spirits." We miss in him the quiet charm of Fénelon or Berkeley, and the sweetness and brotherliness of Massillon; but he had a power of fascination all his own, while intellectually he was greater than any of those, and even as a moralist was fully the equal of the best of them. Blaise Pascal was the earliest born of those great men of letters of the age of Louis XIV. who in themselves were sufficient to make an age illustrious. He was born at Clermont-Ferrand on the 19th June, 1623. Strange stories are told of his precocity, some of which may be in excess of the truth; but, after making all reasonable allowance for possible exaggeration, there remains evidence enough to warrant us in describing him as the most interesting IT is a little difficult to fix on the point of view from which Pascal should be judged. We have before us a number of extracts from French and English writers, in which he is described as a man of reimarkable gifts, but ut- and remarkable boyish prodigy of the terly improvident both mentally and spiritually. Improvidence of this kind may or may not be censurable; it is at least uncommou. modern world. It is not from Pascal that we know anything of this; he was too proud a man, too sensitive and reserved, to be vainglorious, and in him was no proneness to vulgar self-assertion. His father, Etienne Pascal, superintended the education of his son, and wished him, before learning mathematics, to become proficient in the humanities. But the boy by force of genius discovered for himself many of the laws of mathematics, and showed especially a great aptitude for geome The modern attitude towards Pascal outside the Church of Rome is probably not far from that of the writer of the following passage, which is taken from Larousse's "Universal Dictionary of the Nineteenth Century:" "It has been said that Pascal has made more conversions than Bourdaloue. So much the worse for converts and for Church! for such converts were surely sick, in-try. Let it not be forgotten that the firm, or lame!" Even within his own elder Pascal's friends were among the communion he has not been forgiven best intellects of the time, and that they for his severe handling of the Jesuits; were the men to whom the Academy of seldom, indeed, do we meet with a de- Sciences owed its beginnings. The abvout son of Rome who will praise Pas- normal power of the boy was freely cal heartily. In many of the extracts admitted by them, and they had better to which reference has just been made proof of it than we can ever have. there are expressions which savor of What Sainte-Beuve says, closely followcondescension, and there are others in ing the words of Nicole, is certainly which the critics preach too much. true of Blaise Pascal throughout his Now, let us say at once that whatever life: "It was easier for him to make may be wanting in Pascal of that ideal discoveries for himself than to study completeness of character which would after the way of others." We know be entirely satisfying, there is in his that at sixteen Blaise wrote a small life nothing to apologize for or to ex-treatise on conic sections which filled plain away. And the critic has not Descartes with wonder and incredulived who had the right to preach in lity;" the treatise still exists, and may dealing with such a man as Pascal. be examined by the sceptical. For For assuredly he was (as Bayle called some years the youth gave himself up him) "one of the world's sublimest so closely to scientific studies as to 66 overtax his physical strength. "From connection, yet often they exist tothe age of eighteen," says his sister gether; but they tend to weaken, yea (Mme. Périer), "he hardly ever passed to destroy each other. For however a day without pain." But in spite of great may be the spirit of a man, he is pain he continued to work with his ac- at one time capable only of one great customed ardor, until in the summer of passion. So when the heart is stirred 1647 he was partially paralyzed. Then by both ambition and love, each loses for about three years, probably fearing half its strength by that which is given a recurrence of the paralysis or some- to the other. Age does not determine thing worse, he lived quietly in Paris, either the beginning or the end of these and afterwards in Auvergne. At the two passions; man feels them first in end of 1650 the family came back to youth, and even in age it is often only Paris, when Blaise (with health in death that kills them." Many of Paspart restored) for the first time began cal's critics have believed that this fine to go much into society. The death of essay was inspired by the writer's pashis father about a year later checked sion for the beautiful and charming sisfor a time his intercourse with the ter of his friend, the Duc de Roannez, world; but with this slight break he a woman of station too exalted to may be said to have lived in society become the wife of Blaise Pascal. from the end of 1650 until his conver- Man," he says, "considered alone, sion four years afterwards. is not a complete being; to be happy, he has need of another. Usually we seek this second self in our own rank, because the freedom and opportunity to make known our feelings are found most easily among our equals. Sometimes, however, we love a woman of higher rank than our own, and the passion grows within us, though we dare not tell it to her who has inspired it. When we thus love a woman who is set higher in the world than ourselves, ambition may at first attend upon love, but the latter soon gains the mastery. For love is a tyrant that will endure no rival; it will reign alone, and all other passions must yield to it and obey it." It is difficult to believe that the man who wrote this essay was a mere scientific analyst of emotion; there is in it so much of the insight that usually comes only through experience. Some of his biographers have thought it necessary to apologize for all this, as if Pascal could know men from books, or as if a good man should go through life and know as little as possible of the world into which he was born. Pascal owed a great deal to the experiences of these years; such tact and urbanity as he shows in his later work do not come to a man naturally, or by the mere process of self-communion. That his life was pure during these years is sufficiently attested by the fact that his enemies the Jesuits, who in those days knew everything that could throw discredit upon their opponents, were not able to discover any offences of Pascal against