ask of God," answered the monk. "Besides, in the present case, the
thing was impossible, for this same opinion is of more recent standing
than the Breviary. You are not a good chronologist, friend. But, not
to wander from the point, let me request your attention to the
following passage, cited by Diana from Gaspar Hurtado (_De Sub.
Pecc._, diff. 9; Diana, p. 5; tr. 14, r. 99), one of Escobar's
four-and-twenty fathers: 'An incumbent may, without any mortal sin,
desire the decease of a life-renter on his benefice, and a son that of
his father, and rejoice when it happens; provided always it is for the
sake of the profit that is to accrue from the event, and not from
personal aversion.'"
"Good," cried I. "That is certainly a very happy hit, and I can easily
see that the doctrine admits of a wide application. But yet there are
certain cases, the solution of which, though of great importance for
gentlemen, might present still greater difficulties."
"Propose such, if you please, that we may see," said the monk.
"Show me, with all your directing of the intention," returned I, "that
it is allowable to fight a duel."
"Our great Hurtado de Mendoza," said the father, "will satisfy you on
that point in a twinkling. 'If a gentleman,' says he, in a passage
cited by Diana, 'who is challenged to fight a duel, is well known to
have no religion, and if the vices to which he is openly and
unscrupulously addicted are such as would lead people to conclude, in
the event of his refusing to fight, that he is actuated, not by the
fear of God, but by cowardice, and induce them to say of him that he
was a _hen_, and not a man--_gallina, et non vir_; in that case he
may, to save his honor, appear at the appointed spot--not, indeed,
with the express intention of fighting a duel, but merely with that of
defending himself, should the person who challenged him come there
unjustly to attack him. His action in this case, viewed by itself,
will be perfectly indifferent; for what moral evil is there in one's
stepping into a field, taking a stroll in expectation of meeting a
person, and defending one's self in the event of being attacked? And
thus the gentleman is guilty of no sin whatever; for, in fact, it
cannot be called accepting a challenge at all, his intention being
directed to other circumstances, and the acceptance of a challenge
consisting in an express intention to fight, which we are supposing
the gentleman never had.'"
The humorous irony of Pascal, in the "Provincial Letters," plays like
the diffusive sheen of an aurora borealis over the whole surface of the
composition. It does not often deliver itself startlingly in sudden
discharges as of lightning. You need to school your sense somewhat, not
to miss a fine effect now and then. Consider the broadness and
coarseness in pleasantry, that, before Pascal, had been common, almost
universal, in controversy, and you will better understand what a
creative touch it was of genius, of feeling, and of taste, that brought
into literature the far more than Attic, the ineffable Christian, purity
of that wit and humor in the "Provincial Letters" which will make these
writings live as long as men anywhere continue to read the productions
of past ages. Erasmus, perhaps, came the nearest of all modern
predecessors to anticipating the purified pleasantry of Pascal.
It will be interesting and instructive to see Pascal's own statement of
his reasons for adopting the bantering style which he did in the
"Provincial Letters," as well as of the sense of responsibility to be
faithful and fair, under which he wrote. Pascal says:
I have been asked why I employed a pleasant, jocose, and diverting
style. I reply ... I thought it a duty to write so as to be
comprehended by women, and men of the world, that they might know the
danger of their maxims and propositions which were then universally
propagated.... I have been asked, lastly, if I myself read all the
books, which I quoted. I answer, No. If I had done so, I must have
passed a great part of my life in reading very bad books; but I read
Escobar twice through, and I employed some of my friends in reading
the others. But I did not make use of a single passage without having
myself read it in the book from which it is cited, without having
examined the subject of which it treats, and without having read what
went before and followed, so that I might run no risk of quoting an
objection as an answer which would have been blameworthy and unfair.
Of the wit of the "Provincial Letters," their wit and their
controversial effectiveness, the specimens given will have afforded
readers some approximate idea. We must deny ourselves the gratification
of presenting a brief passage, which we had selected and translated for
the purpose, to exemplify from the same source Pascal's serious
eloquence. It was Voltaire who said of these productions: "Moliere's
best comedies do not excel them in wit, nor the compositions of Bossuet
in sublimity." Something of Bossuet's sublimity, or of a sublimity
perhaps finer than Bossuet's, our readers will discover in citations to
follow from the "Thoughts."
