agedy, as typical and central in its expression here, as Hamlet--what
the soul passes, and must pass, through, aux abois with nothingness,
or with those offended mysterious powers that may really occupy it--or
when confronted with the thought of what are called the "four last
things" it yields this way or that. What might have passed with all
its fiery ways for an esprit de secte et de cabale is now revealed amid
the disputes not of a single generation but of eternal ones, by the
light of a phenomenal storm of blinding and blasting inspirations.

[77] Observe, he is not a sceptic converted, a returned infidel, but is
seen there as if at the very centre of a perpetually maintained tragic
crisis holding the faith steadfastly, but amid the well-poised points
of essential doubt all around him and it. It is no mere calm
supersession of a state of doubt by a state of faith; the doubts never
die, they are only just kept down in a perpetual agonia. Everywhere in
the "Letters" he had seemed so great a master--a master of
himself--never at a loss, taking the conflict so lightly, with so light
a heart: in the great Atlantean travail of the "Thoughts" his feet
sometimes "are almost gone." In his soul's agony, theological
abstractions seem to become personal powers. It was as if just below
the surface of the green undulations, the stately woods, of his own
strange country of Auvergne, the volcanic fires had suddenly discovered
themselves anew. In truth into his typical diagnosis, as it may seem,
of the tragedy of the human soul, there have passed not merely the
personal feelings, the temperament of an individual, but his malady
also, a physical malady. Great genius, we know, has the power of
elevating, transmuting, serving itself by the accidental conditions
about it, however unpromising--poverty, and the like. It was certainly
so with Pascal's long-continued physical sufferings. That aigreur,
which is part of the native colour of Pascal's genius, is reinforced in
the [78] "Pensees" by insupportable languor, alternating with
supportable pain, as he died little by little through the eight years
of their composition. They are essentially the utterance of a soul
malade--a soul of great genius, whose malady became a new quality of
that genius, perfecting it thus, by its very defect, as a type on the
intellectual stage, and thereby guiding, reassuring sympathetically,
manning by a sense of good company that large class of persons