Léon Hennique Novel

The most striking characteristic of the seventeenth century is its obsession with thought. To this altar it sacrifices everything: the soaring imagination of the chansons de geste, even its pride in national glory. One thing alone matters—to fathom the essence of those mysteries its forebears were happy simply to dream about.

Many who have judged this age have fallen into error, I believe, by seeing only one side of its dual nature: either the pagan strain it inherited from the Renaissance, or the purely Christian element which, after its brief entanglement with pagan influences and the civil wars of heresy, emerged triumphant alongside the political victory of Divine Right. Yet surely when the new spirit raided the mythological storehouse of antiquity, it sought mere window-dressing, artistic scaffolding for those profound meditations that alone held value. It sought a gossamer veil of dream that left unchallenged the supremacy of ideal realities.

Ideal Realities—here precisely lies the seventeenth century’s sole preoccupation. Ideal Realities: God, the World, the Human Soul. These three terms float free in pure speculation, suspended in that rarefied atmosphere of general ideas and metaphysical abstractions. Priests, Philosophers and Poets alike wield Aristotle’s logic, though not his philosophy. They are Platonists through and through, whether they admit it or deny it. From Aristotle they take only his dialectical toolkit, and that secondhand through the Scholastics and Aquinas. From Plato they inherit faith in the Ideal Forms, dwelling entirely in this ethereal realm.

Christianity figures here as something less than the spirit of the age, for even Descartes—who locks his religious beliefs safely away in a Holy of Holies and commands as much scientific knowledge as any man of his time—instinctively distrusts the evidence of the senses, finding solid ground only in the self-evidence of pure thought.

Descartes’s vision of humanity is not merely generalised but utterly idealised, with mind as absolute sovereign. Nowhere is this more stark than in his Traité des Passions. This same conception of man belongs equally to Bossuet. Though he acknowledges the distinction Scripture draws between ‘the old man’ and ‘the new man’, his genius imposes Gospel law upon what amounts to an eternal abstraction of reason. Even these twin concepts of ‘new man’ and ‘old man’ he lifts straight from Holy Writ. But ‘ancient man’ and ‘modern man’? Bossuet cannot tell them apart.

Only two poles exist for him, between which he labours to broker a reverent accord: God and man. In this enterprise, time’s mutations simply don’t signify. Only the God and Man of all ages concern him, only eternal verities. Novelty he loathes. If he is himself a dazzling innovation in literary artistry—a point of view he would have scorned—he delights in the majestic reiteration of unchanging truths, raising affirmation like a bronze rampart against the doubts of the century. Like Moses on his mountain, he stands firm upon the rock of faith.

This faith he shields from internal corruption, guards in its divine wholeness against the cursed spirit of schism. Yet like Moses too, his care extends only to the Chosen People, whom he watches over jealously against heresy, against Protestant or Quietist deviation. As for the Gentiles, the Unbelievers, he marvels—in all the lofty sense he gave that word—that such creatures can even exist. He finds the very idea of arguing with them inconceivable, flattens the infant spirit of science and criticism beneath his magnificent scorn, and passes this lapidary judgement: ‘Unbelievers lack a sense.’

Racine’s view of humanity, though distinct from that of Bossuet or Descartes, remains an ideal abstraction nonetheless. True, he grasps the concept of modern man, of modern passion. Yet even this modern, passionate being dissolves, in Racine’s hands, into a phantom of the soul. His psychological inquiry strips away from its chosen passion all those messy human realities that would normally surround it, complicate it, amplify or mute it, preserve its essential force or pervert it.

Racine’s characters possess a truth of convention; his passions, a truth of reality. For his dramatis personae, a rough sketch of historical action, a loose approximation of period features will do. But the passions demand the full apparatus of rigorous, subtle psychology. His characters are neither specifically Jewish, Greek, nor Roman; their designations—king, confidant, priest, warrior—are mere tags. Yet their passions are human, preserving every grain of human truth. Indeed, the very names of Racine’s heroes have shed whatever meaning tradition gave them to become synonyms for the passions that consume them. These figures in their fantastical dress, whose physical presence eludes us, inhabit translucent bodies where only passion’s flame burns bright.

