the happy epoch, as it has been called, when nature and art were at a just balance and equipoise with each other, and co-operated in the right measure to produce consummate works. Coming at that period it was the glory of Pascal, by the exquisite felicity of his style, to bestow on his countrymen a model of expression, which for purity, clearness, and power of indicating every shade of thought, has never been surpassed, perhaps scarcely ever equalled. I regard Descartes and Pascal,' says the eminent critic and philosopher, M. Victor Cousin, 'as the first two masters of the art of writing.' But it was not by their style alone that these works of Pascal gained the suffrages of the world. They were as original in matter as in form. The latter of them especially, the posthumous Thoughts,' although they were but fragments arbitrarily arranged by his surviving friends, revealed a thinker of intense individuality and force, who, moving in the loftiest regions of philosophical and religious speculation, bared his heart without reserve, and poured forth at white heat the emotions which had been stirred in him by an almost overpowering sense of the mysteries of life. In this union, then, of force with beauty, we have the secret of Pascal's enduring reputation. Both works have achieved a popularity which has proved as lasting as it was immediate. Repeatedly edited, annotated, and translated into other languages, they have become cosmopolitan, and have won the admiration alike of believers and sceptics, of Protestants and Roman Catholics, of philosophers and men of the world.

Confining ourselves for the present to the 'Thoughts,' and the story of their circulation in France, we find that in the original form in which they had been published in 1669, seven years after Pascal's death, they were current in numerous editions for nearly sixty years, the short Life of Pascal' by his sister, Madame Périer, having first appeared in France in the edition of 1687, though printed in Holland three years earlier. In 1727, Colbert, bishop of Montpellier, and again in the following year Father Desmolets, of the Oratory, gave to the public several new fragments, collected from letters and other sources. These additions, with some further pieces, were incorporated by Condorcet in his edition of 1776, in which, unhappily, he took extraordinary liberties with Pascal's text, in toning it down to the taste of the free-thinking philosophers of the Encyclopædia;' and two years later Condorcet's revision was reissued, with fresh notes, by Voltaire. A year afterwards, in 1779, the Abbé Bossut brought out his standard edition of Pascal's complete works in five volumes, containing the whole of his mathematical and physical pieces. In this the Thoughts

appeared

appeared under a novel arrangement, embracing all the additions that had been successively made to the original PortRoyal text, together with several pieces never before printed, but, unfortunately, without rectifying the falsifications introduced into the text by Condorcet. Subsequent editions of the 'Thoughts' followed Bossut's with little or no change, down to M. Frantin's in 1835, which again adopted a new order of arrangement, and suppressed some passages relating to the Jesuits; and what is especially to be noticed is, that throughout this century and a half of repeated publication, during which the book passed through the hands of so many editors, and was so often a subject of comment and eulogy, it continued to be accepted without suspicion as an authentic work, in which Pascal's fragmentary ideas and reflections were truly given to the world in the very words in which he had himself expressed them.

Then came the surprise. As a help towards the preparation by the French Academy of an historical dictionary of the language, M. Cousin had urged on his fellow-Academicians the importance of producing critical editions of some of the French classical authors, whose works might serve for standards, and had undertaken himself to examine whether any revision was needed of the current form of Pascal's Thoughts.' The result was the famous Report, named at the head of this article, which was presented by him to the Academy in 1842, and the effect of which may, without exaggeration, be likened to the shock produced by a sudden and violent explosion. To make the matter intelligible, we must briefly premise that towards the end of his life Pascal had entertained the idea of producing an elaborate work in defence of Christianity against atheists and other sceptics, and in conversation with his Jansenist friends had roughly sketched out the line he proposed to take. The complete breaking up, however, of his health, which speedily followed the forming of this intention, and the unremitted suffering in which the last four years of his life were passed, hindered him from doing more than jot down from time to time, on loose sheets and fragments of paper, sometimes even on the backs of old letters, such ideas as occurred to his mind while brooding over his subject, and seemed likely to be useful in the composition of his book, should his health ever allow him to set himself seriously about it. These fragments were of all lengths, from a page or two to single sentences, sometimes left incomplete, sometimes even breaking-off in the middle of a word: occasionally the same idea appeared in two or three forms, as it was gradually elaborated in his mind. There were times when, Y 2 being

being unable through infirmity to hold a pen, he got some chance visitor, or even a servant, to write down from his dictation the idea which he wished to preserve; but at least nine-tenths of the papers were traced by his own feeble and failing fingers, in a handwriting which not seldom suggests the marks that might have been left by the legs of an insect crawling over the page, and which was rendered still more difficult to decipher by frequent abbreviations, erasures, interlineations, and additions, stuck in anyhow on the margins and corners of the paper. The facsimile of a page, deeply discoloured by time, which is appended to M. Cousin's report, presents to the ordinary reader about as hopeless an enigma as can be imagined. Of these confused and intractable papers, which were collected with religious care by Pascal's friends after his death, an incomplete copy was made, which is still extant, and from this copy the original edition of the Thoughts' was drawn up; while the precious autographs themselves were fastened at random on large folio sheets of paper, and bound in a volume containing altogether 491 pages. This volume afterwards became the property of the Abbé Périer, Pascal's nephew, and by him was deposited in the library of the Abbey of St. Germain-des-Prés, whence, at a later time, it passed to the Bibliothèque du Roi. There it was examined and collated with the published text by M. Cousin, who in his Report expresses in a lively manner the feelings which took possession of him as he pursued his laborious task.

