ONCE and again there has occurred a resurrection of some great mind upon the European necropolis: the instances are more than a very few; and some of them have been marked by peculiar circumstances. To such an instance we have now to ask the reader's attention: it is that of PASCAL-not indeed quite a recent event in the daily sense of the word, for it is not of this year, nor of last year; but yet it is recent, if the time that has Pensées de Pascal, publiées dans leur Texte Authentique; avec un Commentaire Suivi, et une Etude Littéraire. Par ERNEST HAVET, Ancien élève de l'Ecole, Normale, Maitre de Conférences à cette Ecole, Agregé de la Faculté des Lettres de Paris. Paris. 1852. Studies on Pascal. By the late ALEXANDER VINET, D.D., Professor of Theology in Lausanne, Switzerland. Translated from the French by the Rev. THOMAS SMITH, A.M. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. 1859. VOL. LV.-No. 2 PHILOSOPHER." * elapsed since its occurrence be put in comparison with the length of that period almost two centuries-during which an unreal, or a disguised Pascal, has stood before the world on the pedestal which the genuine Pascal ought from the first to have occupied. We have said that more than a very few instances of a literary resurrection, resembling the one now in view, have taken place in our European necropolis; and yet none that is quite of the same kind. Aristotle rested in his sepulcher for centuries, entombed-strange to think of it! embalmed, in Arabic; from which Oriental swaddling he came forth to domineer over the world of mind, in his own Greek, during other long centuries. And so Herodotus, as to his authenticity-as to his historic vitality, has, in these last times, risen from the dead. As lately as 10 -is well known, and is duly remembered. A recollection of that sad history is indeed needed in framing as good an apology as the case admits of, for the timid and unwarrantable conduct of his friends, the first editors of the Pensées. Gibbon's time the "Father of History" was often contemptuously spoken of, as a teller of stories, a collector of fables for children; but since that age of ill-considered skepticism, this affluent Greek, with his easy Ionic graces, has stepped forward -steady has been his tread; and he now The leading facts, concerning the liter lives among us anew, as "an authority." ary history of Pascal's posthumous wriInstances similar might soon fill a page. tings, are given at length by the editor of Passing by men of second-rate fame, the edition which is now before us. think of Bacon-one might even put on Briefly stated, they are these:-Pascal, this list his wonderful namesake Roger- from the moment of his abandonment of but take the illustrious Lord Bacon: his secular studies, or soon afterward, and little was he read, little was he thought of his dedication of his great powers of of, seldom was he named, until the morn- mind exclusively to religious purposes, ing hour of our now young, modern phy- had entertained-so it has been supposed sical sciences! It is within the recollec-the project of composing, in the most tion of some now living that the Novum Organon, and the De Augmentis, have come to take a prominent and an undisputed place in the canonical philosophic literature of Europe. If we should not affirm the same of John Milton, yet we may say it of Paradise Lost, which, after a long doze, started into life at the call of Addison, in the Saturday Spectators. Blaise Pascal, author of the Lettres de Louis de Montalte, has indeed lived on, in the open day; but as to Pascal, the author of the Pensées, it is not so much se pulture as pillory that he has endured these two hundred years. The author of the Thoughts-the genuine and the fiery utterances of this soul, so profound, so calm, and yet so intense-this mind, hard and geometric, yet warm and sensitive beyond bounds-this mind, by structure skeptical, and yet unboundedly believing -this mind, rigid and exact as that of Aristotle-rich, and lofty, and deep, as that of Plato-this true Pascal, after he had first been martyred by his ill-judging and timid friends, was then quartered by the Philistines of the Encyclopedia; and while he has been admired for qualities he had not, he has been defrauded of his just praise. The real Pascal has at length been rescued, as from his friends, so from his enemies. We may presume that to some of our readers the circumstances of this long obscuration, and of this recent recovery of the genuine Thoughts of Pascal, are not unknown. On this supposition, we shall be the more brief in relating them. We must also suppose that, in outline at least, the tragical history of the society of Port Royal-which has once and again been brought into view before the English public rigidly logical manner, a treatise in proof, first of Theism, and