The seventeenth century’s genius lies in this: a desire to grasp spiritual truth through just one of its facets. Bossuet presents the human soul reaching towards the Gospel’s God, and his masterwork, Les Élévations sur les Mystères, sings the hymn of that soul, trembling yet magnified in knowing its object. Descartes shows the human soul peering into the World’s abyss, recording in his Meditations what he was privileged to discover about the universal riddle. Racine reveals the human soul drawn toward Passion’s consuming flame, offering us through his Theatre what he could divine of this mystery, as boundless as the other two.

TO KNOW—Behold the rallying cry of the century.

‘Yet it knew nothing!’ comes the retort.

‘Knew nothing’—Bossuet, who brings together and crowns the full blaze of Christian illumination! ‘Knew nothing’—Descartes, who laid the foundations of modern philosophical method, wedded algebra to geometry, and blazed the trail where Germany would find the ideas we still inhabit! ‘Knew nothing’—Racine, from whom those psychologists most attuned to the spirit of our age still seek instruction!

But fine. Let them have known nothing. Let’s grant that the religious blinkers worn by philosophers and poets no less than theologians left them all in darkness. Bossuet becomes a Church Father who missed his century; Descartes produced nothing better than his Theory of Vortices; Racine amounts to empty passionate quibbling, no doubt paralysed by fear of the Index. Yet even within this travesty, their true greatness endures. It lies in how they wielded their power of thought.

What they thought about, even what they concluded, matters less here. To give them their due, we need only recognise that the seventeenth century’s minds thought with a purity, sincerity, and nobility unmatched for fifteen hundred years. Why bristle at the Christian uniform these men of sound reason and good faith wore? Why, in our age of doubt, do we so grudgingly acknowledge their pride in serving at the altar? Better to recall what senile twilight Reason inhabited before they arose.

Not that I discount the genius of Aquinas and Paracelsus, the Church Fathers and the Alchemists. Those spiritual beams from two distinct sources converged to cast the same light upon the world. They animate the seventeenth century itself, where Bossuet draws his strength from loyalty to Thomist doctrine, where Descartes seeks initiation into Rosicrucian mysteries. But until Bossuet, Descartes, and Racine, thinking remained the province of a mysterious few, hardly the hallmark of an age or nation.

This great awakening—to proclaim God’s Christian truth, to uncover the World’s philosophical truth, to probe Man’s passionate truth—signals the defining innovation of our classical age. In this epoch, the human soul devoted itself entirely to the human soul. It was our age of pure reason, the momentous hour when the modern mind grasped the worth of exercising its intelligence across every open field, its gift for reading cause in effect, its power to understand, that is, to bind scattered effects through their cause.

I applaud its keeping evangelical metaphysics as its North Star, which may have narrowed its horizon but at least provided one. Without it, minds unused to liberty, barely acquainted with intellectual action, would have drifted from one delusion to the next. The wild flights of even sage Descartes himself show us what fanciful systems the questing minds of the age would have crashed into had they all, like him, swept their religious beliefs from the table.

‘But this fixation on abstract ideas,’ the critics continue, ‘cost us our National Literature. Sketched by the Troubadours, especially the Chanson de Roland‘s poet, by the Mystery playwrights, the Roman de la Rose authors, by Villon and the Chroniclers, it veered off course under pagan influence at the Renaissance but should have found renewal as Christianity returned to prominence.’

My answer: the seventeenth century saw no Christian revival, no reawakening of the mediaeval spirit from the lovely but lethal dream of the Renaissance. The modern age was dawning. By adopting the name of Catholicism, evangelical doctrine did several things at once. It drew inward, took stock of its adherents, set its dogmas in stone, whilst scrutinising under Reason’s lamp whatever it needed to borrow from ancient traditions presumed dead but now proving remarkably alive, even evangelical. The human spirit seemed to be checking its inventory of established truths just as it prepared to sail the vast sea of modern speculation.

