His pride--his pride of sheer intellect--ah! that, as Nietzsche well knew, was the offering that had the most blood in it, the sacrifice that cried the loudest, as he bound it to the horns of the altar. The almost insane howl of suppressed misery which lurks in the scoriating irony of that terrible pa.s.sage about sprinkling oneself with "holy water" and rendering oneself "stupid," is an indication of what I mean. Truly, as his modern representative does not hesitate to hint, the hand of Pascal held Christianity by the hair.
To certain placid cattle-like minds, the life we have been born into is a thing simple and natural enough. To Pascal it was monstrously and insolently unnatural. He had that species of grand and terrible imagination which is capable of piercing the world through and through; of rising high up above it, and of pulverising it with impa.s.sioned logic.
The basic incongruities of life yawned for him like bleeding eye-sockets, and never for one moment could he get out of his mind the appalling nothingness of the stellar s.p.a.ces.
Once, after thinking about Pascal, I dreamed I saw him standing, a tall dark figure, above a chaotic sea. In his hand he held a gigantic whip, whose long quivering lash seemed, as he cracked it above the moaning waters, to summon the hidden monsters of the depths to rise to the surface. I could not see in my dream the face of this figure, for dark clouds kept sweeping across his head; but the sense of his ferocious loneliness took possession of me, and since then I have found it increasingly difficult to confine his image to mild Jansenistic heresies, ironic girdings at Jesuitical opponents, philosophic strolls with evangelical friends.
What Pascal does is a thing that, curiously enough, is very rarely done, even by great metaphysical writers; I mean the bringing home to the mind, without any comfortable illusive softenings of the stark reality, of what life really implies in its trenchant outlines. To do this with the more complete efficacy, he goes back to Montaigne and uses the scepticism of Montaigne as his starting point.
The Christian faith, in order to be a thing of beauty and dignity, must necessarily have something _desperate_ about it, something of the terrible sweat and tears of one who wrestles with the ultimate angel. Easy-going Christianity, the Christianity of plump prelates and argumentative presbyters, is not Christianity at all. It is simply the "custom of the country" greased with the unction of professional interests.
One remembers how both Schopenhauer and Heine sweep away the Hegelian Protestantism of their age and look for the spirit of Christ in other quarters.
That so tremendous a hope, that so sublime a chance should have appeared at all in the history of the human race is a thing to wonder at; and Pascal, coming upon this chance, this hope, this supreme venture, from the depths of a corrosive all-devouring scepticism, realised it at its true value.
Hung between the infinitely great and the infinitely little, frozen by the mockery of two eternities, this "quintessence of dust" which is ourselves, cries aloud to be delivered from the body of its living death.
A reed that thinks! Could there anywhere be found a better description of what we are? Reed-like we bow ourselves to the winds of the four horizons--reed-like we murmur repet.i.tions of the music of forest and sea--reed-like we lift our heads among the dying stalks of those who came before us--reed-like we wither and droop when our own hour comes--but with it all, we _think!_
Pascal looking at the face of the world sees evidence on all sides of the presence of something blighting and poisonous, something diabolic and malign in the way things are now organised. He traces the cause of this to the wilful evil in the heart of man, and he finds the only cure for it in the acceptance of G.o.d"s grace.
There may be something irritating to the pagan mind about this arbitrary introduction of the idea of "sin" as the cause of the lamentable misery of the world. Among modern writers the idea of "sin" is ridiculed, and the notion of its supernaturalism scouted. But is this true psychology?
Whatever its extraordinary origin, this thing which we call "conscience" has emerged as a definite and inalienable phenomenon among us. To be exempt from the power of _remorse_ is still, even in these modern days, to be something below or above the level of ordinary humanity. If the thing is everywhere present with us, then, as an actual undeniable experience; if we feel it, if we suffer from it, where is the philosophical or human advantage of slurring over its existence and refusing to take account of it?
The great artists are wiser in these matters than the philosophers.
Are we to suppose that the depths of malignity in an Iago, or the "dark backward and abysm" of remorse in a Macbeth, are things purely relative and illusive?
"h.e.l.l is murky," whispers the sleep-walker, and the words touch the nerves of our imagination more closely than all the arguments of the evolutionists.
We will not follow Pascal through the doctrinal symbols of his escape from the burden of this consciousness. Where we must still feel the grandeur of his imagination is in his recognition of the presence of "evil" in the world as an objective and palpable thing which no easy explanations can get rid of and only a stronger spiritual force can overcome.
The imagination of Pascal once more makes life terrible, beautiful and dramatic. It pushes back the marble walls of mechanical cause and effect, and opens up the deep places. It makes the universe porous again. It restores to life its strange and mysterious possibilities. It throws the human _will_ once more into the foreground, and gives the drama of our days its rightful s.p.a.ciousness and breadth.
