akness and the divine strength.
Through Christ man is abased and lifted up--abased without despair,
and lifted up without pride; in Him all contradictions are reconciled.
Such, in brief, is the vital thought from which Pascal's apologetic
proceeds. It does not ignore any of the external evidences of
Christianity; but the irresistible evidence is that derived from the
problem of human nature and the essential needs of the spirit--a
problem which religion alone can solve, and needs which Christ alone
can satisfy. Pascal's "Thoughts" are those of an eminent intelligence.
But they are more than thoughts; they are passionate lyrical cries
of a heart which had suffered, and which had found more than
consolation; they are the interpretation of the words of his
amulet--"Joie, joie, joie, pleurs de joie." The union of the ardour
of a poet or a saint with the scientific rigour of a great geometer,
of wit and brilliance with a sublime pathos, is among the rarest
phenomena in literature; all this and more is found in Pascal.

CHAPTER III
THE DRAMA (MONTCHRESTIEN TO CORNEILLE)

The classical and Italian drama of the sixteenth century was literary,
oratorical, lyrical; it was anything but dramatic. Its last
representative, ANTOINE DE MONTCHRESTIEN (1575-1621), a true poet,
and one whose life was a series of strange adventures, wrote, like
his predecessors, rather for the readers of poetry than for the
theatre. With a gift for style, and a lyrical talent, seen not only
in the chants of the chorus, but in the general character of his dramas,
he had little feeling for life and movement; his personages expound
their feelings in admirable verse; they do not act. He attempted a
tragedy--L'Ecossaise--on the story of Mary, Queen of Scots, a theme
beyond his powers. In essentials he belonged rather to the past, whose
traditions he inherited, than to the future of the stage. But his
feeling for grandeur of character, for noble attitudes, for the
pathetic founded on admiration, and together with these the firm
structure of his verse, seem to warrant one in thinking of him as
in some respects a forerunner of Corneille.

At the Hotel de Bourgogne, until 1599, the Confreres de la Passion
still exhibited the mediaeval drama. It passed away when their theatre
was occupied by the company of Valleran Lecomte, who had in his pay
a dramatist of inexhaustible fertility--ALEXANDRE HARDY (_c_. 1560
to _c_. 1630). During thirty years, from the o