Or better, to match the scientific age this seventeenth century was launching, picture an aeronaut loading ballast before cutting his moorings. The weight slows his rise but steadies it, and by jettisoning bags judiciously, he can climb ever higher.

A national literature! What goes by that name was really provincial literature in the Middle Ages. Not French but Occitan and Oïl ^TN1, German, Walloon, Anglo-Saxon, Breton, Basque, or Provençal. And what splendid fortune if, in losing this so-called national literature, we gained something greater: the birth of universal literature, drawing from humanity’s common store of legends to create art shaped by the unique genius inherent in every people!

But if we accept this accusation whilst narrowing its scope, only the surface of the seventeenth century appears anti-national. I have already noted how Corneille, Racine and Molière, whilst plundering ancient literature for their myths, both Christianised and thoroughly Frenchified them. It’s an old truism: these Achilleses and Andromaques, these Phèdres and Cinnas, these Pompeys and Amphitryons are nothing more than courtiers of Louis XIV in fancy dress. Call them Bayard, Godefroy de Bouillon or Joan of Arc, and they wouldn’t be a jot more French. Less so, if anything, given the historical spadework their names would have demanded of the poets, at a time when history was still in its infancy.

Besides, nothing is quite so misguided as this literary infatuation—this historical infatuation, even—with the chimera of patriotic literature. It utterly misconstrues the finest quality of the century we still call ‘Great’. Our poetic heritage lives in the Arthurian romances, in the Chansons de Geste, in Gerusalemme Liberata, in Orlando Furioso, and the rest. Why uproot them?^TN2 That work was complete, as finished as any history of the past, when the Grand Siècle dawned. Its greatness lay precisely in grasping, with unerring instinct, what modern Art demands: to capture in the contemporary moment what is eternal in human truth—forgive the relative use of ‘eternal’.

Bossuet and the Doctors, Racine and the Poets pursued this aim down two distinct paths, driven by different impulses. The divine, spiritualist impulse drew its Christian hue from the age, from Catholicism in full flower, and from mediaeval memory. The human, sensualist impulse took its pagan tint from the era, from the Renaissance afterglow, and from classical antiquity. Yet these twin impulses, these parallel currents, mingled and merged into the mighty river of classical unity.

The Doctors’ language bore the stamp of ancient learning, remained Greek and Latin. The Poets’ imagination bore the mark of modern education, remained Christian. In theological treatises and from the very pulpit, teaching harks back to Athens and Rome. Beneath the poet’s pen and on the very stage, Homer’s sacred fables lose their power, fade, dissolve into nothing, leaving only the baptised soul of humanity itself. And as if to consecrate this mystical marriage of traditions, a Doctor penned Télémaque, a Poet wrote Polyeucte.

Even the tangible framework of the theatre speaks volumes. That interminable antechamber where modern audiences shiver, those costume-less actors with their stilted gestures and monotonous delivery, all that scenic poverty proclaims one thing: the only true stage exists in the Poet’s mind and the imaginative reach of his audience. He offers them not spectacle but contemplation. The perspective belongs to the heroic psychologist, Corneille, the passionate psychologist, Racine, or the moralist psychologist, Molière.

Timeless heroism, passion, morality: truths about man’s inner life, about the quintessential types of the human soul. This is what the Poet means to convey and what spectators come to hear. Temperament remains undiscovered; only character matters. The picturesque—that romantic bridge between classical character and naturalist temperament—is utterly unknown. Man lacks costume because he lacks a body, because he is pure soul. How could anyone grasp the interplay between physical and psychological states? Man is not yet a creature of organs and impulses.