'It was impossible,' he says, 'to look without painful emotion on the great folio book where the failing hand of Pascal had traced, during the agony of his last four years, the thoughts which rose in his mind, and which he deemed might be useful to him some day in composing the great work that he meditated. He threw them in haste on the first scrap of paper that came to hand, in few words, and often even in half a word. Sometimes he dictated them to persons who happened to be present. Pascal's writing is full of abbreviations, ill-formed, almost undecipherable. It is these little papers without order or connection which, collected and pasted on great sheets of paper, compose the manuscript of the "Thoughts."'

But M. Cousin had scarcely begun his labours, when this first emotion was replaced by astonishment at the discovery which soon forced itself upon him. You would be frightened," he goes on to say, at the enormous difference, which the first glance at the original manuscript will show you, between the “Thoughts" of Pascal, as they were written with his own hand, and all the editions, without excepting a single one, not even that of 1669, published by his family and his friends, nor that

of

6

of 1779, which has become the model of all the editions that every year sees put forth.' He then proceeds to give 'samples of the alterations of all kinds' that he had detected; alterations of words, alterations of turns, alterations of phrases, suppressions, substitutions, additions, arbitrary and absurd piecings together, sometimes of a paragraph, sometimes of an entire chapter, by the help of phrases and paragraphs foreign to each other; and, what is worse, decompositions still more arbitrary and truly inconceivable of chapters, which in Pascal's manuscript are perfectly connected in all their parts, and profoundly wrought out.' The original Port-Royal edition is stigmatized by him as 'combining all the faults which ought to have been avoided. (1) It omitted a great part of the "Thoughts" contained in the autograph manuscript, and it omitted precisely the most original, those which laid bare the soul of Pascal, his desolate scepticism, his restless and despairing faith. (2) It changed sometimes in their substance, and weakened almost always in their form, the "Thoughts" which it preserved. (3) It gave a great number of "Thoughts" which are not in the autograph manuscript, and which yet bear the visible imprint of Pascal's hand, without indicating the sources whence they are drawn.' 'I defy analysis,' he exclaims, on reviewing his discoveries, to invent any kind of alteration of the style of a great writer, which the style of Pascal has not suffered at the hands of Port-Royal!'

The utter untrustworthiness of the received text, however, furnished only half the surprise. The world had imagined that in the celebrated Thoughts' it possessed the outlines of a powerful defence of Christianity by a firm believer, in whom reason and faith went harmoniously hand in hand together. Great, therefore, was the astonishment when M. Cousin, having disinterred Pascal's authentic words, proclaimed aloud in the most confident tones that Pascal himself was a sceptic, a Pyrrhonist, whose reason plunged him into a bottomless abyss of doubt, out of which he could discover no escape except by a convulsive resolve to shut his eyes, and at all hazards believe. 'The very substance of Pascal's soul,' says the Report,' was a universal scepticism, against which he found no asylum but in a faith voluntarily blind; the difficulties which he encountered his reason did not surmount, but his will pushed aside, and his last, his true, answer is, that he will not have annihilation.' The ideas of Pascal,' it says in another place,' are not a play of his intellect; it is the painful travail of his soul: they penetrate it, they consume it; it is the fiery dart fastened in his side, and he soothes his pain in expressing it.' And

again, the man in Pascal does not resign himself to the scepticism of the philosopher; his reason cannot believe, but his heart needs to believe. To the heartrending scepticism which he thus discovers in the authentic Thoughts M. Cousin attributes the extraordinary mutilation which they underwent at the hands of his editors. There escape from Pascal, in the midst of the fits of his convulsive devotion, cries of misery and despair which neither Port-Royal, nor Desmolets, nor Bossut have dared to repeat.' And taking this view, it was but natural for M. Cousin to point out how essentially Pascal's religion, such as he conceived it to have been, differed from the reasonable, wholesome faith of the Church. His religion is not the Christianity of the Arnaulds and Malebranches, of the Fénelons and Bossuets, the solid and sweet fruit of reason and heart in a well-conditioned and wisely cultivated soul; it is a bitter fruit, ripened in the desolate region of doubt, under the arid breath of despair.'

The

Such was the tenour of this celebrated Report, and, proceeding from a philosopher and critic of the very eminent standing of M. Cousin, its effect could not fail to be immense. Pascal literature was already considerable, and appeared to comprise almost everything that could be said on its illustrious subject, but under this fresh impulse it at once entered on an enormous extension; the withered stock blossomed anew, and has ever since been yielding abundant fruit. The first result was the publication, in 1844, by M. Prosper Faugère, of an edition of the 'Thoughts,' reproducing with the severest accuracy every decipherable word and even half-word of the autograph manuscript, which, he says in his preface, we have read, or rather studied, page by page, line by line, syllable by syllable, from the beginning to the end, and with the exception of a certain number of words, which we have taken care to mark as illegible, it has passed entire into our edition.' It was a work which severely tasked both eye and brain, but he wrought at it, he says, not only with patience, but with an indefatigable passion: and it had its recompense, for as Principal Tulloch remarks, Nothing can deprive M. Faugère of the credit of being the first editor of a complete and authentic text of the "Pensées." In some respects, indeed, the work failed to satisfy the more fastidious of Pascal's admirers. The grouping of the fragments was after a scheme of M. Faugère's own, founded on indications which he imagined himself able to trace in Pascal's notes; and it was objected to as being fanciful, and even misleading, as well as novel. Besides, M. Faugère printed indiscriminately everything that was found in the medley of the autograph