Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/299

Rh premises for many of our conclusions are too subtle and complex to be isolated and fixed in definitions. To judge aright of many things in life we require "finesse," "l'esprit de justesse," tact, and to persuade we require to possess the art of pleasing. "L'art de persuader consiste en celui d'agréer plutôt qu'en celui de convaincre, tant les hommes se gouvernent plus par caprice que par raison." The heart is reached by another way than the mind: "Jésus Christ, Saint Paul ont l'ordre de la charité, non de l'esprit; car ils voulaient échauffer, non instruire." Thus eloquence excluded for its own sake returns as a legitimate instrument with which to awaken the love of God and the hatred of evil. And Pascal's eloquence is unsurpassed. The shining clearness, the unerring dialectic, the humour, the irony, the grave expostulation of the Lettres Provinciales, are unequalled in literature since the Platonic dialogues; and fragmentary as the Pensées are, the style, as the subject permits, is in parts even more vibrating and imaginative. The description of man, a nothing between two infinites; of his pursuit of diversion to escape from himself; the image of the reed that thinks, have the force and beauty of the finest passages of the Republic. In Plato's and Pascal's eloquence there is no shadow of the rhetoric "qui nous destourne à soy." In Pascal's hands French prose became a medium of such lucidity and precision, such delicacy and resource, that to a foreigner it seems as though it were almost impossible for a Frenchman to write obscurely.