When Molière acknowledges the body, it’s merely as comic relief, grist for the laughter mill. What he fundamentally ignores is the tangle of animal and spiritual passions. Like all his contemporaries, he sees only fixed characters. He inevitably selects from man’s passional repertoire, picks one trait, one alone, and his heroes become misers, hypocrites, libertines before they are men. Were Harpagon truly human, he would have his moment of weakness, a flash of generosity. Were Tartuffe truly human, he would have his lapse of inconsistency, a burst of candour. But these names label vices, not men: Avarice itself, not the avaricious man; Hypocrisy itself, not the hypocrite. Hence their rock-solid consistency.

Mistake these ambulatory abstractions for flesh-and-blood individuals and you are in for a shock. Comedy offers counterfeit life; Tragedy, counterfeit death. For Molière, life isn’t the marriage of soul and body. The body merely tags along with the soul. Sganarelle clings to his, Alceste shrugs his off. He may protest:

Guenille si l’on veut, ma guenille m’est chère!

[Rags they may be, but they’re my rags and I’m fond of them!]

Not that fond! He manages well enough without. For Racine, death isn’t the soul’s divorce from the body. More obviously even than in Molière, life never sprang from their union in the first place. Logically, death in Racine should mean the extinction of the passion that drives his tragedy. Phèdre ought to die when she stops loving Hippolyte. But such logic would satisfy neither the classical tradition Racine devotedly maintains nor the dramatic tension he intuits without fully grasping.

Hence those endings that feel grafted on, those gratuitous suicides that made perfect sense in Greek tragedy, where heroes writhe beneath inexorable Fate, but ring hollow once those heroes embrace Christian feeling. This view of classical tragedy as simply a crisis point explains and vindicates why Corneille and Racine bowed to Aristotle’s triple unities. The rules helped more than hindered. They would have been at sea trying to steer their phantom characters through years and years, across multiple locations, through chains of action that only a vivid, urgent sense of life can weld into dramatic unity. Unity of action was thrust upon them by their very conception: the death throes of a passion at its peak. And for such throes, one place, one day, proved more than enough.

This unity of moral preoccupation emerges still more clearly, if less dazzlingly, in the Moralists proper, from La Rochefoucauld to La Bruyère. Their very titles—Les Maximes and Les Caractères—tell the story. La Rochefoucauld embodies all the defects of his genre and temperament. In him, classical inspiration, stripped to its bare bones, simply dries up. His outlook is cramped, his wit needle-sharp, pricking rather than probing. His dread of the sublime warps his vision. Here is a writer, a man, whom one cannot love and who leaves no mark on posterity. Indeed, he turns his back on the future.

La Bruyère faces forward like a man ready to embrace what’s coming, a thinker prepared to grasp it, a writer who catches its scent on the wind. The seventeenth-century style, elsewhere so measured and majestic, as fixed as its subject matter, stirs to life in La Bruyère. It quickens, slims down, rejuvenates itself. Though he may neglect the outer world, you would swear he sees into souls, perceives their shape, their dress, their gestures. For him alone in his era, the human face amounts to more than its features and isn’t merely the soul’s mask. It becomes its living expression. La Bruyère grasps physiognomy, senses both the gulf and the bridge between passion and the tears or laughter it sparks. In this, he reveals a distinctly modern sensibility

Moreover, he seems gentler than his peers with human frailty, more alive to intentions. Whilst he may not possess the picturesque touch exactly, he has something close: a feeling for the kind of absurdity that isn’t comic or stock, that skews the usual angles, that springs from individual quirk. With him, mankind nearly becomes particular men. The whole of the modern novel lies dormant in La Bruyère. He almost lets character grow complex and reveal itself through temperament.^TN3

Yet like all his contemporaries, his primary lens trains itself on the soul and nothing but the soul. If he strikes us as sharper-eyed than his rivals, closer to our sensibility, it’s because he has given clearer form and substance to the century’s overarching endeavour. Apart from La Bruyère, this entire century devoted solely to the human soul has, perhaps in the interest of clarity, rendered it through symbols—poetic tales, drama, fables—or distilled it into consequences—Maximes and Pensées. La Bruyère alone questions it directly, watches it breathe, takes its pulse!

