953]: 228). A week later, she wrote to a friend that they’d had a children's fancy dress party at Rodmell (the Sussex village where the Woolfs had a house): ‘I judged the clothes. All the mothers gazed, and I felt like – who's the man in the bible –Which by the way, I have bought and am reading. And Renan. And the New Testament; so dont [sic] call me heathen in future’ (Woolf, 1975b: 362). ⁷ But there is no record of her actually reading any of Renan's seven volumes of the History of Christianity in 1935; maybe she had done so by 1939 (long after The Years had been published), when, on a trip to Brittany (Renan's birthplace), she was planning a story based on elements taken from ‘[Pierre] Loti, Renan, Chateaubriand’ – all of whom wrote reveries of childhood and youth focused on the département, Renan and Chateaubriand having been born there, Loti writing about it (Coe, 1984; Lloyd, 1992; Woolf, 1975c: 33).

Renan appears to elude both the writer, Virginia Woolf, and Eleanor, the character she has reading him (Paulsell, 2021: 104). But the fictional Eleanor of ‘1908’ is probably enough evidence that Woolf did look into Vie de Jésus in 1935. The proposed story of 1939 also suggests the Vie rather than the second or third volumes of the series (Les Apôtres, 1866; St Paul, 1869). Woolf had bought the New Testament Acts of the Apostles, not Renan's account of St Paul – of his driven nature – of the ‘ever increasing personality of Paul [which] became insupportable to those who saw it every day growing more usurping and arrogant’ (Renan, 1869[1868]: 51). The riveting historical and sociological accounts of travelling Jewish artisans and disciples in the third book of the series, and the psychology of embracing Christianity outlined by Renan, makes St Paul a book that provokes not reverie, but alert historical attention. Renan made it very clear how St Paul was different from the Vie: ‘How far removed are we from thee, dear Master!’ he writes of the early disciples described in St Paul. ‘Where is thy mildness, thy poetry? Thou, to whom a flower did bring pleasure and ecstasy, dost thou recognize as thy disciples these wranglers, these men, furious over their prerogatives, and desiring that everything should be held of them?’ (ibid.: 206). Woolf's reading St Paul around 1935 is even less certain than her reading Vie de Jésus.

‘Why Virginia Woolf needed to buy any biblical text [in the 1930s] is puzzling’, remarks Diane Gillespie. ‘Among the Woolfs’ books are an old, authorised version of the Old and New Testaments signed “Virginia Stephen” [her maiden name] in 1901; a Bible given her … in 1907; and another inscribed “to my dear wife Virginia Woolf.”’ She had inherited her father's copy of L’Antechrist (1873, fourth volume of the History of Christianity series) and a Vie de Jésus from 1867. The Woolfs also had in their library a Life of Jesus dated 1927 and a Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse dated 1930 (Gillespie, 2012). While composing The Years, Woolf wrote of Renan as a writer she was about to read, whom she intended to read, the ownership of whose books she had forgotten; perhaps, like Eleanor, she was distracted from actually reading Renan, even though she liked it.

But Woolf knew enough of Renan's Vie de Jésus to have a character – Eleanor – like it. Hovering above the approbation and enjoyment of Renan's Vie by many 19th-century readers is his counterpoint, David Strauss (1808–74), author of The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1835; see Linstrum, 2010). The fourth edition of Strauss's Life was translated into English by George Eliot (Marian Evans as was), and, after two years of his translator's depressing labour, was published in 1846 (Haight, 1968; Quails, 2019; Strauss, 1846[1835]). Woolf knew well the story of Eliot's encounter with Strauss and the dismal and ‘soul-stupefying’ work of translation. In an essay for the Times Literary Supplement, she quoted one of Eliot's friends who saw her toiling through Strauss with a statue of the risen Christ in front of her: ‘“Poor thing”, I do pity her sometimes, with her pale sickly face and dreadful headaches’ (Woolf, 1919). From the very early days of the Vie's publication in 1863, it was conventional among readers to make comparison between the experience of reading Renan and reading Strauss, who ground things very dry between natural, supernatural, mythic, legendry, and very occasionally poetical explanations for the events narrated in the Gospels. It was conventional also to prefer the ‘the sentimental effeminacy of Renan’ to ‘the icy criticism of Strauss’ (‘German Literature’, 1864). British readers appear to have felt at home with Renan's style of cultural history. ⁸