the moral law. Indeed, if he had not come later so entirely into the sphere of religion, his genius and virtues would still have given him a place among great and good men. It must have been during this period of his life that he wrote the "Discourse on Love," which has the same elevation of virtue and the same rareness that we find in his other writings. "The passions of man," says Pascal, "which are most natural to him, and which comprehend most others, are love and ambition. They have no true 1 Pascal's authorship of this "Discourse" has been questioned, but no other possible author of it has been discovered. But the life which he led in the world left him sorrowing, and soon the things of the spirit claimed him altogether. This was at the end of 1654 or the beginning of 1655. He himself had, while he was still young, filled his sister Jacqueline with that ardent desire for the religious life which in the end took her to Port Royal to shine among the saints of that noble sisterhood; and she now became one of the chief instruments in his own close surrender of himself to religion. And with this came a new order into his life which | acter; and to compare them generally continued to the end. He was never a priest; he did not even take the vows of the brotherhood of Port Royal, nor did he always reside there; but she has no other son so great, and he has a large place in her history. At the time of his first going to Port Royal the Jansenists were wrangling with the Jesuits, and his share in the dispute has come down to us in the famous Provincial Letters." Within four years of his conversion he began that long fight with death, which ended, after so much suffering, on the 19th of August, 1662. He was just over thirty-nine years of age. This is a bare outline of his life, which might easily have been filled in, if it had seemed needful; but Pascal is pre-eminently one of those rare beings whose outer life is of small account, whose inner life is in truth everything. We know the historical period in which his life was cast; we can see to what extent his thought was colored by his surroundings; and for the rest, we can come near to him in his "Thoughts," though even there we cannot grasp him wholly, he was so much greater than his work. There are men of genius (Shelley for example) who are better and more interesting in their works than in themselves, for however fascinating may be their genius, they are disappointing by their weaknesses. Pascal is not of this class; lofty as was his genius, his character was loftier still. would be as unprofitable as to compare Euripides with Plato. But the limited comparison we have just ventured upon will be of use if it can bring closely home to us those characteristics of Pascal to which we Englishmen are usually rather blind. His grace and urbanity, his ease and sense of fitness, that lofty manner which is never wanting in simplicity, yet is never familiar- these and other qualities go to form a style quite perfect of its kind. An English critic recently said that, after he had left the theatre on witnessing Mme. Bernhardt's striking performance of Phèdre, his first impulse was to go to his library, and burn at once the collected writings of Thomas Carlyle. Certainly it would have been unwise to do it, for Carlyle has to-day a more important message for Englishmen than Racine. But it is not difficult to feel something like sympathy with the train of the critic's thought. Racine has such perfect grace, and so noble a literary manner, that we may well feel annoyed at what is fantastic in Carlyle, if by chance the two come together, and a comparison is forced upon us. The thing which is fantastic in literature is apt to remind us of the displays of the village prodigy; and such displays jar somewhat on a fine taste. But it is foolish to seek comparisons of this sort, for in art and in literature we cannot be too catholic. In Pascal's writing there is no trace of the fantastic; he is as free from it He lived in the great age of French as Tacitus. The style is no doubt the literature, and was the contemporary of man himself, though we cannot always Bossuet and Bourdaloue, Racine, Cor- with other writers safely use the phrase neille, and Molière. However English in this way. But if we consider the critics may disagree with regard to the characteristics of the man we see at merits of the poetry of the French, once the foundation of the style. “A there can be no disagreement as to their poet grafted on a geometrician," M. prose; in that region they are supreme. Ernest Legouvé calls him; and in this Pascal in prose and Racine in verse, respect he is without parallel in literary among the great writers of the age of history. For his mathematical genius Louis XIV., are remarkable for their is of the highest order, while his purely perfect taste and the soundness of their literary genius (notwithstanding the literary styles. Personally there is little actual narrowness of his achievement) in common between them; Racine, gives him a place in the first rank of apart from his literary faculty, is not men of letters. That style, noble, siman attractive, certainly not a great char-ple, and impassioned, vivid, full of indi viduality and distinction, free from all | the Jesuitical morality of that time as rhetorical device, and without a trace of taught in the books published with the the orator's accent- this style of Pascal's is surely the best of all modern literary styles. There is many a fine style (Landor's will serve as an illustration) that has upon it a trace of the confectioner; thought and expression are not united quite indissolubly-you oan separate them. But you cannot do this with Pascal's work. sanction of the proper authorities; it is not even to the point to assert that other teaching bodies in the French Church had similar casuistical maxims. If your neighbor's moral teaching is pernicious, and you feel it a duty to say so, you are not therefore bound to find all the men upon earth who preach a like morality; there is a limit to a man's duty. Nor are you in such a case called upon to appraise the virtue of your neighbor; your real concern is to kill a deadly thing. Pascal brought a simple morality to test the teachings of the Jesuits, and there is on his part no positive unfairness in pressing his case ; indeed, with his literary power and his mastery of the arts of ridicule, he could have made the satire a great deal more severe. Outside France the "Provincial Letters" are not much read