True, Racine and La Fontaine observe too, but for them it’s merely groundwork, hidden from view. They present only the polished result in fable or tragedy. And surely their laboratory is their own intuition, imagination, or personal experience rather than the living, breathing humanity that suffers and rejoices around them. La Bruyère pioneered observation. He glimpsed the value of particular truths, conceived the notion of studying humanity in motion, and this everyday drama, raw and unadorned, struck him as worth preserving. Both microscopic in focus and sweeping in ambition, he captured visible reality in vibrant sketches that outrun their subjects, an overreach that betrays the classical writer within.

This same vision takes different form in La Fontaine. He too has watched life unfold, and dreamed besides, weaving life and dream into his fables. A persistent mistake dogs La Fontaine’s reputation today. Because he populates his stage with plants and animals, people insist he has a feeling for nature. They marvel at his grasp of his symbolic creatures’ behaviour. In truth, he understands the Lion and the Ant no more deeply than the humble Pot of clay or its iron counterpart. He knows all equally, having studied Lion and Earthen Pot solely in his mind’s eye.

La Fontaine transcends his century far less than La Bruyère. He is nothing more—though nothing less—than Racine’s exact contemporary. His lions, bears and foxes are no more genuinely animal than Achilles, Agamemnon and Iphigenia are authentically Greek. ‘But see,’ they cry, ‘how sly his fox, how busy his ant!’ Indeed, they display their stock traits, just as Racine’s heroes do. And look how fierce Achilles is! But that’s worlds away from the deep insight into beasts’ and objects’ secret lives that people credit to La Fontaine. Achilles and the Lion are human emblems, full stop.

It’s actually rather melancholy that La Fontaine, confronted with nature’s stupendous pageant of supernatural, many-personed life, should have shrunk to the narrow human vantage point. He is utterly of his age, which never dreamed of toppling Man from the throne he had seized at the core of all that is. What ages must pass, what scientific breakthroughs, social upheavals, artistic and literary sea-changes, before humanity conceives that invisible, tremendous, universal life in which our individual existence vanishes like a drop in the ocean!

Pythagoras had trembled before it, as had Kalidasa, who could hear the mimosa and blue lotus singing their lament for vanished Shakuntala.^TN4 But these seers lie so remote in the silent hollow of time that their era and teachings blur together in our eyes with the haze from which tomorrow’s suns will rise. From the days when La Fontaine wrote, at any rate, we must wait nearly two centuries for humanity to recover that sense of Mystery which forms the animating spirit of poetry itself. Wait nearly two centuries for Lamartine’s line:

Adore ici l'écho qu'adorait Pythagore, 

[Here worship the echo Pythagoras adored,]

for Gérard de Nerval’s:

Crains dans le mur aveugle un regard qui t'épie, 

[Fear in the blind wall an eye that watches you,]

for Baudelaire’s:

La nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles:
L’homme y marche à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.

[Nature is a temple whose living pillars
Sometimes breathe forth mysterious words:
Man passes there through forests of symbols
That watch him with knowing eyes.]

What gives La Fontaine his lasting claim on posterity, what keeps him alive in our present day, what justifies the rapturous admiration a poet like Théodore de Banville could lavish upon him—this isn’t the quality of his thought. It’s his style. La Fontaine’s style almost invariably soars above his thought, sometimes lending it a deceptive nimbus of dream that one might take for genuine Poetry. Indeed, Taine went so far as to crown him the most authentically Poetic of French poets. Truly, none in his age, precious few since, have possessed this gift for natural harmony that seems to spring forth of its own accord, defying all dissection.

He commands both the rhythm and the phrase. He is at once magnificently lyrical and magnificently controlled. His verse appears nearer to prose than Racine’s, yet stands in reality much further from it. Here is a music both logical and weightless, first cousin to that music championed, two centuries on, by a master of our own era²⁴, modern through and through:

De la musique encore et toujours!
Que ton vers soit la chose envolée
Qu’on sent qui fuit d’une âme en allée
Vers d’autres cieux à d’autres amours.