It is beautiful

There was one work of Renan we can be certain Virginia Woolf really did read, and that was his Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse (1863) – but not in 1935. She could have purchased a new translation made by J. Lewis May, published that year, but there is no evidence that she did. This was widely reviewed, including in the TLS, with which Woolf had much to do and whose reviewer noted ‘a translation of … the most clerical of agnostic laymen that ever lived. The Souvenirs … is … a classic of French prose, the rhythm and music of which set the translator a pretty problem’ (Falls, 1935; Renan, 1935[1863]). Lewis May had introduced, he said, ‘a piece of exquisite writing’. His task of translation had been difficult, for Souvenirs was literature that identified itself with music. Still, other translators had done worse than him: ‘In the only previous version of this book that I have seen (a version that has many virtues) not only does the translator fail to reproduce Renan's music … but he seems not to have realised that there was any music to reproduce. Yet this matter of rhythm, of cadence, of music, is all-important.’ May went on to mention the writers (Walter Pater, Cardinal John Newman, Jules Michelet, Walter Landor, Charles Lamb) whose musicality, cadence, and rhythm you might care to have in mind as you read Renan. He advised that you listen to the music as you read; then ‘you will doubt that … [Renan] ever left the religious life’ (Renan, 1935[1863]: ix–xiv). The TLS reviewer of May's translation concluded by remarking that whether Renan ‘would have liked it or not a priest's frock is still the garment in which his ghost haunts those who seem to see it in the dark and narrow streets of Treguier’, his Brittany birthplace (Falls, 1935).

In his own (newly translated in 1935) author's preface to Souvenirs, Renan claimed that ‘what we say of ourselves is always poetry. To imagine that the petty details of one's own life are in themselves worthy of being put on permanent records, would argue a very small minded vanity. We write about such things in order to make known to others the theory of the universe implicit in ourselves’ (iii). He believed that ‘the autobiographical reminiscence … [was] a convenient medium for conveying certain shades of thought which [his] other writings had imperfectly expressed’. Souvenirs is nothing like his historical writing: ‘What is accounted a virtue in history, would have been out of place in this form of composition. Everything in this little book is true, but its truth is not of the kind that would be appropriate to a Dictionary of Biography’ (xviii). But Vie de Jésus and the Souvenirs are stylistically similar, in their depiction of ‘the past’ as visualised in the romantic ‘Childhood’, in the very great tenderness of a writer for the just-out-of-reach vignettes of himself and others when young (Coe, 1984; Steedman, 2015).

Souvenirs gives an account of Renan's religious formation in the highly specific locale and culture of early 19th-century Brittany – its particular forms of Christianity, its religious folklore, the pattern of its social relations, its memories of the Revolution inscribed on minds and in monuments – and of the shaping force of his mother's intelligence on his historical sensibility and writing. ‘I was born a priest a priori, like the people who are born soldiers or born lawyers’, he says at one point; then, a page on, ‘That in truth is what I am; a priest that might have been’ (Renan, 1935[1863]: 101, 103). As a child he spent a lot of time in Brittany's many chapels and ossuaries and at its roadside shrines: ‘It was only in the company of the dead that I felt at home, there among the knights and noble dames, sleeping their dreamless sleep, their greyhounds at their feet, and in their hands a torch of stone’ (ibid.: 8, 48). ⁹ He tells the story of his journey from the religious schools and seminaries of rural Brittany to those of Paris as ‘passing from one religion to another – from the world of old Breton priests’ to a ‘religion of dimity and muslin’. This, the gravest spiritual crisis of his life, was exacerbated by ‘a complete change of food and mode of living’. In Paris, he beheld sights ‘as new and as strange as if I had suddenly been landed in France from Tahiti or Timbuctoo’ (ibid.: 115–23). He makes frequent comparison between the cultural and religious practices observed in his youth and the beliefs of people encountered in his historical, anthropological, and philological travels (that some of these people are Sami, then known as Lap-Fins, makes his observations no less orientalist). The languages spoken by these anthropological Others are a mark of their simplicity: Hebrew is characterised as ‘so simple, so artless, almost devoid of syntax, giving naked expression to the pure idea, as if it were a little child that was speaking’ (ibid.: 50, 92, 189).