then of the Christian Revelation. Full of the grandeur of this purpose-great indeed in his view of it, and of the extent and the difficulty of the task-he postponed to a distant time that sort of ordering of the various subjects before him which must have preceded a formal commencement of it. To a time of leisure, and of recovered health perhaps -to years which, in his thirtieth year, were yet in his prospect-he reserved this preliminary labor. Meantime, to prevent the loss of any valuable materials, and to secure the daily products of his teeming mind, and at the same time, perhaps, to preclude the supposition on the part of survivors that these loose materials were all, or nearly all, that he had intended to make them, it was his habit to intrust to any chance fragments of paper the thoughts of each passing moment. Loose materials indeed-fragmentary, and elliptical, and enigmatical, and often interlined, and blotted, and sometimes quite illegible-were these scraps. Nevertheless, if Pascal's Thoughts were scraps in form-if they were scraps to the eye, they possessed a golden continuity of their own-they had an intrinsic oneness; there was in them a coherence, a unity of intention, which belonged to them as being the out-beamings of a mind great in its own tranquil luminousness translucent and incandescent itself throughout its substance. So is it that all these sparks have all the same splendor; and so does the iron, when it is struck at a white heat, fill the space around the anvil with flaming diamonds. The mass of writings accumulated in this manner, in the course of some ten had been expunged-they are not, in truth, as to their literary quality, as rough as they seem:-this, their appearance would give a false idea of them as compositions. Pascal was a most severe critic of his own style: slow was he in satisfying himself, (so have the best writers always been ;) exact was he in his requirements, as to his choice of words; and still more severe was he in the adjustment of his thoughts; for he combined, in a remarkable manner, the rigid geometric years, was great;-it was a pile of manu- | are, bits, rendered illegible often by interscripts that came into the hands of Pas- lineations, and by many erasures, and by cal's literary executors. But who were the reïnsertion of words and phrases that these? They were the trembling expectants of every wrong which the malice of Jesuitism, and the stolid fanaticism of the Court-its tool, might please to inflict. This the cruel position of the heads of the Jansenist sect, at that time-must, in justice, be kept in view for mitigating the heavy blame which, at the first moment, one is inclined to throw upon them. But the course pursued at that critical moment in the religious fate of France, by those excellent men-Nicole, Arnauld, and others, involved consequences which they temper-abstemious in terms, inexorable did not which they could not, have foreseen; and it is partly in regard to these consequences, fatal as they have been, that we are now proposing to bring the facts under the reader's notice. If any one should ask, What is the present religious condition of our nearest neighbors ?-an answer to that question must carry us up from one generation of men to the next above it; nor will it be possible to stop, in pursuing the line of moral causation, until we reach the time when the bloodshedding of the Reign of Terror finds its true explication in the blood-shedding of the St. Bartholomew. A strict connection, an unbroken thread of influencessome of them, indeed, highly attenuated, and yet real-give a continuity to this series of events. And dare any one now affirm that this same thread is snapped, and that, from the time of the founding of the revolutionary empire, onward, all things in France-its religion and its irreligion together-have taken a fresh start, and that thus the things of to-day have no hold upon the past? We may not profess to think this; nor may we believe that the great evolution of the French mind, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, has yet been sealed, as if for oblivion, and that it will never repeat itself in that country. We return, then, for a moment to the circumstances that attended the first publication of this remarkable collection-the Thoughts of Pascal. In relating them, we regard as trustworthy the summary of facts prefixed by M. Ernest Havet to his edition, and most of which are attested in other recent publications. Rough-cast and fragmentary as these Thoughts must appear, if we are looking at Pascal's autograph-morsels as they in the excision of whatever he thought superfluous-with a freedom, a spirit, and even a license of speech, which had much of the dramatic cast. It is this freedom which now imparts so much freshness to the Thoughts, but which alarmed his