From Port-Royal also came, about the year 1670, a painful book, the "Life of Pascal," a portrait painted slowly from the life or living death, but with an almost exclusive preference for traits expressive of disease. The post-mortem examination of Pascal's brain revealed, we are now told, the secret, not merely of that long prostration, those sudden passing torments, but of something analogous to them in Pascal's genius and work. Well! the light cast indirectly on the literary work of Pascal by Mme. Périer's "Life" is of a similar kind. It is a veritable chapter in morbid pathology, though it may have truly a beauty for experts, the beauty which belongs to all refined cases even of cerebral disturbance. That he should [79] have sought relief from his singular wretchedness, in that sombre company, is like the second stroke of tragedy upon him. At moments Pascal becomes almost a sectarian, and seems to pass out of the genial broad heaven of the Catholic Church. He had lent himself in those last years to a kind of pieties which do not make a winning picture, which always have about them, even when they show themselves in men physically strong, something of the small compass of the sick-chamber. His medieval or oriental self-tortures, all the painful efforts at absolute detachment, a perverse asceticism taking all there still was to spare from the denuded and suffering body, might well, you may think, have died with him, but are here recorded, chiefly by way of showing the world, the Jesuits, that the Jansenists, too, had a saint quite after their mind.
But though, at first sight, you may find a pettiness in those minute pieties, they have their signification as a testimony to the wholeness of Pascal's assent, the entirety of his submission, his immense sincerity, the heroic grandeur of his achieved faith. The seventeenth century presents survivals of the gloomy mental habits of the Middle Age, but for the most part of a somewhat theatrical kind, imitations of Francis and Dominic or of their earlier imitators. In Pascal they are original, and have all their seriousness. Que je n'en sois [80] jamais séparé—pas séparé éternellement, he repeats, or makes that strange sort of MS. amulet, of which his sister tells us, repeat for him. Cast me not away from Thy presence; and take not Thy Holy Spirit from me. It is table rase he is trying to make of himself, that He might reign there absolutely alone, who, however, as he was bound to think, had made and blest all those things he declined to accept. Deeper and deeper, then, he retreated into the renuncient life. He could not, had he wished, deprive himself of that his greatest gift—literally a gift he might have thought it not to be buried but accounted for—the gift of le beau dire, of writing beautifully. "Il avoit renoncé depuis longtemps aux sciences purement humains." To him who had known them so well, and as if by intuition, those abstract and perdurable forms of service might well have seemed a part of "the Lord's doing, marvellous in our eyes," as his favourite Psalm cxix., the psalm des petites heures, the cxviii. of the Vulgate, says.* These, too, he counts now as but a variety of le néant and vanity of things. He no longer records, therefore, the mathematical aperçus that may visit him; and in his scruples, his suspicions of' visible beauty, he interests us as precisely an inversion of what is called the aesthetic life.
[81] Yet his faith, as in the days of the Middle Age, had been supported, rewarded, by what he believed to be visible miracle among the strange lights and shades of that retired place. Pascal's niece, the daughter of Madame Périer, a girl ten years of age, suffered from a disease of the eyes pronounced to be incurable. The disease was a peculiarly distressing one, the sort of affliction which, falling on a young child, may lead one to question the presence of divine justice in the world, makes one long that miracles were possible. Well! Pascal, for one, believed that on occasion that profound aspiration had been followed up by the power desired. A thorn from the crown of Jesus, as was believed, had been lately brought to the Port-Royal du Faubourg S. Jacques in Paris, and was one day applied devoutly to the eye of the suffering child. What followed was an immediate and complete cure, fully attested by experts. Ah! Thou hast given him his heart's desire: and hast not denied him the request of his lips. Pascal, and the young girl herself, faithfully to the end of a long life, believed the circumstances to have been miraculous. Otherwise, we do not see that Pascal was ever permitted to enjoy (so to speak) the religion for which he had exchanged so much; that the sense of acceptance, of assurance, had come to him; that for him the Spouse had ever penetrated the veil of the ordinary routine of the means of grace; [82] nothing that corresponded as a matter of clear personal intercourse of the very senses to the greatness of his surrender—who had emptied himself of all other things. Besides, there was some not wholly-explained delay in his reception, in those his last days, of the Sacrament. It was brought to him just in time—"Voici celui que vous avez tant désiré!"—the ministrant says to the dying man. Pascal was then aged thirty-nine—an age you may remember fancifully noted as fatal to genius.