Que ton vers soit la bonne aventure
Éparse au vent crispé du matin,
Qui va fleurant la menthe et le thym,
Et tout le reste est littérature.

[Music, music, ever and always!
Let your verse be the winged thing
We sense escaping from a soul in flight
Towards other skies and other loves.

Let your verse be fortune scattered
On the crisp and biting morning air,
Wafting mint and thyme wherever,
And all the rest is literature.]

As has long been observed, what appears to be inequality in La Fontaine’s verse—the seemingly irregular rhythm of his lines—can only strike as whimsy or caprice those who haven’t the faintest notion what a Strophe is. In sum, he possesses every gift that marks the true Poet: strength that never loses its grace, inborn ingenuity, the lyrical spirit, compositional mastery, dynamism itself, feeling, emotion. Every gift save one, without which all others prove false: he lacks an inner life.

So bewitching is his charm that face to face one cannot judge him. He seduces, he disarms. But memory proves sterner and lays bare the appalling emptiness of this soul adrift between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, those twin centuries of negation. This soul devoid of faith or any hunger for faith, besotted with utilitarian morality, beguiling us with counterfeit compassion²⁵. Crack open his works: the Contes and the Fables answer one another, the latter teaching us how to ‘manage our affairs’ so as to live according to the former’s taste.

Throw in your lot with the shrewd and sly against the reckless and wretched. Hoard what you have, like the Ant, and learn to rebuff the would-be borrower. Learn, like the Fox, to manage the mighty through deception, to mock them whilst sacrificing the weak to their appetites. Sometimes it pays to do a good turn, but never blindly, never without knowing whom you are helping. Take counsel from Self-Interest. Help the Ant, who practises thrift and goes armed: you may have need of her. But send the Grasshopper packing, she who could only sing the summer away.

Yet La Fontaine’s most repugnant and telling characteristic is his loathing of all nobility. How deluded were those who sought to cast him as champion of the humble, recalling that moral from Les Animaux malades de la peste:

Selon que vous serez puissant ou misérable
Les jugements de cour vous rendront blanc ou noir.

[The court will paint you black or white
According to your power or your plight.]

But does he pity the Ass he is about to parade as ridiculous beside the Lapdog? Does he even pity the Lamb torn apart by the Wolf? Doubtful. I suspect he chiefly begrudges the Wolf his strength. Doesn’t he champion patience and the slow passage of time over Force, which he instinctively pairs with ‘fury’? Doesn’t he have the Fox make a proper fool of the Lion?

In nobility and strength he sees nothing but flaw and pride. The Oak extends its protection to the Reed, and this springs, surely, from good nature, real generosity. Why then are we invited to sneer? Though lightning menaces the Oak, the Reed—proud in its smallness—is spared the great perils that grandeur invites. This Reed is a cunning creature, the Fox’s own cousin. It jeers at the Oak, the Oak about to perish! La Fontaine won’t even spare the dying! And anyway, why does he conveniently forget that this Reed, so smug in its littleness, will be trampled by the first passing foot?

This wretched morality, this black and rotten core beneath so delightful a genius—perhaps it’s unfair to lay it all at La Fontaine’s door. Are we not witnessing here the inevitable outcome of a century-long deepening of the mind’s study, which proved excellent training for reason but whose tangible, immediate fruits could only be exhaustion, revulsion even, despair even at reasoning itself, having reasoned in a vacuum about a phantom humanity, static and bodiless?

What discoveries did they make, these Poets who took the passions as their dreamscape, these Moralists who anatomised the mechanisms of Vice and Virtue? Corneille presents us with nothing but heroes. He holds humanity in the loftiest regard and pays it the highest tribute. But his tribute is excessive, his regard too lofty, and his hoisted-up humanity bears no resemblance to ours. His relentless Sublimity crushes our spirits, and measuring ourselves against his grandeur, we confess our pitiful smallness.

