BOOKS.

PASCAL.*

THE wise youth Hadrian in _Richard Fevers/ speaks with felicity of Horace and Gibbon, defining them as "the aristo-

crats of literature." No one probably will dispute his epithet, though some of us might extend his list, especially

from the ancients. Xenophon and Caesar should certainly be in it, and the aristocracy of literature would be incomplete without many French names. Among them would assuredly be Pascal's in his literary aspect. The greatest master of the French language, and perhaps of any language, has ranked Pascal as a stylist among or above the choicest French authors. Voltaire, speaking of the Provincial Letters, declares that the best comedies of Moliere " n'ont pas plus de eel que lee premieres lettres," and he goes on to assert that " Bossuet n'a rien de plus sublime que lee dernieres." Higher and juster praise could not be given by any com- parison from French literature as it was known to Voltaire. Gibbon is no less emphatic in his appreciation. "From the Provincial Letters of Pascal," he says, "which almost

every year I have perused with new pleasure, I learned to manage the weapon of grave and temperate irony, even on subjects of ecclesiastical solemnity." He thus owes to Pascal's teaching that quality in which, among English writers, he is supreme. Pater, again, expresses the highest admiration for Pascal's writing. In his hands French literature "became at once, as if by a new creation, what it has remained—a pattern of absolutely unencumbered expressiveness"

"He took up the pen as other chivalrous gentlemen of the day took up the sword, and showed himself a master of the art of fence therewith. His delicate exercise of himself with that weapon was nothing less than a revelation to all the world of the capabilities, the true genius, of the French language in

prose Pascal is the countryman of Rabelais and Montaigne, smiling with the fine malice of the one, laughing outright with the gaiety of the other, all the world joining in the laugh—well, at the silliness of the clergy, who seem indeed

not to know their own business The spirit in which Pascal deals with his opponents, his irony, may remind us of the Apology of Socrates ; the style which secured them immediate access to people who, as a rule, find the subjects there treated hopelessly dry, reminds us of the Apologia of Newman."

These quotations from Voltaire, Gibbon, and Pater require no apology, even to readers who know them, because they

throw a clear light on the form, the spirit, and the achieve- ment of Pascal's greatest work. For we venture to hold that the Pensees, popular as they may be, are neither so perfect in form nor so fine in spirit as the Provincial Letters, which are surely more important to the cause of morality than the Pensees can claim to be in the sphere of intellect. With this

prelude we may turn from the work to the workman, and to his latest English biographer.

Lord St. Cyres has given UB an excellent study, a model

biography. It is a pleasure to meet with a book so well thought out, so elegantly and vigorously written, and so skilfully constructed. It is a book which no enthusiast for Pascal can afford to miss, and it is indispensable for every one who desires to know him well. Much as Pascal has been written about, he has never been presented better. Lord St. Cyres handles him with ample knowledge, with mellowed wisdom, and in distinguished phrase. Besides these higher qualities, he possesses an admirable common-sense which makes the biographical part of his work not only interesting but very profitable reading, and will secure it a leading place among even the best French Lives. Pascal is by no means easy to handle. For several reasons he is one of the most difficult and elusive subjects of biography. He is not only an "aristocrat of literature," but of intellect and thought. Besides this, he was one of the most various mortals.

Though his innermost life, his mental and spiritual evolution, was consistent enough, yet superficially and outwardly he seemed to be ever changing. He was "everything by turns, and nothing long ": theorist and experimentalist, mathematician and mystic, philosopher and man of fashion, wit and ascetic. Pascal was all these, and more. He managed

even to be theological and scientific, devout and truthful. In fact, if he can be summed up in a phrase, he was a passionate • (1) Pascal. By the Viscount St. Cyres. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. tlOs. 8d. net.]—(2) Mai.. Pascal. By H. B. Jordan. London: Williams guid liorgate. [48. 6d. net.] devotee of truth. He expected more of it than human life could give him, and he was the martyr of his baffled search. Never were so many temperaments compressed into a single body, nor a frail body so tormented by a fevered intellect. One of the keenest of all human intelligences was crippled by physical disease. Pascal the devotee was at times very near to fanaticism, and perhaps to insanity. He was a self- tormentor, whose life was of necessity tragic ; and though we delight in the Provincial Letters, the story of their author is melancholy reading. In science the mind of Pascal could soar beyond the flaming ramparts of the world; but in theology he was imprisoned by the narrow boundaries of the seven- teenth century, and as we read his intellectual disaster we cannot refrain from the Lucretian challenge, Tantum relligio otuit suaclere malorum.

