,
the highest class of modern fiction, Flaubert, &c. (see "War and
Peace," for instance, _L'Education Sentimentale_, and many others).

It is true that the fatality shown is no longer the goddess of old, or
rather (at least to the bulk of mankind) the clearly determinate God,
inflexible, implacable, arbitrary, blind, although constantly watchful;
the fatality of to-day is vaster, more formless, more vague, less human
or actively personal, more indifferent and more universal. In a word,
it is now no more than a provisional appellation bestowed, until better
be found, on the general and inexplicable misery of man. In this sense
we may accept it, perhaps, though we do no more than give a new name to
the unchanging enigma, and throw no light on the darkness. But we have
no right to exaggerate its importance or the part that it plays; no
right to believe that we are truly surveying mankind and events from a
point of some loftiness, beneath a definitive light, or that there is
nothing to seek beyond, because at times we become deeply conscious of
the obscure and invincible force that lies at the end of every
existence. Doubtless, from one point of view, unhappiness must always
remain the portion of man, and the fatal abyss be ever open before him,
vowed as he is to death, to the fickleness of matter, to old age and
disease. If we fix our eyes only upon the end of a life, the happiest
and most triumphant existence must of necessity contain its elements of
misery and fatality. But let us not make a wrong use of these words;
above all, let us not, through listlessness or undue inclination to
mystic sorrow, be induced to lessen the part of what could be explained
if we would only give more eager attention to the ideas, the passions
and feelings of the life of man and the nature of things. Let us
always remember that we are steeped in the unknown; for this thought is
the most fruitful of all, the most sustaining and salutary. But the
neutrality of the unknown does not warrant our attributing to it a
force, or designs, or hostility, which it cannot be proved to possess.
At Erfurt, in his famous interview with Goethe, Napoleon is said to
have spoken disparagingly of the dramas in which fatality plays a great
part--the plays that we, in our "passion for calamity," are apt to
consider the finest. "They belong," he remarked, "to an epoch of
darkness; but how can fatality touch us to-day? Policy--_that_ is
fatality!" Napoleon