misfortune should teach us to lift up our eyes
and look on an eternal, unchanging, undeniable God, sovereignly
beautiful, sovereignly just, and sovereignly good. It was well that
the poet who found in his God an unquestionable ideal should
incessantly hold before us this unique, this definitive ideal. But
to-day, if we look away from the truth, from the ordinary experience of
life, on what shall our eager glance rest? If we discard the more or
less compensatory laws of conscience and inward happiness, what shall
we say when triumphant injustice confronts us, or successful,
unpunished crime? How shall we account for the death of a child, the
miserable end of an innocent man, or the disaster hurled by cruel fate
on some unfortunate creature, if we seek explanations loftier, more
definite, more comprehensive and decisive than those that are found
satisfactory in everyday life for the reason that they are the only
ones that accord with a certain number of realities? Is it right that
the poet, in his eager desire to contrive a solemn atmosphere for his
drama, should arouse from their slumber sentiments, errors, prejudices
and fears, which we would attack and rebuke were we to discover them in
the hearts of our friends or our children? Man has at last, through
his study of the habits of spirit and brain, of the laws of existence,
the caprices of fate and the maternal indifference of nature--man has
at last, and laboriously, acquired some few certitudes, that are worthy
of all respect; and is the poet entitled to seize on the moment of
anguish in order to oust all these certitudes, and set up in their
place a fatality to which every action of ours gives the lie; or powers
before which we would refuse to kneel did the blow fall on us that has
prostrated his hero; or a mystic justice that, for all it may sweep
away the need for many an embarrassing explanation, bears yet not the
slightest kinship to the active and personal justice we all of us
recognise in our own personal life?

24

And yet this is what the "interpreter of life" will more or less
deliberately do from the moment he seeks to invest his work with a
lofty spirit, with a deep and religious beauty, with the sense of the
infinite. Even though this work of his may be of the sincerest, though
it express as nearly as may be his own most intimate truth, he believes
that this truth is enhanced, and established more firmly, by being
surrounded with phantoms of a