Word: renanism
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...Marquis de Villemer was a smash hit. Her anticlerical novel, Mademoiselle La Quintinie, was a bestseller. Napoleon III read all her books, went to the first nights of all her plays his censor did not ban. In 1863 she dined regularly with the Goncourts, Maupassant, Zola, Taine, Renan, Gautier, Flaubert. Most of them admired her as people admire a prehistoric skeleton. But with Flaubert she struck up a warm friendship. His genius was not yet recognized: she urged him to work, though she confessed in private that "all novels are ultimately written for chambermaids...
...histories of Josephus, the pseudepigrapha.* Yet its literature is enormous. In Chautauqua, N. Y., famed cultural and religious resort, an Aula Christi (Hall of Christ) contains some 2,000 biographies and critical studies of Him.† Not only scholars but novelists have been gripped by His story. Ernest Renan wrote a prettified Life of Christ which was almost fiction. Giovanni Papini, on & off a Roman Catholic, lavished Latin enthusiasm on Jesus. In The Brook Kerith, George Moore, in cadenced prose, had Jesus survive the crucifixion to spend the rest of a long life in retirement...
...Published this week is his long (698 pages) The Nazarene, November Book-of-the-Month.* As full of Hebraic fervor, and often as mournful, as a synagogue chant-it was written in Yiddish-The Nazarene brings ancient Palestine to life, offers the most extraordinary evocation of Jesus since Renan's. Yet Author Asch's viewpoint is so objective it should not offend Christian sensibilities...
...fame the brothers encountered even graver difficulties. Rabid anti-romantics, they wrote such painstakingly realistic novels that old-line critics whooped "sculptured slime . . . literature of putrescence." To younger men, such as Emile Zola, the Goncourts were prophetic pioneers. Gradually they built up a literary circle- Gautier, Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert, Renan, Taine-who used to meet fortnightly to dine well, talk how they liked. On one of these occasions, Gautier rebuked a silent guest: "As for you, I hope that the next time you come, you will compromise yourself. We all compromise ourselves here, and it is not fair that...
When Anatole France (Jacques-Anatole-François Thibault) died in 1924, the younger generation of French writers swarmed to the scene with strong antiseptic criticism intended to fumigate the world of his reputation as the equal of Montaigne, Rabelais, Renan, Voltaire. Most contemporary writing about him has reflected this opinion. With the possible exception of Proust the most-written-about French writer of the last century, Anatole France has not yet been the subject of a definitive English biography. Why biographers have been scared away may be surmised by reading Author Dargan's volume, a 729-pager which...