Thus did Dante, in merely seeking to temper his art to simple minds, fall upon new and wonderful developments of it. In giving up song to tell a story, he was in effect emancipating himself from the lyric prepossessions in which he had grown up, and creating an epic poem for Italy. An epic, indeed, still vibrating with the lyrical prepossessions out of which it had grown; story as told by a born singer who of choice refrains from song; passionate, personal, individual, wholly unlike the sculpturesque objectivity of the Iliad.' Homer never emerges; Dante stands always in the focus and centre of the tale he tells. Yet, on the other hand, it is true epic and of the grandest kind. The circle which thus thrills and throbs with personality and passion at the centre, holds the universe in its circumference; and, if the soul of Dante attends us everywhere and will not let us go, it is a soul which has become a mirror for all things in heaven and earth, which has possessed the sun and the stars.

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It is perhaps not hypercritical to notice that the structural divisions of the poem, the three cantiche and the hundred cantos, appear to simulate a collection of songs, such as the Wolfian school were later to discover in the 'Iliad' and the 'Nibelungenlied,' rather than a continuous narrative; and the single canto resembles a canzone in length rather than a Homeric or Virgilian 'book.' And the seamless vesture of interwoven rhymes which enfolds each canto seems designed to secure, together with the continuity of narrative, the interrelatedness of the parts which he admired in the sestinas of Arnaut Daniel. The sequence of terzine is not so closeknit as that of the stanzas in the sestina, but they have the same character of advancing by definite and symmetrical steps. And just as the old lyric temper still works in Dantesque epic, so the old subtle symbolism has not really been expelled by the new plain and homely speech, but persists along with it, a more profound and pervading form than ever-a Proteus saved by transforming itself. The story, however simple, direct, and lifelike the telling, is not really simple; it means more than is told; behind the human drama we witness and listen to, there is a larger sense that we gather and infer. The modern student reads with some alarm, perhaps, Dante's exposition to Can Grande of the four meanings

running through his poem. But though it be allegory, and allegory fourfold, it is wholly exempt from the besetting frigidity and unreality of allegory. He hardly ever deals in dreamy personifications like Spenser. The modern allegorist has to establish or invent a correspondence between the order of real life and the order of ideas, and he rarely does it without violence to the one or the other. But for the medieval poet a correspondence was already there. To signify something in the higher order was of the essence of whatever really existed in the lower. The universe, God's act, was at the same time His speech; everything that happened, every life that rose and strove and passed away, was a word of the divine mind, pregnant with a significance more than it knew. The human world which gives the literal sense of this allegory, and the spiritual interpretation, are for Dante equally real; and the old poetic ideal of the Vita Nuova' days, fidelity through figure, found a deeper solution in this union of realism and suggestion in the great poem of his maturity.

The conception of the universe as the visible language of God, moreover, while liable to abuse by superstitious fancy, opened the way to the subtle imaginative apprehension of life and of nature which is one of the notes of the greatest modern poetry. Dante stands, a great mediator, between the allegorists who shadowed forth their meaning in purely symbolic shapes, and the naturalists, who painted what they saw, but saw nothing more than they painted. The imaginative and pregnant realism of Dante, uniting the larger significance of the one with the lifelike veracity of the other, foreshadowed, despite the vast changes wrought by Protestantism, and the scientific discovery of the world by Humanism, whatever is, in the profounder sense of the term, Romantic in modern poetry; whether it be Wordsworth's wondrous earth, this mighty sum of things for ever speaking,' or Goethe's living and moving humanity, the living robe of the Godhead woven by the Earth-spirit at the roaring loom of Time.

C. H. HERFORD.

Art. 6.-THE PROBLEM OF PASCAL.

1. Pascal.

By Viscount St Cyres.

Elder and Co., 1909.

London: Smith,

2. Euvres de Blaise Pascal. Edited by L. Brunschvicq and Pierre Boutroux (in course of publication). Paris: Hachette, 1904-8.

3. Pascal. By Emile Boutroux. Paris: Hachette, 1900. 4. Blaise Pascal. A Study in Religious Psychology. By Humphrey R. Jordan, B.A. London: Williams and Norgate, 1909.

And other works.