scrupulous friends of Port Royal, who misused a frigid discretion in drawing the pen through every startling word and phrase that made their nice ears to tingle. So it is, therefore, that what some of us, years ago, were used to think a rather heavy book, reads now, in these recent recensions, almost like Moliere, and too often like Rouchefoucauld. It is amusing to trace the instances-hundreds of such instances there are in which the pious Nicole, and others, his coädjutors, have disguised the bright and witty author of the Provincial Letters, by putting upon him the broad brim and the straight-cut drab coat of Port Royal Quakerism! Although so spirited and so free, Pascal wrote on morals and religion in as severe a manner as if he were framing the demonstration of a geometric theorem. It was his aim so to write, says his modern editor, as that there should not be a word too much—not a word wanting; no false graces-no conventional utterances; nothing so said that the author should appear rather than the man. He did not hesitate to repeat a word in a sentence, if it was the most proper word for the occasion; and he would at any time do this, rather than, merely for avoiding a repetition, introduce a word that was less proper. In his compositions, every thing of ornament -luxe-was cut off; and if, as a writer, Pascal is elegant, this word must be understood in the sense in which mathematicians apply it sometimes to a demon stration. He turns upon and works his than their own foregone or suppressthought tourmente son idée-in such ed much; and this perhaps they might manner as shall bring it out, clear of think themselves at liberty to do; but mistake; and, in doing this, he pays at- they had dared to substitute words, tention, not merely to the choice of phrases, sentences of their own, in place terms, but to the order in which they of the flashing, the burning words and are presented. Nothing was more im- phrases of their departed friend. Alportant in his view than order; nor most every one of those dramatic turns any thing more difficult to this end he of expression which, in truth, are the labored-he spared no labor; he would natural out-speakings of a mind and soul revise and correct what he had written so teeming with life, so sharp, so robust, eight or ten times over, where every are either smoothed over, or are simone but himself would have said it was ply struck out! Feeble wisdom, indeed, admirably expressed at the first. If, in was this! The fearless Montalte, wieldfact, Pascal has written little, and nothing ing his own two-edged, terrible weaof a much extended kind, this was not pon of logic and satire, had once saved merely so thinks his editor - because Port Royal. Was it not an error, then, health and strength for doing so failed not to allow the same champion, wielding him, but because the rigorousness of the the same weapon again, and, as if startcriticism to which he subjected his coming from his grave, to save Port Royal positions was such, that the execution of any work on a large scale would have been, to him, a task and a labor exceed ing the powers of human nature. It has often been said that, if Pascal had completed the Thoughts-that is to say, had brought his materials into form, as a finished composition-it would have been a work of matchless excellence. There du monde à lo déchiffrer. This being may, however, be reason to doubt whether a finished work ever and again commenced anew-could have come from under his hand; and there is room also, with another of his editors, to say that, admirable writer as he is when he finishes any thing, he is still more to be admired in any instance in which he was cut short. At the time of Pascal's death, in 1662, the establishment at Port Royal, and the Jansenist body, was in doubtful conflict with their powerful and ruthless enemies, the Jesuits. His papers came into the hands of his friends of Port Royal, who appear to have hesitated long as to the expediency, or the safety to themselves, of giving them publicity. It was not until seven years afterward, in 1669, that what is called the Port Royal edition of the Pensées appeared; and, during this lapse of time, the worthy and learned persons of that body had, at their leisure, not only deciphered the autograph, which was a very difficult task, but they had, at their discretion, and with too little regard to the limits of their responsibility in the execution of such a task-editing the products of a mind of immeasurably greater compass anew? The Port Royal editor, Stephen Perier, in his preface, speaking of the huge, disorderly collection of papers which came into the hands of his friends, says of them and we may well believe it that tout cela était si imparfait et si mal écrit, qu'on a eu toutes les peines - for the case, these good men might have |