During his several courses of study in Brittany and Paris, Renan regularly read Pascal, Malebranche, Leonhard Euler (philosopher of music and mathematics), Locke, Leibnitz, Descartes, and Dugald Stewart (philosopher and mathematician; Renan, 1935[1863]: 164). He professed profound admiration for several moral philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment besides Stewart. Could he have his time again, he would aspire to be Thomas Reid (1710–96), to whose work he had been introduced by one of his lecturers at the College de St Sulpice in Paris: ‘“The Scottish philosophy”, he used to say to me, “Brings us back our peace of mind and leads us on to Christ”’:

And he drew a picture of the good Thomas Reid, who was at once a philosopher and a zealous minister of the Gospel. So for a long time, Reid was my ideal. What I should have liked best would have been to live the quiet, uneventful life of a hard-working priest, scrupulously discharging the duties of the sanctuary, but dispensed from ordinary parochial work, so that he might pursue his researches undisturbed. (ibid.: 162–3)

Virginia Woolf had read some form of these words, round about the historical time she has Eleanor Pargiter reading (or failing to read) Renan (in ‘1908’). In a letter dated Christmas Day 1906, she described going on a very long walk with one of her brothers, getting lost, coming home at last, then both of them at the fireside, reading. Her book was ‘by Renan called his Memories of Childhood. O my word it is beautiful’, she wrote, ‘like the chime of silver bells; and when his old peasant mother writes it is the same thing, so that I think it a virtue in the French language that it submits to prose, whereas English curls and knots and breaks off in short spasms of rage’ (Woolf, 1975a: 271). She was evidently reading in French, so not confined to one of the English translations that Lewis May found wanting in 1935, the year in which Woolf writes Eleanor Pargiter not quite reading Renan (probably, fictionally, in English).

Reading history

Virginia Woolf's engagement with history (as an academic and intellectual endeavour) is well documented. Her father, a notable literary critic and historian, hoped that she would become ‘a historian’; ‘“History will be a good thing for her to take up as I can give her some hints”’, he said (Spiropoulou, 2010: 41). It has been said that the barriers to women's higher education, the fact that Woolf was unable to study for a history degree, provided the pathway to her subversion of ‘official’ history and the way in which she wrote against the grain of the positivism that accumulated ‘vast dust heaps’ of facts; wrote against ‘the enumeration of trifles and names’ in conventional history writing (Hotho-Jackson, 1991; Spiropoulou, 2010: 41–3). But when – if – Woolf read Renan's Vie de Jésus, she did not encounter positivism's vast dust heaps. If – when – she read it, it was a text much more in the vein of 18th-century, or indeed late 20th-century, cultural history, in its generous attention to literary text and to the contingency of things (Priest, 2015b: 21, 51–5, 69–70, 79–89). In histories such his Vie, wrote Renan,

the great test that we have got the truth is, to have succeeded in combining the texts in such a manner that they shall constitute a logical, probable narrative, harmonious throughout. The secret laws of life, of the progression of organic products, of the melting of minute distinctions, ought to be consulted at each moment; for what is required to be reproduced is not the material circumstance, which it is impossible to verify, but the very soul of history; what must be sought is not the petty certainty about trifles, it is the correctness of the general sentiment, the truthfulness of the colouring. (Renan, 1864[1863]: 48)