Pascal's "Thoughts," the printed book, has a remarkable history. It was
a posthumous publication. The author died, leaving behind him a
considerable number of detached fragments of composition, first jottings
of thought on a subject that had long occupied his mind. These precious
manuscripts were almost undecipherable. The writer had used for his
purpose any chance scrap of paper--old wrapping, for example, or margin
of letter--that, at the critical moment of happy conception, was nearest
his hand. Sentences, words even, were often left unfinished. There was
no coherence, no sequence, no arrangement. It was, however, among his
friends perfectly well understood that Pascal for years had meditated a
work on religion designed to demonstrate the truth of Christianity. For
this he had been thinking arduously. Fortunately he had even, in a
memorable conversation, sketched his project at some length to his Port
Royal friends. With so much, scarcely more, in the way of clew, to guide
their editorial work, these friends prepared and issued a volume of
Pascal's "Thoughts." With the most loyal intentions, the Port-Royalists
unwisely edited too much. They pieced out incompletenesses, they
provided clauses or sentences of connection, they toned down expressions
deemed too bold, they improved Pascal's style! After having suffered
such things from his friends, the posthumous Pascal, later, fell into
the hands of an enemy. The infidel Condorcet published an edition of the
"Thoughts." Whereas the Port-Royalists had suppressed to placate the
Jesuits, Condorcet suppressed to please the "philosophers." Between
those on the one side and these on the other, Pascal's "Thoughts" had
experienced what might well have killed any production of the human mind
that could die. It was not till near the middle of the present century
that Cousin called the attention of the world to the fact that we had
not yet, but that we still might have, a true edition of Pascal's
"Thoughts." M. Faugere took the hint, and, consulting the original
manuscripts, preserved in the national library at Paris, produced, with
infinite editorial labor, almost two hundred years after the thinker's
death, the first satisfactory edition of Pascal's "Thoughts." Since
Faugere, M. Havet has also published an edition of Pascal's works
entire, by him now first adequately annotated and explained. The
arrangement of the "Thoughts" varies in order, according to the varying
judgment of editors. We use, for our extracts, a current translation,
which we modify at our discretion by comparison of the original text as
given in M. Havet's elaborate work.
Our first extract is a passage in which the writer supposes a skeptic of
the more shallow, trifling sort, to speak. This skeptic represents his
own state of mind in the following strain as of soliloquy:
"I do not know who put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor
what I am myself. I am in a frightful ignorance of all things. I do
not know what my body is, what my senses are, what my soul is, and
that very part of me which thinks what I am saying, which reflects
upon every thing and upon itself, and is no better acquainted with
itself than with any thing else. I see these appalling spaces of the
universe which inclose me, and I find myself tethered in one corner of
this immense expansion without knowing why I am stationed in this
place rather than in another, or why this moment of time which is
given me to live is assigned me at this point rather than at another
of the whole eternity that has preceded me, and of that which is to
follow me.
"I see nothing but infinities on every side, which inclose me like an
atom, and like a shadow which endures but for an instant, and returns
no more.
"All that I know is, that I am soon to die; but what I am most
ignorant of is, that very death which I am unable to avoid.
"As I know not whence I came, so I know not whither I go; and I know
only, that in leaving this world I fall forever either into
nothingness or into the hands of an angry God, without knowing which
of these two conditions is to be eternally my lot. Such is my
state--full of misery, of weakness, and of uncertainty.
"And from all this I conclude that I ought to pass all the days of my
life without a thought of trying to learn what is to befall me
hereafter. Perhaps in my doubts I might find some enlightenment; but I
am unwilling to take the trouble, or go a single step in search of it;
and, treating with contempt those who perplex themselves with such
solicitude, my purpose is to go forward without forethought and
without fear to try the great event, and passively to approach death
in uncertainty of the eternity of my future condition."
Who would desire to have for a friend a man who discourses in this
manner? Who would select such a one for the confidant of his affairs?
Who would have recourse to such a one in his afflictions? And, in
fine, for what use of life could such a man be destined?
The central thought on which the projected apologetic of Pascal was to
revolve as on a pivot is, the contrasted greatness and wretchedness of
man--with Divine Revelation, in its doctrine of a fall on man's part
from original nobleness, supplying the needed link, and the only link
conceivable, of explanation, to unite the one with the other, the human
greatness with the human wretchedness. This contrast of dignity and
disgrace should constantly be in the mind of the reader of the
"Thoughts" of Pascal. It will often be found to throw a very necessary
light upon the meaning of the separate fragments that make up the
series.