In all this, in both sides of his mental life, Pascal was a true child and representative of the seventeenth century : that charming and interesting borderland between an expiring mediaevalism and the sane philosophy of the coming age. It was a time of singular distinction and attractiveness, but of curious uncertainty. It had lost the old Latin Catholicism, and it halted between Papalism and Protestantism, taking something from both, not rejecting either decisively. It was stirred to its depths by the physical and experimental sciences, with all the possibilities they, suggested. It had been nourished on the humanities of the Renaissance ; but its classics came to it chiefly through the poetical channels of Arnyot and North, or through their debtors the play-writers. Indeed, whatever the seventeenth century touched was turned into poetry : science, medicine, politics, philosophy, history, scholarship, theology. Galileo and Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Algernon Sidney and Harrington, Hobbes, Clarendon and Bossuet, Wotton and Fuller, Bunyan, George Fox, Jeremy Taylor: they all reveal the innate poetry of their time. Even its antiquaries were poetical, and some of its least imaginative children were its professed poets. The enchantments of the Middle Age were still potent in this curious century, as may be proved by Milton. Steeped as he was in the classics, his earlier poems are charged with mediaeval feeling, and all his poetry is crowded with mediaeval figures. In his astronomy he wavered between the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems, just as the age itself doubted between astronomy and astrology. In all this complexity, which confused those who lived through it, which appears so contradictory to us as we look back, Pascal had his full share ; he is the most characteristic and repre- sentative figure in a pathetic age. On one side of his intellect he was touched by its science, in which he achieved much, and looked towards the future. On the other side, in his theology and the apologetics of his religion, he looked backwards, and was shut out from the future. There was no place in his theories for development or comparative religion. His Apology for Christianity rested upon a documentary basis which has been utterly destroyed : and he was ignorant of what are to us the most essential factors in the problem. His treatise is not worth the paper on which it was written, and all the other contemporary apologetics are in the same case. It is for this reason that so many of the PensJes are ineffective, and that Pascal's intellectual shipwreck is so deplorably tragic. It was a useless martyrdom.

Lord St. Cyres has a masterly knowledge of Pascal's time, and of the society in which he moved. Its thought and politics are explained with a ripe scholarship, and its dis- tinguished men are exhibited with a cultured understanding. A very pleasing picture is given of Pascal's family, of the integrity, the dignity, and the high ideals of a good Govern- ment official in the provinces. Deeply interesting is the account of the various scientific societies which were so active all over France, and in correspondence with learned men all over Europe. The conflict between the Cartesians and Scholastics is very well described, as is the growing power and confidence of the experimental philosophers, the pre- cursors and pioneers of our modern science. Pascal's own exploits in mathematics and hydrostatics are told cleverly; and hardly of less interest is his initiation into polite society. Here Lord St. Cyres has excelled himself, and in Mere, Nikon, Naude, Le 'Payer, Gassendi, Saint-Evremond he has made a gallery of skilful and living portraits.

The ecclesiastical and theological parts of the story are told equally well. Lord St. Cyres understands what Gallicanism really was, and how anti-Roman the great Frenchmen were. In their opinion, as he Says truly, Catholicism "was not so much a duty to God as a duty to the State," and ia the light of these penetinting words we must always study such questions as the perseention of the Jansenists, the suppression of Port-Royal, and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. It is the method rather than the motive of these policies which requires an excuse, and which will certainly bear an explanation.

As to the Protincial Letters and their cause, the saner mind

of the world has probably come to the conclusion that neither the Jansenists nor the Jesuits were wholly right or wholly wrong. The controversy between rigorists and opportunists is at least as old as Tertullian : we might say as old as the New Testament, and older ; and it is far too difficult and complex to be settled by arbitrary rules. There is much to be said on both sides ; perhaps the parable of the wheat and the tares is the deepest saying, and the only workable policy. It does not, it must be owned, work out in favour of rigorists or Jan- senists; but the excesses of the casuists are condemned even more sweepingly by utterances of the same high authority.

Some casuistry is necessary in an imperfect world, or society could not exist, and justice could not be administered. ' Equity, it might be urged, is an aspect of casuistry. But the Jesuit casuists concocted a remedy which was far worse than the disease. Instead of a sedative they gave a stimulant; and they prescribed as an habitual food what should have been a medicine. Against these excesses Pascal was stirred to a righteous anger, and all hottest men must agree with him, though few of them can rise to his immortal irony and scorn.

The whole of Lord St. Cyres's book is good, but far the best of it is his chapter on the Provincial Letters. It would only be

spoilt by quotation, as would the innumerable other wise and witty things which are scattered through his pages. Mr.

Jordan's book is no rival to Lord St. Cyres's as a presentation of Pascal's time, but it gives a notion of Pascal's life and thought which may be helpful to some readers.

Pascal stands among the choice few as a man of letters ; and his secret is worth pondering in these times of "raw haste and disarray" :—

"Several letters cost Pascal three weeks of continuous work ; all were re-written at least half-a-dozen times. The Sixteenth alone was produced in a hurry, because the police were close on the tracks of the printer. Pascal apologised in the postscript for not having had time to make it shorter."

The same excuse cannot be made for many sermons, speeches, and reviews. Preachers, politicians, and too many fashionable critics are hardened sinners.