The novel in which Renan is (or isn’t) read, The Years, has been classified as a late modernist version of the historical novel, in that Woolf connected the minutiae of everyday life to the world-historical events hovering at the margins of all the years that The Years relates. It can be read as registering ‘the protracted decline of a British centered world-system’, and for the way in which Woolf ‘figures the everyday as the scene where the historical crises of the 1930s attain legibility’ (Davis, 2014). It been claimed as a forerunner of ‘the new historicism’, for the way in which Woolf appears to reject the idea of history as a unitary and directly accessible past; her view was rather of history as a series of constructions in the present. But she was no postmodern theorist of history avant la lettre: she may have adopted ‘a located perspective on the past’, and she may have understood ‘historiographical accounts as constructions in the present’, but her writing inscribed a commitment to the material determinations of political and social life in any historical period; she always approached the past ‘with political intentions’ (Spiropoulou, 2010: 47–9). Her characters’ understanding of their historical position in the present is written in a discontinuous and inconclusive chronological narrative in which Woolf merged historical ‘fact’ and fictional lives (ibid.: 114–15).

Woolf's original plan for The Years had been ‘an Essay-Novel’. She wanted to intersperse factual (historical) essays with fictional writing: ‘Its [sic] to take in everything, sex, education, life &c; & come, with the most powerful agile leaps like a chamois across precipices from 1880 to here and now’ (Marcus, 2010: 155; Wood, 2013: 2). The final published version, The Years – the factual/historical interludes abandoned – is structured as a series of date-headed chapters of vastly differing lengths: ‘1880’, ‘1891’, ‘1907’, ‘1908’, ‘1910’, ‘1913’, ‘1914’, ‘1917’, ‘1918’ (the shortest, four pages), and ‘Present Day’ (120 pages). Historical events – the deaths of Parnell and Edward VII, the First World War – happen offstage. Some of the Pargiter family sit finishing their dinner as an air raid rages overhead in ‘1917’. Members of the extended family sometimes think about these events, but more often about the pattern on a china bowl or raindrops running down a windowpane. The dates themselves are off-kilter: before and after the First World War, the war itself in brief episodes, the ‘Present Day’ not 1937 but a time running with rumours of a second war. The ‘dates’ are not those of a conventional historical narrative. Readers may – many will – use Woolf's date headings to locate the events of the novel in a previously established chronology, but chronology is dispersed in a suddenly noticed piece of 18th-century chinaware, or a frayed candlewick. Dinner parties, shopping, going to bed, watching the rain fall: a series of undramatic moments make up a plot in which the everyday is written as the place where human history happens.

The text meditates on the relationship between individual characters and the state in which they live. The structure of The Years – the lives of an extended family through 50 years of British history – provides a detailed contemplation of ‘the nation’, through chronological, historical time. Thoughts and musings, in a room, about what happened in another room, long ago, are connected to the world-historical processes that underwrite the novel's half-century time span (Davis, 2014: 2; Spiropoulou, 2010: 3). The past happens, history is inscribed in a character's mind, as she or he thinks about something now (a raindrop, a newspaper clipping) and brings forward its past into the present. In his extended discussion of Virginia Woolf's theory of character – character as ‘a literary structure and as a reference to the real world of selves’ – Eric Sandberg argues for Woolf's characters – for ‘Eleanor’ – as historically located literary artefacts: ‘As characters move through time, the past moves with them.’ The ‘literary’ here encompasses both historical writing and novel writing (Sandberg, 2015: 132).

Being a character

Towards the end of Souvenirs, Renan draws together the fragments of the self he has inscribed in the incidents and observations that compose his memoir. The first rule imparted by his religious education, he says, ‘was never to talk about oneself’; but he does. ‘All's well that ends well’ (‘Tout est bien qui finit bien’), he concludes, ‘life on the whole having proved a very agreeable experience for me’:

I was well brought up; there you have it in a nutshell. My good temper, which is often nothing but indifference; my indulgence, which, on the other hand, is very sincere and arises from the clearness with which I discern how unjust men are to one another; my conscientious habits which, in my case are no hardship but a pleasure; the unmeasured capacity I have for putting up with boredom … all these things are to be attributed to the environment in which I lived and the profound influence it exerted upon me. (Renan, 1935[1863]: 219–20)

He says that he is a man who has never greatly suffered. Even with the death of those close to him, nature put a cushion under him (‘La nature a plus d’une fois mis des coussins pour m’épargner les chocs trop rudes’; a nice example of the charming insertion of the demotic and the everyday by which Renan measured the music of his prose). He is good-humoured, not easily ruffled; his is ‘a sound mind in a body tolerably sound’; these factors have maintained him in ‘a condition of philosophic serenity which sometimes blossomed forth in grateful optimism, sometimes in playful irony’ (ibid.: 239).