Pascal's "Thoughts," then, we shall not rightly measure but as the outcome, the utterance, of a soul diseased, a soul permanently ill at ease. We find in their constant tension something of insomnia, of that sleeplessness which can never be a quite healthful condition of mind in a human body. Sometimes they are cries, cries of obscure pain rather than thoughts—those great fine sayings which seem to betray by their depth of sound the vast unseen hollow places of nature, of humanity, just beneath one's feet or at one's side. Reading them, so modern still are those thoughts, so rich and various in suggestion, that one seems to witness the mental seed-sowing of the next two centuries, and perhaps more, as to those matters with which he concerns himself. Intuitions of a religious genius, they may well be taken also as the final considerations of the natural man, as a religious inquirer on doubt and faith, and their place in [83] things. Listen now to some of these "Thoughts" taken at random: taken at first for their brevity. Peu de chose nous console, parce que peu de chose nous afflige. Par l'espace l'univers me comprend et m'engloutit comme un point: par la pensée je le comprends. Things like these put us en route with Pascal. Toutes les bonnes maximes sont dans le monde: on ne manque que de les appliquer. The great ascetic was always hard on amusements, on mere pastimes: Le divertissement nous amuse, one and all of us, et nous fait arriver insensiblement à la mort. Nous perdons encore la vie avec joie, pourvu qu'on en parle. On ne peut faire une bonne physionomie (in a portrait) qu'en accordant toutes nos contrariétés. L'homme n'est qu'un roseau, le plus foible de la nature, mais c'est un roseau pensant. Il ne faut pas que l'univers entier s'arme pour l'écraser. Une vapeur, une goutte d'eau, suffit pour le tuer. Mais quand l'univers l'écraseroit, l'homme seroit encore plus noble que se qui le tue, parce qu'il sait qu'il meurt, et l'avantage que l'univers a sur lui, l'univers n'en sait rien. It is not thought by which that excels, but the convincing force of imagination which sublimates its very triteness. Toute notre dignité consiste donc en la pensée.
There, then, you have at random the sort of stuff of which the "Pensees" are made. Let me now briefly indicate, also by quotation again, some of the main leading tendencies in them. La chose la plus importante à toute la vie c'est la [84] choix du métier: le hasard en dispose. There we recognise the manner of thought of Montaigne. Now one of the leading interests in the study of Pascal is to trace the influence upon him of the typical sceptic of the preceding century. Pascal's "Thoughts" we shall never understand unless we realise the under-texture in them of Montaigne's very phrases, the fascination the "Essays" had for Pascal in his capacity of one of the children of light, as giving a veritable compte rendu of the Satanic course of this world since the Fall, set forth with all the persuasiveness, the power and charm, all the gifts of Satan, the veritable light on things he has at his disposal.
Pascal re-echoes Montaigne then in asserting the paradoxical character of man and his experience. The old headings under which the Port-Royalist editors grouped the "Thoughts" recall the titles of Montaigne's "Essays"—"Of the Disproportion of Man," and the like. As strongly as Montaigne he delights in asserting the relative, local, ephemeral and merely provisional character of our ideas of law, vice, virtue, happiness, and so forth. Comme la mode fait l'agrément aussi fait-elle la justice. La justice et la vérité sont deux pointes si subtiles, que nos instruments sont trop mousses pour y toucher exactement. Bien suivant la seule raison n'est juste de soi: tout branle avec le temps. Sometimes he strikes the express accent of Montaigne: Ceux qui sont dans un vaisseau croient que ceux qui sont [85] au bord fuient. Le langage est pareil de tous côtés. Il faut avoir un point fixe pour en juger. Le port juge ceux qui sont dans un vaisseau, mais où prendrons-nous un port dans la morale? At times he seems to forget that he himself and Montaigne are after all not of the same flock, as his mind grazes in those pleasant places. Qu'il (man) se regarde comme égaré dans ce canton détourné de la nature, et de ce petit cachot où il se trouve logé, qu'il apprenne the earth, et soi-même à son juste prix. Il ffre, mais elle est ployable à tous sens; et ainsi il n'y en a point. Un même sens change selon les paroles qui l'expriment. He has touches even of what he calls the malignity, the malign irony of Montaigne. Rien que la médiocrité n'est bon, he says,—épris des hauteurs, as he so conspicuously was—C'est sortir de l'humanité que de sortir du milieu; la grandeur de l'âme humaine consiste à savoir s'y tenir. Rien ne fortifie plus le pyrrhonisme—that is ever his word for scepticism—que ce qu'il y en a qui ne sont pas pyrrhoniens: si tous étaient ils auraient tort. You may even credit him, like Montaigne, with a somewhat Satanic intimacy with the ways, the cruel ways, the weakness, lâcheté, of the human heart, so that, as he says of Montaigne, himself too might be a pernicious study for those who have a native tendency to corruption.
