," edited at last by Faugere, in 1844, from Pascal's own
MSS., in the National Library, they group themselves into certain
definite trains [75] of speculation and study. But it is still,
nevertheless, as isolated thoughts, as inspirations, so to call them,
penetrating what seemed hopelessly dark, summarising what seemed
hopelessly confused, sticking fast in men's memories, floating lightly,
or going far, that they have left so deep a mark in literature. For
again the manner, also, their style precisely becomes them. The merits
of Pascal's style, indeed, as of the French language itself, still is
to say beaucoup de choses en peu de mots; and the brevity, the
discerning edge, the impassioned concentration of the language are here
one with the ardent immediate apprehensions of his spirit.

One of the literary merits of the "Provincial Letters" is that they are
really like letters; they are essentially a conversation by writing
with other persons. What we have in the "Thoughts" is the conversation
of the writer with himself, with himself and with God, or rather
concerning Him, for He is, in Pascal's favourite phrase from the
Vulgate, Deus absconditus, He who never directly shows Himself. Choses
de coeur the "Thoughts" are, indeed those of an individual, though they
seem to have determined the very outlines of a great subject for all
other persons. In Pascal, at the summit of the Puy de Dome in his
native Auvergne, experimenting on the weight of the invisible air,
proving it to be ever all around by its effects, we are presented with
one of the more pleasing [76] aspects of his earlier, more wholesome,
open-air life. In the great work of which the "Thoughts" are the first
head, Pascal conceived himself to be doing something of the same kind
in the spiritual order by a demonstration of this other invisible world
all around us, with its really ponderable forces, its movement, its
attractions and repulsions, the world of grace, unseen, but, as he
thinks, the one only hypothesis that can explain the experienced,
admitted facts. Whether or not he was fixing permanently in the
"Pensees" the outlines, the principles, of a great system of assent, of
conviction, for acceptance by the intellect, he was certainly fixing
these with all the imaginative depth and sufficiency of Shakespeare
himself, the fancied opposites, the attitudes, the necessary forms of
pathos,+ of a great tragedy in the heart, the soul, the essential human
tr