He makes startling and arresting propositions about being in the world, as a social creature. He has never encouraged friendship – what he calls ‘private friendship’; affection, esteem, intimacy, and trust between two people are things he has discouraged all his life. This was a lesson of his tutors, in Brittany and Paris: ‘I sometimes say to myself, like my old schoolmasters, that friendship is a larceny perpetrated at the expense of society as a whole, and that in a higher social state friendship will altogether disappear’ (Renan, 1935[1863]: 232). This self-presentation is by way of marked contrast with the ‘career intellectual’ described by his recent English biographer (Priest, 2015b: 46). Priest notes many of Renan's ‘friends’ who helped him progress through the academic system, promoting him as a linguist and historian, but these were perhaps the useful advocates and allies of an earlier, 18th-century understanding of ‘friend’ as one who might help you advance in the world, not the full-blown post-romantic attachment that Renan eschews (Silver, 1990; Tadmore, 2009). It is an extraordinary particularity of character that entrances when reading Renan's Souvenirs, a kind of serene oddness that is delivered, it seems, not by an actual living person, remembering and reflecting, but by the compelling presence – existence – of some beautiful words. This is to read Renan in the sure and certain knowledge that ‘Renan’ as depicted may not exist (or have existed) but that the beautiful words do.

‘All's well that ends well’

But Eleanor-the-character doesn’t read Souvenirs d’enfance; she doesn’t even read the Renan she's most likely to read, Vie de Jésus, or at least doesn’t get very far with it before she's distracted. We can begin to answer Martin Pargiter's question, ‘Why Renan?’ It's the same question, whether or not the fictional Eleanor actually reads Renan: why Renan in the first place? Dozens of characters move through the narrative of all the years Woolf relates; it is difficult to keep track of them – not least because many are given diminutives or nicknames – and perhaps not necessary, for the focus is not named characters who develop and change, but rather their minds, their thoughts, their reveries, and what is briefly caught in their vision and on the page (Steedman, 2022: 277). Several characters assume an importance in one chapter, only to never be seen or heard from again. The only character who appears all the way through the novel and thus provides narrative continuity is Eleanor, who is not given a diminutive. ¹⁰ The literature on women and social action in the Edwardian years provides a better characterisation for her than the ‘do-gooder’ label she is given in various study guides to The Years. Her engagement with questions of welfare and social housing, the several discussion and reading groups she belongs to over the years, and her interest in suffragism are presented as social and political in focus rather than as the catch-all ‘philanthropic’ (Cunningham, 2020; Lewis, 1991). She is interested in the world and travelling it; she is interested in the historical origins of modern society. She reads widely (she almost reads Renan). As a continuous presence she holds the narrative in some kind of historical stasis. She was born in the early 1860s and thus inscribes the novel's historical trajectory and time span. At the end, in ‘The Present Day’ chapter Eleanor, now in her 70s, has just returned from India (‘“next year she's off to China”’). With one of her cousins she goes to a party where members of the extended Pargiter family, young and old, reminisce about the past, telling each other stories about their childhoods. She feels happy, thinks about the long life she has lived, tries to make sense of it, falls asleep (Woolf, 2016[1937]: 281–401).

But the novel (the history) does not end there. Eleanor wakes up: ‘But where was she? In what room? In which of the innumerable rooms? Always there were rooms; always there were people. Always from the beginning of time’ (Woolf, 2016[1937]: 393). In a few minutes Eleanor will halt the passage of the years, and end the novel The Years, for soon she is on the doorstep, looking back into the house for her brother (not Martin; another of her brothers). She is waiting for him to make his goodbyes; they are going to walk home together: ‘The sun had risen, and the sky above the houses wore an air of extraordinary beauty, simplicity and peace’ (ibid.: 401). Here the history-novel ends.