Racine summons forth a pageant of illustrious, wretched souls, shattered, flayed by Passion, bleeding and wailing, their very nobility compounding their anguish. As we track these melancholy shades that mirror the darkest hours of our destiny, these noble souls whom some pitiless, inexorable power torments and corrupts, we confess our pitiful weakness.

Molière speaks much the same language, only more ruthlessly still. He proclaims our pettiness ridiculous, our frailty contemptible. Corneille with his impossible grandeurs, Racine with his inescapable agonies, merely drove us to despair. Molière makes us sick of ourselves.

All the while, La Rochefoucauld has taken another route down into this same wretched human soul and pronounces that there is nothing, nothing but Evil. Even beneath the splendour of those heroic deeds to which Horace, Cinna, Rodogune, Le Cid beckoned us, there lurks a monster that transforms these phantoms of valour, sacrifice, and mercy into spectres of shame, and he gives it a name: Self-Love.

La Bruyère might prove more lenient, might wish to entertain us, yet he only deepens our melancholy with his comedy of our quirks, our lapses, the thousand faults in our habits and poses.

Which way to turn? From their pulpit heights the Doctors echo the Poets and Moralists, drumming into us that our nature is despicably small and feeble. Granted, they append that whilst man can achieve nothing alone, he can achieve everything through Him who gives him strength. But already humanity is turning its back on this Gospel God who demands of it, when all’s said and done, much the same impossible virtues as Corneille’s heroes. Humanity stands desperate and nauseated.

Which way will it turn? The way La Fontaine and good sense prescribe. Since heroism is a pipe dream, and pointless besides, rooted as it is in ego and self-regard, forget about it. Since the passions bring nothing but misery, wisdom begins by shunning them. Since man cannot rise to nobility or virtue, let him at least live undisturbed. Let self-interest be his law, though he would better keep quiet about it. Let him outwit that grandeur whose hollowness he knows, outwit misfortune, that is, nature itself. Let him savour his modest pleasures and, armed only with his bitter experience, let him glide past all serious matters with a knowing smile that mocks the lot. And thus the eighteenth century is born.

It’s the backlash against Corneille, it’s La Fontaine in action. Or rather, it’s the seventeenth century’s inexorable conclusion. The Tragedies, the Comedies, the Maxims, the Fables, and even the Sermons have led us straight to the Contes.

A voice cries out in protest, vibrant, unmistakably human. It is the voice of omnipotent Reason, of burning Imagination, of a diseased Body. It is the voice of a man: Pascal.

The seventeenth century’s purest greatness bears this name, which belongs equally to the future. Pascal saw beyond his age to glimpse the catastrophe into which such single-minded spirituality would plunge the human soul. He foresaw ravenous sensuality looming on the darkening horizon, spawned by reason worn out from reigning alone too long, and by flesh rebelling against centuries of neglect. With the eyes of both man and genius, Pascal witnessed the emerging needs of days to come. He heard the question Humanity would pose to the Sphinx, for Humanity herself sometimes rises up sphinx-like before that other, eternally silent one.

Pascal thought to find the Sphinx’s answer in the Gospel, which props up our frailties with divine support, and so he embarked upon his Demonstration of the Christian Religion. The making of this work, never to be completed, unfolds as a drama more harrowing than the poets’ darkest imaginings. The scant testimony of those who witnessed this inner torment stirs our pity and wonder whilst leaving us hungry for more.

We seem to watch Pascal begin his book trembling with passionate certainty, a certainty that by its very fervour eluded his grasp. And slowly, as those scraps of paper accumulated, scrawled in fever, offspring of genius and sleeplessness, his soul, heavy with the future it yearned to redeem, began opening to the very doubts it had vowed to conquer. It felt compelled to satisfy the scientific spirit dwelling within, yet found itself powerless to explain what God is, or even to prove His existence!

And so the most earnest and profound mind ever known begins to hedge and prevaricate, loses itself in wishful visions, feeds on superstition and sorcery. Here unfolds that murky, pitiful tale at which only the Devil, and perhaps Voltaire, might smile: the tale of Pascal’s Talisman. Here too we find that troubled soul mortifying itself within its deeply afflicted frame, those fearsome penances, those fasts and austerities meant to purchase Truth but winning only death.