Of certain well-known figures in history, as on the stage, we may say that they exert the fascination of a problem never quite resolved and therefore continually new. In literature the striking example is Hamlet; in history, among the Romans, Tiberius, among Italians, Machiavelli; but the French, from whom we should scarcely look for it, have given us in Pascal the most enigmatic of religious teachers and the most questionable of orthodox champions. Pascal stands by himself, claiming no ancestors, leaving no successors. Although the spokesman of a 'refined and special sect of Christian believers,' he derived from Port Royal neither his eloquence nor his method of reasoning. By conviction a fierce dogmatist, he has been reckoned a sceptic. Sensitive to all the springs of emotion, he was yet hard upon others and harder to himself. A pioneer of physical science, he renounced and despised it in the name of religion; yet he it was who most sharply defended Galileo in a famous sarcasm about the earth's moving on despite ecclesiastical censure. Violently opposed to the Reformers, he is equally hostile to the Jesuits. A devout Roman Catholic, he appeals from the judgment of the Papal See to the tribunal of Christ. He is a fanatic, but he questions all first principles; a keen logician who scorns the syllogism; a master of irony and satire who resolves the Gospel into a commandment of love; a humorist who provokes inextinguishable laughter yet who is more melancholy than tears, more saddening in his effect on such as turn to him for comfort than any modern except Swift. That some formidable note of interrogation was embodied in Pascal we cannot deny. Vol. 213.-No. 425,

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He attracts and he repels; he is no less persuasive in detail than unsatisfactory on the whole. He abounds in contradictions, yet he remains a living spirit, unlike any other, passionate, profound, individual, immortal.

Among the signs of a return on the part of literary leaders in France towards their classic age, few are more significant than the interest which every detail connected with Pascal awakens. A beautiful new edition of his works has been in progress, under the care of MM. Brunschvicq and Pierre Boutroux, since 1904, in the series termed Grands Ecrivains de la France.' M. Brunschvicq has given us two editions of the Pensées,' in 1900 and 1904, of which the larger, in three volumes, contains all that can possibly be said touching the origin, condition, and general plan of that most tantalising cas de conscience, wherein the Port Royal issue of 1670 displayed a finesse or a strategy not altogether contemplated by the Provincial Letters' as lawful to Jansenists. The concordance of manuscript and editions, founded on Michaut, would put to shame German industry; none but experts will study it, and what expert is there who will not cleave to his own private judgment after all? M. Emile Boutroux, in a dainty sketch marked by serious and refined method, surrenders himself to Pascal's guidance as though it were efficacious grace; it would be fair to consult, on the other side, Father W. Kreiten, S.J., in his valuable German studies. But, on this matter of bibliography, enough.

It is now some years since Viscount St Cyres put forth a volume on Fénelon which deservedly won recognition at the time, and which remains the standard English treatment of that many-sided author and statesman. By mere force of contrast one who had spent days and nights in studying the martyr of Quietism, the forerunner of Romanticism, the reconciler of human with divine learning, would be led back to consider the severe solitary, now falling below the horizon as Port Royal underwent its last defeat. Pascal antedated Fénelon by twenty-eight years in point of birth (1623 and 1651), while his literary efforts had come to an end about thirty years before the Archbishop of Cambray made his mark. The Jansenism of Pascal was intensely repugnant to the human tenderness of which Fénelon has left so

many proofs in his correspondence; and that proud isolation, which St-Cyran practised and encouraged in his disciples, could have little charm for a director who was before all things a friend. Fénelon professed a reverence without bounds for the Holy See; the Jesuits (though intolerant of Mme Guyon's raptures) made common cause with a prelate who detested their theological enemies; and in the later quarrels on the subject of Jansenism they fought shoulder to shoulder with him. Again, Pascal is the perfection of a French classic style in prose, even as Racine is in verse; and both were held up as models by Port Royal. From that school Fénelon differed no less widely than did La Fontaine or St-Simon. He was already feeling out after the large prospects which should be revealed when nature and not books came to be the source of inspiration. If, as philosophers teach, the knowledge of contraries is one, a student of Fénelon could not well avoid casting a glance towards Pascal, who in so many ways was by anticipation his opposite.

Detached thoughts concerning this lay Tertullian of the seventeenth century-and thoughts often piercing to the quick of their subject-are extant in such critics of renown as Dean Church and Walter Pater. But no analysis like that of Lord St Cyres, full, minute, and exhaustive, will be discovered in any English volume; nay, there are aspects of Pascal's earlier days which our author has brought out more clearly than Sainte Beuve himself. Sainte Beuve made this beautiful soul' the centre of his Port Royal,' as every scholar knows; and his superb, sympathetic handling is not likely to be surpassed. He did not, however, give the space to Descartes, to Mersenne, to the Chevalier de Méré, to Roberval, or to the beginnings of the Academy of Science in Paris, that these different persons and influences must claim, if we would follow up the method of Pascal to its origins. French studies on each of the points named are not wanting, but in this volume they find their due position; and, whether we take our guide's final view or select one of our own, we cannot refuse him the acknowledgment of a complete survey, conducted from every side except that of pure literature. He is, indeed, frequently subtle and demands an attentive reader. But no one will charge him with unkindness towards the great troubled genius whom,