The kind of religious faith which lends itself to our sense of the n.o.ble and the tragic is necessarily of this nature. Like the tight-rope dancer in Zarathustra, it balances itself between the upper and the nether gulfs. It makes its choice between eternal issues; it throws the dice upon the cosmic gaming-table; it wagers the safety of the soul against the sanity of the intellect.
And it is pre-eminently the mark of a great religion that it should be founded upon a great scepticism. Anything short of this lacks the true tragic note; anything short of this is mere temperamental cheerfulness, mere conventional a.s.sent to custom and tradition.
The great religion must carve its daring protest against the whole natural order of the universe upon the flaming ramparts of the world"s uttermost boundary. The great religion must engrave its challenge to eternity upon the forehead of the Great Sphinx.
And after all, even supposing that Pascal is wrong; even supposing that making his grand wager he put his money upon the _wrong horse_, does that diminish the tragedy of his position? Does that lessen the sublimity of his imagination? Obviously it is the practical certainty that he is wrong, and that he did put his money on the wrong horse, which creates the grandeur of the whole desperate business. If he were right, if the universe were really and truly composed in the manner he conceived it--why then, so far from his figure being a tragic one, he would present himself as a shrewd magician, who has found the "wonderful lamp" of the world"s Aladdin"s cave, and has entered upon inestimable treasures while disappearing into the darkness.
The sublimity of Pascal"s vision depends upon its being illusive. The grandeur of his world-logic depends upon its being false. The beauty of his heroic character depends upon his philosophy being a lie.
If all that is left of this desperate dicer with eternity is a little dust and a strangely shaped skull, how magnificently dramatic, in the high cla.s.sic sense, was his offering up of his intellect upon the altar of his faith!
In the wise psychology of the future--interesting itself in the historic aberrations of the human mind--it is likely that many chapters will be devoted to this strange "disease of desperation" full of such wild and fatal beauty.
The Spectacle of the world will lack much contrasting shadow when this thing pa.s.ses away. A _certain deep crimson upon black_ will be missing from the tapestry of human consciousness. There will be more sun-light but less Rembrantian chiaroscuro in the pigments of the great Picture. At any rate this is certain; by his tragic gambling in the darkness of the abyss between the unfathomed s.p.a.ces, Pascal has drawn the perilous stuff of the great disease to a dramatic head.
The thing can no longer diffuse itself like an attenuated evil humour through every vein of the world-body.
Customary piety, conventional religion, the thin security of self-satisfied morality, can now no more tease us with their sleek impertinence. In the presence of a venture of this high distinction, of a faith of this tragic intensity, such shabby counterfeits of the race"s hope dwindle and pale and fade.
We now perceive what the alternative is, what the voice of "deep calling unto deep" really utters, as the constellation of Hercules draws the solar world toward it through the abysmal night. No more ethical foolery; no more pragmatic insolence; no more mystical rhetoric.
The prophets of optimism "lie in h.e.l.l like sheep." The world yawns and quivers to its foundations. Jotunheim rushes upon Asgard. From the pleasant fields of sun-lit pagan doubt comes to our ears the piping of the undying Pan--older than all the "twilights" of all the "G.o.ds."
But for the rest the issue is now plain, the great dilemma clear. No more fooling with shadows when faith has lost its substance; no more walking on the road to Emmaus when the Master is transformed to a stream of tendency; no more liberal theology when Socrates is as divine as Jesus.
The "Thinking Reed" bows before the wind of the infinite s.p.a.ces. It bows. It bends. It is broken.
Aut Christus aut Nihil!
VOLTAIRE
The immense bulk of Voltaire"s writings is profoundly uninteresting to me. I once saw--I think it must have been in Liverpool--a wonderful edition of his complete works published during the Revolution and with a duplicate copy of every ill.u.s.trative print. I couldn"t afford the price of the thing just then, amazingly low though it was, but in my devotion to that great name, I swore that, when I made my library, that n.o.ble edition should be in it.
I have never made any library and never intend to. The sight of cla.s.sical authors in row upon row depresses me beyond words.
Public Libraries are still worse. I have no wish to be helped "to get on in the world" by Mr. Carnegie. I resent the a.s.sociation between literature and "public benefactions." Does he propose to dole out the exquisite taste necessary to appreciate these rare things, on condition that our "home town" pay half the cost? Thank Heaven, a feeling for what is n.o.ble and distinguished in human thought is beyond the reach of any philanthropist. I mean beyond his power of giving or taking away, and I do not believe that those among the poor who really have this feeling are often found in libraries. They probably have their "Oxford Book of English Verse"--a gift from their gentlest acquaintance--just as I have; and, for the rest, they can sell their school prizes to buy Hardy and Henry James.