We now present a brief fragment asserting, with vivid metaphor, at the
same time the fragility of man's frame and the majesty of man's nature.
This is a very famous "Thought":
Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.
It is not necessary that the entire universe arm itself to crush him.
An exhalation, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But were the
universe to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which
kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and knows the advantage
that the universe has over him. The universe knows nothing of it.
Our whole dignity consists, then, in thought.
One is reminded of the memorable saying of a celebrated philosopher: "In
the universe there is nothing great but man; in man there is nothing
great but mind."
What a sudden, almost ludicrous, reduction in scale, the greatness of
Caesar, as conqueror, is made to suffer when looked at in the way in
which Pascal asks you to look at it in the following "Thought"!
(Remember that Caesar, when he began fighting for universal empire, was
fifty-one years of age:)
Caesar was too old, it seems to me, to amuse himself with conquering
the world. This amusement was well enough for Augustus or Alexander;
they were young people, whom it is difficult to stop; but Caesar ought
to have been more mature.
That is as if you should reverse the tube of your telescope, with the
result of seeing the object observed made smaller instead of larger.
The following sentence might be a "Maxim" of La Rochefoucauld. Pascal
was, no doubt, a debtor to him as well as to Montaigne:
I lay it down as a fact, that, if all men knew what others say of them
there would not be four friends in the world.
Here is one of the most current of Pascal's sayings:
Rivers are highways that move on and bear us whither we wish to go.
The following "Thought" condenses the substance of the book proposed
into three short sentences:
The knowledge of God without that of our misery produces pride. The
knowledge of our misery without that of God gives despair. The
knowledge of Jesus Christ is intermediate, because therein we find God
and our misery.
The prevalent seeming severity and intellectual coldness of Pascal's
"Thoughts" yield to a touch from the heart, and become pathetic, in such
utterances as the following, supposed to be addressed by the Saviour to
the penitent seeking to be saved:
Console thyself; thou wouldst not seek me if thou hadst not found me.
I thought on thee in my agony; such drops of blood I shed for thee.
It is austerity again, but not unjust austerity, that speaks as follows:
Religion is a thing so great that those who would not take the pains
to seek it if it is obscure, should be deprived of it. What do they
complain of, then, if it is such that they could find it by seeking
it?
But we must take our leave of Pascal. His was a suffering as well as an
aspiring spirit. He suffered because he aspired. But, at least, he did
not suffer long. He aspired himself quickly away. Toward the last he
wrought at a problem in his first favorite study, that of mathematics,
and left behind him, as a memorial of his later life, a remarkable
result of investigation on the curve called the cycloid. During his
final illness he pierced himself through with many sorrows--unnecessary
sorrows, sorrows, too, that bore a double edge, hurting not only him,
but also his kindred--in practicing, from mistaken religious motives, a
hard repression upon his natural instinct to love, and to welcome love.
He thought that God should be all, the creature nothing. The thought was
half true, but it was half false. God should, indeed, be all. But, in
God, the creature also should be something.
In French history--we may say, in the history of the world--if there are
few brighter, there also are few purer, fames than the fame of Pascal.
IX.
MADAME DE SEVIGNE.
1626-1696.
Of Madame de Sevigne, if it were permitted here to make a pun and a
paradox, one might justly and descriptively say that she was not a woman
of letters, but only a woman of--letters. For Madame de Sevigne's
addiction to literature was not at all that of an author by profession.
She simply wrote admirable private letters in great profusion, and
became famous thereby.
Madame de Sevigne's fame is partly her merit, but it is also partly her
good fortune. She was rightly placed to be what she was. This will
appear from a sketch of her life, and still more from specimens to be
exhibited of her own epistolary writing.
Marie de Rabutin-Chantal was her maiden name. She was born a baroness.
She was married, young, a marchioness. First early left an orphan, she
was afterward early left a widow--not too early, however, to have become
the mother of two children, a son and a daughter. The daughter grew to
be the life-long idol of the widowed mother's heart. The letters she
wrote to this daughter, married and living remote from her, compose the
greater part of that voluminous epistolary production by which Madame de
Sevigne became, without her ever aiming at such a result, or probably
ever thinking of it, one of the classics of the French language.
