PARIS LITERARY GOSSIP.

Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser, Volume 3, Issue 302, 10 June 1879, Page 2

PARIS LITERARY GOSSIP.

(from our own correspondent.)

The reception of M. Eenan at the French Academy will remain the literary event of the season. * His address surpasses all he has hitherto written in point of style ; it left a little to be desired, chiefly under the head of reading, as ho was suffering from the gout. It contained all the qualities, blemishes, and " philosophy" of the writer. M. Legouve, who was close to him, ought to experience pain at a delivery recalling a charity sermon. Further, it was too long. But it was not the less remarkable, and a substantial success. Eenan affirmed the singular theory, that great writers occupy themselves very little as to form. He is himself a'contradiction ; his briiiiaet style is tho result of industry as much aa a gift of nature. The text of the discourse was an encouiutn of Claude Bernard, the celebrated scientist. Kenan

showed us in the case of Bernard, that the savant was equal to the saint, and more happy, for he has the joy and pride of his discoveries. M. Mezieres, the president, replied to M. Kenan, and reclaimed for the simple, the humble, and the suffering, the right to their creeds, which consoled them in their hours of trial, and enabled them to sustain the burdens of life. Kenan never denied this. M. Menzieres was more successful when he twitted the new immortal ironically on his personal acquaintance' with St. Paul, and going bail for the chastity of the Empress Faustina. The reception of M. Renau marked a step in the vast revolution now taking place in the political and social manners of France. Some people avoid the timid celebrity with terror; others view him as AntiChrist—which in a sense he really is. Ten years ago the reception of Kenan was impossible, and yet he is to-day exactly what he really was then. In his "Life of Jesus" he labors to destroy what he maintains to be a chimera, but he only creates another beside that which he has dreamed to overthrow. Kenan is in prose what Lamartine was in verse ; both wrote superb pages, but when they enter the clouds they are absolutely unseizable. He searches an unknown he cannot define, passions that cannot exist, and describes scenes that he has never beheld. He says—"ln the heart I feel that my life is always governed by a faith that I no longer possessfor faith has this particularity, when it has disappeared, it acts still." {After Orpheua had lost his ideal, and had been torn in pieces by the Menades, his lyre ever repeated, Eurydice ! Eurydice ! Kenan is worse than a schismatic, a heretic, or Pore Loyson ; he has resolutely quitted— not orthodoxy, but Christianity, and this step no sect, whether rigid or liberal, will pardon. On the other hand he has never joined materialists or positivists, though, with them, he excludes miracles; at the same time he does not see in nature or history a blind mechanism or chance. He feels the want of a God without being able to define such. The God of M. Kenan is orie of Pure Intelligence—the God of a seat of learning like the Academy where he has been received—an ideal God, that humanity, in elevating itself, will one day make a reality. This is German, as Avell as Kenan. The God of simple mortals is infinitely preferable to this. Infinite intelligence is not yet born—but will be. Infinite purity does not exist—but will. There are three men in Kenan—a poet, a priest, and an inquirer. He was educated for the priesthood, but never entered it, hence why his life lacks the gay note, and why he has never been able to comprehend Voltaire, Moliere, Aristophanes, Kabelais, or Beranger, for gaiety, lightness, and insouciance are human forces, and humanity does not. march in sections, but en bloc. The special and prodigious attraction of Kenan lies in his contraries; he irritates at the moment he commences to charm, and charms when he commences to irritate. He makes you think, because ■he is a suggestive writer, and opens up for the reader a new horizon of why's and how's. M. Kenan accepts nothing on trust; each doctrine, each idea, he demands, "Is it true ?" He is simply curious, loves curiosity for the sake of curiosity, as people who*voyage for the sake of travelling, and not for arriving at any fixed* destination. Nero is a phenomenon as curious for him as St. Paul or Francois d'Assise. Without being Christian, Kenan at Jerusalem follows with emotion the sad road to Calvary ; at Athens he ascends the Acropolis to admire Athens, the goddess of intelligence and .wisdom ; but he knows Athens is not a goddess, as well as Christ.for him'is not God. Both are his dreams, however, and Pindar holds life to be the dream of a shadow, but not the less meriting to be caressed. Kenan has ever been afraid of political economy, dreads material prosperity, because checking the inarch of intellectual ideas. He would limit mankind to St. John's diet—locusts and wild honey. It is by these traits he shows his priestly training; he has no sympathy with material progress, hence why he opposes universal exhibitions. For him there is neither dignity nor value in perfecting the means for humanity to gain easily its daily bread. He has no sympathy with the crowd, and hates the masses. They do not sympathize with him in return, as they instinctively declined to elect him Deputy and Senator. He despairs of the age—which advances ; he sees in democracy the decadence of his country —but in which France has found her resuscitation and safety. Now more than ever, the working classes want faith and hope. Whoever has been born priest is well nigh being born aristocrat. But do not confound priest with apostle. The latter tries to convert, the former rather to dominate. The tribe Levi has never assimilated with the other tribes of Israel. Common-places and vulgarity Kenan detests, and he avows the sole weakness of his life has been to permit the issue of a popular edition of his '" Life of Jesus." He separates humanity into two classes— the Athenians and Boeotians, rather than sheep and goats ; lie is the self-appointed Moses tO;.lead the Children of Israel in the desert ; he would be a "providential man," only he ignores Providence ; he does not judge God, but promises to create Him, and lays down that the commencement of wisdom is to doubt His existence. For Kenan, knowledge is a Jacob's ladder with a thousand steps that ignorance climbs and descends. Now he only regards the extremities, excludes the intervening space. For him the world has only two poles and an equator. This explains why he is the advocate of superior instruction, while remaining indifferent to popular education. One day he asked if it were necessary for a Papuan to have a soul ? Kenan, I have said, does not believe in miracles, but he does in the existence of a constant and invincible power, serving itself with all the laws of nature. To think and speak freely here below is, with Kenan, the supreme good for mortals ; he has not so much developed as begotten a taste in the general public for historical religious studies. Many before Kenan have attacked the divinity of Christ. Strauss treats Him as a negation, an algebraic quantity, and Coquerel perhaps as an impostor. Ilenen approaches the grand figure of Jesus "with respect, admires His sorrows and gntji'--, ann crowns Him with flowers, but i!n-=o render the critic's blows more teinbjs, which deprive Jeaus of his aureola of C " and of his supernatural attributes, 'l latter were useful, he admits, in the ■ - but with a new, ■ critical, and scie. , . inhumanity, they are an anachronism. Juuic ■illcs lach'imce of the simple, and the rage of theologians.