Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1940. Pp. x + 108.
Cambridge Review, 63 (29 Nov 1941) 124
Every student of Pascal in this country must be acquainted with Dr. Stewart’s earlier book, The Holiness of Pascal. 1 The title of this second small book does not reveal its meaning so clearly; but it is as well that we should be provoked to read the book in order to find out what the secret is. It is, for the purpose of this book, Pascal’s style. French critics have analysed and criticised this famous style, but an explanation of it for English readers can best be given by an English critic, and no one is better qualified, first, by his knowledge of theology and erudition in French literature, and, second – what is equally important – by a lifelong devotion to Pascal, than is Dr. Stewart. 2
The book consists of three chapters: Pascal in Debate, Pascal as Moralist, and Pascal as Poet. The second chapter is not so directly concerned with style as the first and third. We admit, that with Pascal if with anyone, it is impossible to appreciate so ardent a style without some understanding of what he was ardent about; my only criticism of this second chapter – which is perhaps merely a complaint that the book is so brief – is that one would like to see Pascal as moralist set in his proper place in that great French tradition of moralists – a tradition so definite in France as to produce its own genre– which begins with Montaigne, which proceeds to La Bruyère and Vauvenargues, which comprehends minor figures like Chamfort and Rivarol, and which is even at the back of a book most agreeably read in a French translation, Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann. 3 It is true that Dr. Stewart says significantly, in describing the composition of a particular penséein his third chapter, that Pascal “has his Montaigne in hand or in his head” [65], but one would have liked to find a more general statement of the relationship of the two writers. 4
In the first chapter, Dr. Stewart is, of course, concerned with the Provinciales. 5 Whether Pascal was quitefair to his antagonists (who certainly were not fair to him), whether he did not sometimes pounce with glee upon the works of the more unlucky exponents of the principles of 193their order, whether he was not sometimes carried to excess by delight in the exercise of his own prowess, are questions about which I have doubts, but which I have not the learning to resolve: Dr. Stewart, certainly, is convinced of Pascal’s rightness. At one point, however, it seems to me that he reprimands Pascal without justification. Pascal has said of the Jesuits: “they have such a good opinion of themselves that they think it useful and almost necessary for the welfare of religion that their credit should spread until all consciences pass into their keeping.” 6 If the Jesuits in question thought this, they may have been mistaken, but I fail to see that Pascal’s accusation is, as Dr. Stewart takes it to be, an “accusation of personal ambition” [15]. Whether Pascal accused them of personal ambition or not, he does not appear to be doing so in this passage. But in the matter of style, certainly, Dr. Stewart does, in the second chapter, make a very important point in favour of Pascal against the Jesuits. He points out that In the first half of the seventeenth century a wave of bad taste swept over France, tainting every branch of intellectual activity; and the Society of Jesus, which might have taken as its second motto humani nihil a me alienum puto, did not escape the infection. 7 [30]
The wave of bad taste was not, of course, limited in its motion to France. It rises in...