And the vast achievement of this immeasurable spirit lies barren, a desolate ruin echoing not with the longed-for Answer but with the very question the future would pose, a question that sounds like a moan. Yet this question, though Pascal never knew the comfort of it, harboured the very key to its own answer, and this ruin forms the splendid arch connecting the Church of old to the Church of modern times.

Pascal as thinker, scientist, and theologian stands as a double protest: against both the genuine degradations of the dawning century and the hollow magnificence of the dying one. He protests against the arrogance of cleaving man in two and feeding him only spiritual truths, and equally against the counter-arrogance of embracing this grotesque division whilst clinging only to sensual truths.

Though it seems almost vulgar to speak of literature when discussing such a figure, we might observe that Pascal, though consumed by thoughts, the most fervent thoughts, those that rise like smoke from the Mysteries, yet throbbing with life’s whole tumult, alive to passion and human feeling, and armed besides with that scientific mind alert to how material causes shape the soul as it stirs and acts—that he emerges as a poet for our present moment, for the age of synthesis.

Pascal stands as our contemporary with Balzac and Edgar Poe, whose kindred spirit he shares. He is a forerunner, a lighthouse still blazing from the past. In him and through him, through this great soul’s rupture in the combat between old and new spirit fought within its bounds, the complete Modern Ideal found both articulation and first embodiment. In the fierce concentration of his thought, in the pulse and hue of his prose, in the temper and lifeblood of his genius, Pascal belongs to the nineteenth century²⁶.

TN¹: The medieval French language was divided into two major dialect groups named after their word for “yes”: the langue d’oc in the south (using “oc” from Latin hoc) and the langue d’oïl in the north (using “oïl,” later “oui,” from Latin hoc ille). Occitan refers to the southern varieties, which produced the troubadour tradition, while Oïl encompasses the northern dialects from which modern French evolved. This linguistic division reflected broader cultural differences between northern and southern France in the Middle Ages.

TN²: Morice is addressing critics who claim 17th-century French theatre is “anti-national” because it uses Greek and Roman myths rather than French historical subjects. His response is that France’s “poetic heritage”—its literary tradition—already encompasses these international works (Arthurian legends from Britain, Italian epics like Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata and Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, along with native French Chansons de Geste). These have become part of French literary culture through centuries of reading and adaptation. When he asks “why uproot them?” he means: why should we extract or separate French writers from this rich, international literary tradition that has already become part of our cultural inheritance? This tradition was already “complete” and established when the Grand Siècle began. His point is that true literary greatness doesn’t lie in narrow patriotic subject matter, but in capturing universal human truths. The classical writers achieved their “Frenchness” not by dramatizing French history, but by infusing universal stories with French sensibility and contemporary relevance. They made Greek heroes speak to Louis XIV’s court—that’s more genuinely French than mechanically adapting stories of Charlemagne or Joan of Arc would have been. In essence: French literature had already absorbed these international classics into its tradition—why artificially limit writers to purely French subjects when this broader heritage was already theirs to draw upon?

TN³: Character vs. temperament: In French literary criticism, caractère denotes fixed moral and psychological types (the miser, the hypocrite)—the universal traits that classical moralists studied. Tempérament refers to individual physical and emotional constitution—one’s particular nature shaped by biology and circumstance. Morice suggests La Bruyère nearly breaks through classical universalism to show how individual temperament shapes character, anticipating the psychological realism of the modern novel.

TN⁴: Kalidasa: Classical Sanskrit poet and dramatist (c. 4th-5th century CE), regarded as ancient India’s greatest writer. Shakuntala: Heroine of Kalidasa’s most celebrated play, Abhijñānaśākuntalam, in which nature mourns her departure from the forest hermitage. Morice cites this as an example of poetry that recognises the consciousness of nature, contrasting it with the anthropocentric worldview of 17th-century French writers.