Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/397

Rh of the Hôtel there is a good deal of coarseness; in the refinements of style which they cultivate, a large admixture of the precious and fantastic. But before the first sixty years of the century are over, modern French prose has taken shape. In moulding it, the two great influences of classicism are at work. Balzac represents the one, the influence of society and its conscious pursuit of dignity and elegance; Descartes stands for the other, the rationalist requirement of precision and order; Pascal combines the two. It may be that the actual influence of Descartes' own style on French prose has been exaggerated. Even so, it would not affect the claim of the new scientific method to have been the principal shaping influence. For Pascal, about whose importance all critics are at one, was educated in that method, and was fully conscious of what right thinking requires of the medium it is to use—precision in the definition of words, and logical order. The method of right thinking is "de n'employer aucun terme dont on n'eût auparavant expliqué nettement le sens: l'autre, de n'avancer jamais aucune proposition qu'on ne démontrât par des vérités déjà connues." When Pascal opened his attack on Arnauld's judges in the Lettres Provinciales, it was by showing the ambiguity of the terms in use, and how, in consequence, the innocence or guiltiness of a doctrine was made to depend not on its meaning but on the person who uttered it. But Pascal was not merely a philosopher. Before he wrote the Provinciales he had been a man of the world; and he knew how little capable the honnête homme is of