Except for "Candide" and a few excerpts from the "Philosophical Dictionary," I must confess I have no wish to turn over another page of Voltaire. It is simply incredible to me that human beings possessed of the same senses as ours could find satisfaction for their imagination in the sterile moralising, stilted sentiment, superficial wit, and tiresome persiflage of that queer generation. I suppose they didn"t really. I suppose they used to go off on the sly, and read Rabelais and Villon. I suppose it was only the preposterous "social world" of those days who enjoyed nothing in literature except pseudo-cla.s.sic att.i.tudes and gestures; just as it is only the preposterous "social world" with us who enjoy nothing but Gaelic mythology and Oriental Mysticism.
Those pseudo-cla.s.sic writers of the eighteenth century, in England and France, have their admirers still. I confess such admiration excites in me as much wonder as the works themselves excite distaste. What can they find in them that is thrilling or exciting or large or luminous or magical? I would pile up the whole lot of them along with those books that are no books--biblia-a-biblia--of which Charles Lamb speaks so plaintively. Backgammon boards with lettering behind them should be their companions.
What a relief to turn from contemplation of the works of Voltaire to that bust of him by Houdon!
Ah! there we have him, there we apprehend him, there we catch his undying spirit! And what a man he was! As one looks at that face wherein a mockery more trenchant than the world is able to endure leers and wags the tongue, one feels certain that the soul of the eighteenth century was not really contented with its heroic sentimental mask. The look upon that face, with its aristocratic refinement, its deadly intellect, its beautiful cynicism, is worth all the sessions of the Academy and all the seasons of the Salons. It makes one think somehow of the gardens of Versailles. One seems to see it as a mocking fragment of heathen marble--some Priapian deity of shameless irreverence, peering forth in the moonlight from among the yew hedges and the fountains; watching the Pierrot of the Minute make love to Columbine, and the generations of men drift by like falling leaves.
Voltaire!--He was well advised to choose that name for himself; a name which sounds even now like the call of a trumpet. And a call it is; a call to the clear intelligences and the unclouded brains; a call to the generous hearts and the unperverted instincts; a call to sanity and sweetness and clarity and n.o.ble commonsense; to all that is free and brave and gay and friendly, to rally to the standard of true civilisation against the forces of stupidity, brutality and obscurantism!
Voltaire was one of those great men whose thoughts are armies and whose words are victories in the cause of the liberation of humanity.
If we do not read his books, we look at his image and we read his life. We name his name and we seal ourselves of his tribe; the name and tribe of such as refuse to bow their knees to Baal, and if they worship in the house of Rimmon, worship with a large reservation!
Voltaire is much more than a man of letters. He is a prophet of the age to come, when the execrable superst.i.tions of narrow minds shall no longer darken the sunlight, and the infamous compulsion of human manners, human intellects, human tastes, into the petty mould of oppressive public opinion shall be ended forever.
That bust in the Louvre and the sublime story of his life will outlast all but one of those half a hundred volumes of his which Mr.
Carnegie"s liberality has put at the disposal of our "home town."
We too, like the populace of Paris, on the day when he came back to his own, flock out to see the "saviour of the Calas." We too, like the pa.s.sionate actresses who crowned his image in the great comedy-house while--as they say--he bowed his head so low that his forehead touched the front of his box, acclaim him still as the Messiah of the Liberty of the human intellect.
How admirable it is to come back to the spirit and temper of Voltaire from the fussy self-love and neurotic introspections of our modern egoists. The new fashionable doctrine among the "intellectuals" is that one is to live in one"s ivory tower and let the world go; live in one"s ivory tower while brutal and detestable people tyrannise over the gentle and sensitive; live in one"s ivory tower while the heavy hand of popular ignorance lies like a dead weight upon all that is fine and rare; live in one"s ivory tower while complacent well-paid optimism whispers acquiescence in the "best of all possible worlds."
The great Voltaire was made in another mould. Few enjoyed the pleasures of life more than he; but the idea of the stupid brutality and ignorant tyranny from which in this world so many harmless people suffer filled him with fury. The Calas were only one--only the best known--of a long list of victims on whose behalf he entered the arena. In these campaigns of justice, he was tireless, inexhaustible, insatiable. He flooded Europe with pamphlets on behalf of his proteges. He defied Church and State in his crusades to defend them. His house at Ferney became a sort of universal refuge and sanctuary for the persecuted persons of the civilised world.
A great and good man! I sometimes think that of all the heroic champions of sensitiveness against insensitiveness, of weakness against strength, of the individual against public opinion, I would soonest call up the n.o.ble shade of Voltaire and kiss his pontifical hand!
The Pantheistic Carlyle grumbles at his levity and rails against his persiflage. One hopes there will always be a "persiflage" like that of Voltaire to clear the human stage of stupid tyranny and drive the mud-monsters of obscurantism back into their mid-night caverns. He was a queer kind of Apollo--this little great man with his old-fashioned wig and the fur-cloak "given him by Catherine of Russia"--but the flame which inspired him was the authentic fire, and the arrows with which he fought were dipped in the golden light of the sun.