The paradoxical condition of the world, the natural inconsistency of man, his strange [86] blending of meanness with ancient greatness, the caprices of his status here, of his power and attainments, in the issue of his existence—that is what the study of Montaigne had enforced on Pascal as the sincere compte rendu of experience. But then he passes at a tangent from the circle of the great sceptic's apprehension. That prospect of man and the world, undulant, capricious, inconsistent, contemptible, lâche, full of contradiction, with a soul of evil in things good, irreducible to law, upon which, after all, Montaigne looks out with a complacency so entire, fills Pascal with terror. It is the world on the morrow of a great catastrophe, the casual forces of which have by no means spent themselves. Yes! this world we see, of which we are a part, with its thousand dislocations, is precisely what we might expect as resultant from the Fall of Man, with consequences in full working still. It presents the appropriate aspect of a lost world, though with beams of redeeming grace about it, those, too, distributed somewhat capriciously to chosen people and elect souls, who, after all, can have but an ill time of it here. Under the tragic éclairs of divine wrath essentially implacable, the gentle, pleasantly undulating, sunny, earthly prospect of poor loveable humanity which opens out for one in Montaigne's "Essays," becomes for Pascal a scene of harsh precipices, of threatening heights and depths—the depths of his own nothingness. Vanity: nothingness: these [87] are his catchwords: Nous sommes incapables et du vrai et du bien; nous sommes tous condamnés. Ce qui y paraît (i.e., what we see in the world) ne marque ni une exclusion totale ni une présence manifeste de divinité, mais la présence d'un Dieu qui se cache: (Deus absconditus, that is a recurrent favourite thought of his) tout porte ce caractère. In this world of abysmal dilemmas, he is ready to push all things to their extremes. All or nothing; for him real morality will be nothing short of sanctity. En Jésus Christ toutes les contradictions sont accordées. Yet what difficulties again in the religion of Christ! Nulle autre religion n'a proposé de se haïr. La seule religion contraire à la nature, contraire au sens commun, est la seule qui ait toujours été.
Multitudes in every generation have felt at least the aesthetic charm of the rites of the Catholic Church. For Pascal, on the other hand, a certain weariness, a certain puerility, a certain unprofitableness in them is but an extra trial of faith. He seems to have little sense of the beauty of holiness. And for his sombre, trenchant, precipitous philosophy there could be no middle terms; irresistible election, irresistible reprobation; only sometimes extremes meet, and again it may be the trial of faith that the justified seem as loveless and unlovely as the reprobate. Abêtissez-vous! A nature, you may think, that would magnify things to the utmost, nurse, expand them beyond their natural bounds by his [88] reflex action upon them. Thus revelation is to be received on evidence, indeed, but an evidence conclusive only on a presupposition or series of presuppositions, evidence that is supplemented by an act of imagination, or by the grace of faith, shall we say? At any rate, the fact is, that the genius of the great reasoner, of this great master of the abstract and deductive sciences, turned theologian, carrying the methods of thought there formed into the things of faith, was after all of the imaginative order. Now hear what he says of imagination: Cette faculté trompeuse, qui semble nous être donnée exprès pour nous induire à une erreur nécessaire. That has a sort of necessity in it. What he says has again the air of Montaigne, and he says much of the same kind: Cette superbe puissance ennemie de la raison, combien toutes les richesses de la terre sont insuffisantes sans son consentement. The imagination has the disposition of all things: Elle fait la beauté, la justice, et le bonheur, qui est le tout du monde. L'imagination dispose de tout. And what we have here to note is its extraordinary power in himself. Strong in him as the reasoning faculty, so to speak, it administered the reasoning faculty in him à son grbut he was unaware of it, that power d'autant plus fourbe qu'elle ne l'est pas toujours. Hidden under the apparent rigidity of his favourite studies, imagination, even in them, played a large part. Physics, mathematics were with him largely matters of intuition, anticipation, [89] precocious discovery, short cuts, superb guessing. It was the inventive element in his work and his way of putting things that surprised those best able to judge. He might have discovered the mathematical sciences for himself, it is alleged, had his father, as he once had a mind to do, withheld him from instruction in them.
About the time when he was bidding adieu to the world, Pascal had an accident. As he drove round a corner on the Seine side to cross the bridge at Neuilly, the horses were precipitated down the bank into the water. Pascal escaped, but with a nervous shock, a certain hallucination, from which he never recovered. As he walked or sat he was apt to perceive a yawning depth beside him; would set stick or chair there to reassure himself. We are now told, indeed, that that circumstance has been greatly exaggerated. But how true to Pascal's temper, as revealed in his work, that alarmed precipitous character in it! Intellectually the abyss was evermore at his side. Nous avons, he observes, un autre principe d'erreur, les maladies. Now in him the imagination itself was like a physical malady, troubling, disturbing, or in active collusion with it....
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