Pascal himself evidently thought highly of his success. He liked the controversy, its excitement, and the applausive echo which followed each Letter. Like every true artist, he felt the joy and yet the gravity of his work. He took up his pen with a pleasurable sense of mastery, and yet he wrote some of the Letters six or seven times over. He spared no pains, yet he never wearied. All his intellectual life for the time was thrown into the controversy, and his most finely-tempered strokes made music in his own mind, while they carried confusion to his adversaries and triumph to his friends. The sensation made by the Letters was, of course, mainly confined to France; but the nervous Latinity of Nicole soon communicated something of the same sensation to a wider circle. {156} Pascal has himself told us that he never repented having written them, nor “the amusing, agreeable, ironical style” in which they were written. Even the condemnation of the Papal See, abject in some respects as was his devotion to his Church, did not move him on this point. He left on record, amongst his Thoughts, the following solemn declaration: “IF MY LETTERS ARE CONDEMNED IN ROME, WHAT I CONDEMN IN THEM IS CONDEMNED IN HEAVEN. AD TUUM, DOMINE JESU, TRIBUNAL APPELLO.” CHAPTER VI. THE ‘PENSÉES.’ From Pascal’s finished work we turn to his unfinished Remains. The one will always be regarded as the chief monument of his literary skill, and of the executive completeness of his mind. But the other is the worthier and nobler tribute to the greatness of his soul, and the depth and power of his moral genius. Few comparatively now read the ‘Provincial Letters’ as a whole; fewer still are interested in the controversy which they commemorate. But there are hardly any of higher culture—none certainly of higher thoughtfulness—to whom the ‘Pensées’ are not still attractive, and who have not sought in them at one time or another some answer to the obstinate questionings which the deeper scrutiny of human life and destiny is ever renewing in the human heart. No answer may have been found in them, but every spiritual mind must have so far met in the author of the ‘Pensées’ a kindred spirit which, if it has seen no farther than others, has yet entered keenly upon the great quest, and traversed with a singular boldness the great lines of higher speculation that “slope through darkness up to God.”