“‘You can have no idea how much I am obliged to you for the Letter you sent me,’ writes a friend to a lady; ‘it is so very ingenious, and so nicely written. It narrates without narrating. It clears up the most intricate matters possible; its raillery is exquisite; it enlightens those who know little of the subject, and imparts double delight to those who understand it. It is an admirable apology; and if they would take it, a delicate and innocent censure. In short, the Letter displays so much art, so much spirit, and so much judgment, that I burn with curiosity to know who wrote it.’”
This is the report of the Provincial; and if it is Pascal himself who speaks, he had little idea that his own page 131badinage would be echoed by grave critics, in after-years, as not in excess of the actual merit of his productions. “The best comedies of Molière,” says Voltaire, “have not more wit than the first Provincial Letters.” It must be admitted that the brightness of the wit is somewhat dimmed after the lapse of two centuries. Even the genius of Pascal fails to lighten all the tortuous absurdities of controversies so purely verbal, and there is an occasional baldness in the clever device of pitting Molinist, New Thomist, and Jansenist against one another. The professed artlessness of the speeches is at times too apparent. But nothing, upon the whole, can be finer than the address with which this is done; the changes of scene and the turns of the dialogue are managed with admirable felicity; there is an exquisite fitness and Socratic point in all the evolutions of the argument, which we feel even now when we see so clearly behind the scenes, and know that Molinist and New Thomist must have had a good deal more to say for themselves. We have only to imagine the atmosphere of the Sorbonne, or the wider social atmosphere throughout France in the seventeenth century,