ory and legend. But is it legitimate deliberately to misconceive
the unknown that governs our life in order that we may reconstruct this
mysterious background?

11

While on this subject of dominant and mysterious ideas, we shall do
well to consider the forms that the idea of fatality has taken, and for
ever is taking: for fatality even to-day still provides the supreme
explanation for all that we cannot explain; and it is to fatality still
that the thoughts of the "interpreter of life" unceasingly turn.

The poets have endeavoured to transform it, to make it attractive, to
restore its youth. They have contrived, in their works, a hundred new
and winding canals through which they may introduce the icy waters of
the great and desolate river whose banks have been gradually shunned by
the dwellings of men. And of those most successful in making us share
the illusion that they were conferring a solemn, definitive meaning on
life, there are few who have not instinctively recognised the sovereign
importance conferred on the actions of men by the irresponsible power
of an ever august and unerring destiny. Fatality would seem to be the
pre-eminent tragical force; it no sooner appears in a drama than it
does of itself three-fourths of all that needs doing. It may safely be
said that the poet who could find to-day, in material science, in the
unknown that surrounds us, or in his own heart, the equivalent for
ancient fatality--a force, that is, of equally irresistible
predestination, a force as universally admitted--would infallibly
produce a masterpiece. It is true, however, that he would have, at the
same time, to solve the mighty enigma for whose word we are all of us
seeking, so that this supposition is not likely to be realised very
soon.

12

This is the source, then, whence the lustral water is drawn with which
the poets have purified the cruellest of tragedies. There is an
instinct in man that worships fatality, and he is apt to regard
whatever pertains thereto as incontestable, solemn, and beautiful. His
cry is for freedom; but circumstances arise when he rather would tell
himself that he is not free. The unbending, malignant goddess is more
acceptable often than the divinity who only asks for an effort that
shall avert disaster. All things notwithstanding, it pleases us still
to be ruled by a power that nothing can turn from its purpose; and
whatever our mental dignity may lose by such a belief is gai