What you might take from Renan, and a writer (Virginia Woolf) reading another writer, is a calm delight in someone being in the world, a person being as he or she is, in time and circumstance: their own gently unyielding self. It's up for grabs, really, as no one really reads Renan, not in The Years, not in the various houses where Virginia Woolf wrote ‘Eleanor’, between 1932 and 1935; yet Renan allows, fleetingly, poetically, evasively, a person to be made. In 1906, Woolf had read Renan's musings on history as that ‘little conjectural science’, a thing no sooner made than unmade by some other historian, tomorrow, or in a hundred years (Steedman, 1996). Whether or not she remembered Renan's Souvenirs when she wrote The Years, her novel is homage to a way of writing, exemplified also in Vie de Jésus, that allows history to escape its fate of being undone. No one is going to come along, next week or in a hundred years, and in ‘twenty pages with thirty-nine learned footnotes’ tell this historian, Virginia Woolf, that in The Years she got the teaspoon wrong, or that March 1908 was an unusually windless month. ¹¹

Coda: Fig tree on hill, man under it

‘The actual words were very beautiful’ (the words ‘God is love’, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is within us’) thinks Eleanor of whatever Renan she is (or isn’t) reading. ‘But who said them – when?’ she asks herself. My earlier ellipses when quoting these lines omits what happens next, though ‘happen’ is too big a notion for ‘the spout of the tea-kettle’ puffing steam at her, her moving the kettle away, the wind ‘rattling the windows in the back room’, her noticing though the window it ‘bending the little bushes; they still had no leaves on them’. Only then, after all (!) of this, or after nothing at all, does Eleanor answer her own question: ‘It was what a man said under a fig tree, on a hill.… And then another man wrote it down.’ My biblical knowledge is small, but I know how to find things, in concordances, in the New Testament online, in biblical commentary … in many ‘Lives of Jesus’, from the 19th to the 21st century – all places you have to go once it is ascertained that there is no man under a fig tree, on a hill, speaking beautiful words, in Renan's Vie de Jésus (quite a few fig trees though, including Jesus’ Parable of the Fig Tree). There are many fig trees in the Bible, many, many men speaking, many hills; but not this precise formation, of a man speaking on a hill, under a tree. I had high hopes of Emmanuel Carrère's imagined meeting between the Apostles Philip and Luke, where a fig tree seems to matter to the words being spoken, but it takes place in Philip's little house in Caesarea, which has fig tree by the door, not on a hill (Carrère, 2018[2014]: 203). The best I can come up with is that Woolf, either out of her own misapprehension or by attributing ignorance to the ‘Eleanor’ she has created, or both, has some woman (‘Eleanor Pargiter’ / Virginia Woolf), remembering the Sermon on the Mount (the Beatitudes). This is a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew (5, 6, 7), but I surmise this only because the Beatitudes are delivered on a mountain (though the elevation of the site is in dispute). The words ‘The Kingdom of God is within you’ occur in Luke 17:21, and ‘God is love’ in John 4:8, 16. Renan several times explains that ‘this name of “kingdom of God”, or “kingdom of heaven”, was the favourite term of Jesus to express the revolution which he brought into the world’, and one could surmise that Virginia Woolf wanted the reader to know that the fictional Eleanor had got as far as – let's say – page 91 of a 1897 English Vie, where the 1864 translation has become ‘favourite expression of Jesus to describe the revolution he inaugurated in the world’ (Renan, 1897: 91). Eleanor's musings are (made to be) those of anyone over the last two centuries, half-educated in the scriptures, remembering stories from Sunday school, sermons long ago, Bible lessons from childhood, the daily repetition of the Lord's Prayer in school, but – probably – not in Woolf's case. She was brought up in an agnostic household and home-schooled (de Gay, 2018; Paulsell, 2021). (Her family's agnosticism may be the reason she has her character flush at being found reading a religious work.) An ordinary elementary school child of 1908 or 1935 might well have known more of Christianity – ‘what it meant’ – than did Woolf (Brown, 2001; Stevens, 2010: 2, 282–9). The beautiful words are also the clearest indication that, just like everyone else, Woolf's Eleanor hasn’t really read Renan, but that you have to, in order to find that out.