to-day. Like all polemical writing, they need to be treated historically before we can do them justice; and for this reason they do not lend themselves to quotation. His work, as we said just now, is by no means large; there are novels that would perhaps be found to contain as many words (if one were foolish enough to count them) as the whole of his extant writings. His miscellaneous work would not have won for him more than a passing notice in literary history; it is the 66 'Provincial Letters" and the "Thoughts" that have secured for him a place among the great masters of prose. Let us say first a few words about the "Provincial Letters." In the Church of Rome Pascal is not regarded with favor, and Mary Stuart has the better chance of canonization. Pascal was one of the Jansenists, and they But the "Provincial Letters" would have never been popular at Rome. not, even with the addition of his misJoseph de Maistre shows the Roman cellaneous writings, have caused Bayle attitude towards Pascal when he says, to describe him (so justly) as one of "No man of taste would deny that the the world's sublimest spirits." It is 'Provincials' are a very pretty libel." the "Thoughts" that bring him into Chateaubriand strikes much the same the region of the sublime; and it is note when he calls Pascal "a calum- of the "Thoughts" that we would now niator of genius, who has left us an speak. 66 immortal lic." This piece of declama- Pascal, after completing the "Protion is absurd, for the "Provincials "vincial Letters," designed a work in are true in substance, which is the defence of the Christian religion. He great moral question with regard to them n; and as to their literary value, there is of course no question. In these letters Pascal is the champion of a rational liberty; man's intellect was in fetters in the France of that day, and, without intending it, Pascal did something for the cause of freedom of conscience. It does not in any way affect us that many of the Jesuits besides Bourdaloue were saintly men; if France had then contained ten thousand Bourdaloues, their existence would not have affected our judgment in this matter. The passages quoted by Pascal were fair examples of one side of did not live to write it; but in the last years of his life, always in physical weakness and often in pain, he wrote down some of his meditations, mostly on the subject of religion. After his death these were found among his papers, and were published by the Port Royalists, with many excisions. The full text has since been restored from Pascal's manuscript, so now in reading the "Thoughts we may feel that we have them as they came from his pen. He did not arrange them; they were scattered memoranda, even without dates; and they are most interesting and pathetic in their disarrangement. When many of these meditations were | onwards." Yet who will say that Newwritten Pascal's mind no doubt was man had killed his reason when he occupied with that work on Christianity wrote this? We will no more accept which was to be the crown of his la- Pascal's morbid utterances as expresbors. It is easy to understand that the sive of his whole self, than we will in subject should so often be a religious such wise accept Carlyle's atrabilious one, for religion almost alone occupied memoirs. If we go to the "Thoughts him in his last years. we can easily show, in his own words, how far Pascal at his best was from the excesses of monasticism. 22 them. Faith indeed tells us what our senses do not tell us, but not the contrary of what Faith is above they perceive to be true. the senses, not in opposition to them. Once more: — Some of his reflections on religion are of the kind we look for from the purely monastic mind; this it is which explains the attitude of the writer in the ex-stitious; but only pride refuses to accept To fix our hopes on mere forms is supertract from "The Universal Dictionary Piety is not superstition; to quoted at the beginning of this article. carry piety so far, is to destroy it. By the side of that passage we may Again: place the following, from the historical introduction of Dr. McCrie to his excellent translation of the "Provincial Letters: " "We see [in Pascal] a noble mind debilitated by superstition; we see a useful life prematurely terminating in, if not shortened by, the petty austerities and solicitudes of monasticism." Here Pascal is placed in that great class of mystics whose insanity was publicly certified some years ago by a distinguished doctor of medicine. M. Barrère, in his work on "French Writers," says: "Pascal has been compared with Byron; to make the comparison more just, it should be added that he was a sick Byron and a Jansen ist." compar This has been a favorite ison, and following it up we find Pascal, classed among the members of that family of literary men which includes Chatterton, Burns, and Heine, men of genius who have never reached their goal. Pascal was of a quite different order from these men, who, with all their genius, were weaklings. He was of that glorious army of heroes and saints who have sweetened and ennobled our human life, and the remembrance of whom is a blessing forever. He not only reached his goal, but lived in sight of it, if such a thing is possible to man; nor did he largely forego the claims of reason at the call of superstition. Pascal has no passage so apparently retrograde as that of Cardinal Newman in the "Apologia," ," where he expresses so piercingly the need for something which will afford a fulcrum for us, whereby to keep the earth from moving The utmost reach of reason is to recognize what an infinity of things go beyond it altogether. The reason is a feeble one which does not perceive this. Doubt, certainty, and submission have each their own province, and the true force of reason is unknown to him who does not distinguish them. What is condemned in the "Thoughts" as narrow and monastic, is such a passage as the following, which certainly does justify something like anger: Our The noble deaths of Lacedæmonians and other pagans do not appeal to us, for what have we to do with them? But we are strongly moved at the deaths of the martyrs, since they are members of our body. souls are at one with theirs; their resolution may form our own, not merely by example, but by inheritance. But in the examples of the heathen there is nothing of this, there is no spiritual tie between us; just as we do not become rich by seeing a stranger who is so, but by having a father or husband who is rich. |