glove thrown down. He supposes a Jansenist to turn upon his opponent
who uses the term "sufficient" grace, while really meaning, as he
alleges, insufficient, with the words:--"Your explanation would be
odious to men of the world. They speak more sincerely than you on
matters of far less importance than this." With the world, Pascal, in
the "Provincial Letters," had immediate success. "All the world," we
read in his friend's supposed reply to the second "Letter," "sees them;
all the world understands them. Men of the world find them agreeable,
and even women intelligible." A century later Voltaire found them very
agreeable. The spirit in which Pascal deals with his opponents, his
irony, may remind us of the "Apology" of [67] Socrates; the style which
secured them immediate access to people who, as a rule, find the
subjects there treated hopelessly dry, reminds us of the "Apologia" of
Newman.

The essence of all good style, whatever its accidents may be, is
expressiveness. It is mastered in proportion to the justice, the
nicety with which words balance or match their meaning, and their
writer succeeds in saying what he wills, grave or gay, severe or
florid, simple or complex. Pascal was a master of style because, as
his sister tells us, recording his earliest years, he had a wonderful
natural facility a dire ce qu'il voulait en la maniere qu'il voulait.

Facit indignatio versus. The indignation which caused Pascal to write
the "Letters" was of a supercilious kind, and what he willed to say in
them led to the development of all those qualities that are summed up
in the French term l'esprit. Voltaire declared that the best comedies
of Moliere n'ont pas plus de sel que les premieres lettres. "Vos
maximes," Pascal assures the Jesuit Fathers, "ont je ne sais quoi de
divertissant, qui rejouit toujours le monde," and they lose nothing of
that character in his handling of them, so much so that it was clear
from the first that the world in general would never ask whether Pascal
had been quite fair to his opponents: "N'etes-vous donc pas ridicules,
mes Peres? Qu'on satisfait au precepte d'ouir la messe en entendant
quatre quarts de messe a la fois de differents pretres!" When [68] you
have the like of that it is impossible not to laugh, parce que rien n'y
porte davantage qu'une disproportion surprenante entre ce qu'on attend
et ce qu'on voit.

He has "salt" also, of another kind. He drives straight at the
Jesuits,