Madame de Sevigne was wealthy as orphan heiress, and she should have
been wealthy as widow. But her husband was profligate, and he wasted her
substance. She turned out to be a thoroughly capable woman of affairs
who managed her property well. During her long and stainless
widowhood--her husband fell in a shameful duel when she was but
twenty-five years old, and she lived to be seventy--she divided her
time between her estate, "The Rocks," in Brittany, and her residence in
Paris. This period was all embraced within the protracted reign of Louis
XIV., perhaps upon the whole the most memorable age in the history of
France.
Beautiful, and, if not brilliantly beautiful, at least, brilliantly
witty, Madame de Sevigne was virtuous--in that chief sense of feminine
virtue--amid an almost universal empire of profligacy around her. Her
social advantages were unsurpassed, and her social success was equal to
her advantages. She had the woman courtier's supreme triumph in being
once led out to dance by the king--her own junior by a dozen years--no
vulgar king, remember, but the "great" Louis XIV. Her cynical cousin,
himself a writer of power, who had been repulsed in dishonorable
proffers of love by the young marchioness during the lifetime of her
husband--we mean Count Bussy--says, in a scurrilous work of his, that
Madame de Sevigne remarked, on returning to her seat after her
dancing-bout with the king, that Louis possessed great qualities, and
would certainly obscure the luster of all his predecessors. "I could not
help laughing in her face," the ungallant cousin declared, "seeing what
had produced this panegyric." Probably, indeed, the young woman was
pleased. But, whatever may have been her faults or her follies, nothing
can rob Madame de Sevigne of the glory that is hers, in having been
strong enough in womanly and motherly honor to preserve, against many
dazzling temptations, amid general bad example, and even under malignant
aspersions, a chaste and spotless name. When it is added that, besides
access to the royal court itself, this gifted woman enjoyed the familiar
acquaintance of La Rochefoucauld--with other high-bred wits, less
famous, not a few--enough will have been said to show that her position
was such as to give her talent its best possible chance. The French
history of the times of Louis XIV. is hinted in glimpses the most vivid
and the most suggestive, throughout the whole series of the letters.
We owe it to our readers (and to Madame de Sevigne no less) first of all
to let them see a specimen of the affectionate adulation that this
French woman of rank and of fashion, literally in almost every letter of
hers, effuses on her daughter--a daughter who, by the way, seems very
languidly to have responded to such demonstrations:
THE ROCKS, Sunday, June 28, 1671.
You have amply made up to me my late losses; I have received two
letters from you which have filled me with transports of joy. The
pleasure I take in reading them is beyond all imagination. If I have
in any way contributed to the improvement of your style, I did it in
the thought that I was laboring for the pleasure of others, not for my
own. But Providence, who has seen fit to separate us so often, and to
place us at such immense distances from each other, has repaid me a
little for the privation in the charms of your correspondence, and
still more in the satisfaction you express in your situation, and the
beauty of your castle; you represent it to me with an air of grandeur
and magnificence that enchants me. I once saw a similar account of it
by the first Madame de Grignan; but I little thought at that time that
all these beauties were to be one day at your command. I am very much
obliged to you for having given me so particular an account of it. If
I could be tired in reading your letters, it would not only betray a
very bad taste in me, but would likewise show that I could have very
little love or friendship for you. Divest yourself of the dislike you
have taken to circumstantial details. I have often told you, and you
ought yourself to feel the truth of this remark, that they are as dear
to us from those we love as they are tedious and disagreeable from
others. If they are displeasing to us, it is only from the
indifference we feel for those who write them. Admitting this
observation to be true, I leave you to judge what pleasure yours
afford me. It is a fine thing truly to play the great lady, as you do
at present.
Conceive the foregoing multiplied by the whole number of the separate
letters composing the correspondence, and you will have no exaggerated
idea of the display that Madame de Sevigne makes of her regard for her
daughter. This regard was a passion, morbid, no doubt, by excess, and,
even at that, extravagantly demonstrated; but it was fundamentally
sincere. Madame de Sevigne idealized her absent daughter, and literally
"loved but only her." We need not wholly admire such maternal
affection. But we should not criticise it too severely.
We choose next a marvelously vivid "instantaneous view" in words, of a
court afternoon and evening at Versailles. This letter, too is addressed
to the daughter--Madame de Grignan, by her married name. It bears date,
"Paris, Wednesday, 29th July." The year is 1676, and the writer is just
fifty: