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276 Balzac were doing for style in verse and prose. The famous method of the Discours, the cultivation of doubt not for its own sake but that from it may emerge the "clear and distinct" first principles of a rational system of knowledge, stands in the same relation to the eclectic and sceptical thought of Montaigne as Malherbe's and Balzac's ideal of style to that writer's rhetorical canon, "c'est aux paroles à servir et à suivre et que le Gascon y arrive si le François n'y peut aller." The attempt has even been made to represent the classical ideal as the æsthetic expression of the Cartesian philosophy, but as M. Lanson justly says, Cartesian æsthetic would reduce art to science, identifying beauty with truth. Rational and ordered truth is an important constituent of the classical ideal in French literature and criticism, but it is not the whole of that ideal, which includes the dignity and elegance that mark it as the product of a polite and cultured society nourished on the literature of antiquity. Descartes' own style has little emotional quality. It is clear, precise, and occasionally felicitous in figure, but the sentences are long and weighted with subordinate clauses,—the adequate reflection of the author's methodical comprehensive thought and purely intellectual purpose. He had not Balzac's desire to rouse admiration, and the only persuasion he sought was intellectual conviction, so that there is no place in his style for elaborate colour or cadence.

It was the wish to gain the heart and the will as well as the understanding which gave to Pascal's