François De Fénelon (1901)
"THIS little book is an attempt to review the whole Life and Works of Fénelon from a standpoint somewhat more impartial than that of his biographers in France. There the ship of his reputation has always sailed under a Party flag. To contemporary admirers such as de Ramsai he is pre-eminently a Saint; a generation later comes the rise of sentimentalism, when Rousseau and La Harpe forget the Churchman in the prophet of philanthropy and the Rights of Man. During the Napoleonic era appears the great official Life by Cardinal Bausset, where Fénelon is pictured as the typical enlightened priest, blessing the typical enlightened despotism—though only to be elevated, thirty years later, to a very different pedestal, when Lamennais hails him as the champion of a progressive Papacy at war with illiberal Kings and Bishops. Lastly, in our own day has come the inevitable reaction, and in the various writings of M. Bruneticre, but especially in the monumental Fénelon et Bossuet of M. Crouslé, the shifty womanish malcontent at Cambrai, a vague cosmopolitan and a friend of Rome, is everywhere unfavourably contrasted with the frank and manly Bossuet at Meaux, national in his faith and politics as in his genius and good sense. That there is truth in each of these views, but not the whole truth, it has been my endeavour to show. Fénelon will appear in these pages as the father of eighteenth century sentimentalism—witness his politics and philosophy, his educational and literary theories—but also as an upholder of seventeenth century rationality, and of the most ruthlessly stoical of mysticisms—a disciple sometimes worthy, sometimes dilettantist, and sometimes morbid, of the great Spanish ascetic St John of the Cross. And in pursuance of this theme I have departed a little from traditional lines, and dealt with subjects usually dismissed more cavalierly, such as Fénelon’s relation to the Jansenists and Papacy, to the philosophy of Malebranche and the Classical School of literature." (Preface)
https://archive.org/details/cu31924027284052/page/n11/mode/2up
Pascal (1909)
"A FEW years ago I had the good fortune to be introduced to a lady, who told me she heard that I was very clever, and wrote books. I pleaded guilty to the second half of her indictment. She asked what kind of books I wrote. I answered that I was thinking of writing something on Pascal. She inquired what that was. I explained that it was a man. She asked if he was alive now. I told her that he was an eminent Frenchman, who had been dead about two hundred and fifty years. A look of sudden interest came into her face, and she begged me to tell her how on earth I ever came to hear of him. This book is an attempt to answer her question. I have tried to bring together all such facts in Pascal's life as are likely to be of interest to an English reader. I have, indeed, skated lightly over his geometrical performances, for reasons of which my own mathematical incompetence is only one ; and I have cut as short as possible the technical detail of his quarrels with the Church of Rome. On the other hand, I have described at some length the more dramatic sides of his scientific career ; and I have given a good deal of space to the so-called 'worldly period,' when he consorted with précieuses and free-thinkers in the drawing-rooms of Paris. Neither the 'Great Experiment of the Puy de Dôme' nor the friendship with the Chevalier de Mere were mere episodes in his career ; the 'Provincial Letters' and the 'Pensées' could only have been written by a scientific man who had also had considerable experience of the world of fashion." (Preface)https://archive.org/details/cu31924029433582/page/n13/mode/2up