It behoves every man to frame for himself his own general conception of the world. On this conception reposes his whole human and moral existence. But this general conception of the world, when closely examined, is truly no more than a general conception of the unknown.
And we must be careful; we have not the right, when ideas so vast confront us, ideas the results of which are so highly important, to select the one which seems most magnificent to us, most beautiful, or most attractive. The duty lies on us to choose the idea which seems truest, or rather the only one which seems true; for I decline to believe that we can sincerely hesitate between the truth that is only apparent and the one that is real. The moment must always come when we feel that one of these two is possessed of more truth than the other.
And to this truth we should cling: in our actions, our words, and our thoughts; in our art, in our science, in the life of our feelings and intellect. Its definition, perhaps, may elude us. It may possibly bring not one grain of rea.s.suring conviction. Nay, essentially, perhaps, it may be but the merest impression, though profounder and more sincere than any previous impression. These things do not matter.
It is not imperative that the truth we have chosen should be unimpeachable or of absolute certainty. There is already great gain in our having been brought to experience that the truths we had loved before did not accord with reality or with faithful experience of life; and we have every reason, therefore, to cherish our truth with heartiest grat.i.tude until its own turn shall come to experience the fate it inflicted on its predecessor. The great mischief, the one which destroys our moral existence and threatens the integrity of our mind and our character, is not that we should deceive ourselves and love an uncertain truth, but that we should remain constant to one in which we no longer wholly believe.
3
If we sought nothing more than to invest our conception of the unknown with the utmost possible grandeur and tragedy, magnificence and might, there would be no need of such restrictions. From many points of view, doubtless, the most beautiful, most touching, most religious att.i.tude in face of mystery is silence, and prayer, and fearful acceptance.
When this immense, irresistible force confronts us--this inscrutable, ceaselessly vigilant power, humanly super-human, sovereignly intelligent, and, for all we know, even personal--must it not, at first sight, seem more reverent, worthier, to offer complete submission, trying only to master our terror, than tranquilly to set on foot a patient, laborious investigation? But is the choice possible to us; have we still the right to choose? The beauty or dignity of the att.i.tude we shall a.s.sume no longer is matter of moment. It is truth and sincerity that are called for to-day for the facing of all things--how much more when mystery confronts us! In the past, the prostration of man, his bending the knee, seemed beautiful because of what, in the past, seemed to be true. We have acquired no fresh cert.i.tude, perhaps; but for us, none the less, the truth of the past has ceased to be true. We have not bridged the unknown; but still, though we know not what it is, we do partially know what it is not; and it is before this we should bow, were the att.i.tude of our fathers to be once more a.s.sumed by us. For although it has not, perhaps, been incontrovertibly proved that the unknown is neither vigilant nor personal, neither sovereignly intelligent nor sovereignly just, or that it possesses none of the pa.s.sions, intentions, virtues and vices of man, it is still incomparably more probable that the unknown is entirely indifferent to all that appears of supreme importance in this life of ours. It is incomparably more probable that if, in the vast and eternal scheme of the unknown, a minute and ephemeral place be reserved for man, his actions, be he the strongest or weakest, the best or the worst of men, will be as unimportant there as the movements of the obscurest geological cell in the history of ocean or continent.
Though it may not have been irrefutably shown that the infinite and invisible are not for ever hovering round us, dealing out sorrow or joy in accordance with our good or evil intentions, guiding our destiny step by step, and preparing, with the help of innumerable forces, the incomprehensible but eternal law that governs the accidents of our birth, our future, our death, and our life beyond the tomb, it is still incomparably more probable that the invisible and infinite, intervene as they may at every moment in our life, enter therein only as stupendous, blind, indifferent elements; and that though they pa.s.s over us, in us, penetrate into our being, and inspire and mould our life, they are as careless of our individual existence as air, water, or light. And the whole of our conscious life, the life that forms our one cert.i.tude, that is our one fixed point in time and s.p.a.ce, rests upon "incomparable probabilities" of this nature; but rarely are they as "incomparable" as these.
4
The hour when a lofty conviction forsakes us should never be one of regret. If a belief we have clung to goes, or a spring snaps within us; if we at last dethrone the idea that so long has held sway, this is proof of vitality, progress, of our marching steadily onwards, and making good use of all that lies to our hand. We should rejoice at the knowledge that the thought which so long has sustained us is proved incapable now of even sustaining itself. And though we have nothing to put in the place of the spring that lies broken, there need still be no cause for sadness. Far better the place remain empty than that it be filled by a spring which the rust corrodes, or by a new truth in which we do not wholly believe. And besides, the place is not really empty.
Determinate truth may not yet have arrived, but still, in its own deep recess, there hides a truth without name, which waits and calls. And if it wait and call too long in the void, and nothing arise in the place of the vanished spring, it still shall be found that, in moral no less than in physical life, necessity will be able to create the organ it needs, and that the negative truth will at last find sufficient force in itself to set the idle machinery going. And the lives that possess no more than one force of this kind are not the least strenuous, the least ardent, or the least useful.
And even though our belief forsake us entirely, it still will take with it nothing of what we have given, nor will there be lost one single sincere, religious, disinterested effort that we have put forth to enn.o.ble this faith, to exalt or embellish it. Every thought we have added, each worthy sacrifice we have had the courage to make in its name, will have left its indelible mark on our moral existence. The body is gone, but the palace it built still stands, and the s.p.a.ce it has conquered will remain for ever unenclosed. It is our duty, and one we dare not renounce, to prepare homes for truths that shall come, to maintain in good order the forces destined to serve them, and to create open s.p.a.ces within us; nor can the time thus employed be possibly wasted.
5
These thoughts have arisen within me through my having been compelled, a few days ago, to glance through two or three little dramas of mine, wherein lies revealed the disquiet of a mind that has given itself wholly to mystery; a disquiet legitimate enough in itself, perhaps, but not so inevitable as to warrant its own complacency. The keynote of these little plays is dread of the unknown that surrounds us. I, or rather some obscure poetical feeling within me (for with the sincerest of poets a division must often be made between the instinctive feeling of their art and the thoughts of their real life), seemed to believe in a species of monstrous, invisible, fatal power that gave heed to our every action, and was hostile to our smile, to our life, to our peace and our love. Its intentions could not be divined, but the spirit of the drama a.s.sumed them to be malevolent always. In its essence, perhaps, this power was just, but only in anger; and it exercised justice in a manner so crooked, so secret, so sluggish and remote, that its punishments--for it never rewarded--took the semblance of inexplicable, arbitrary acts of fate. We had there, in a word, more or less the idea of the G.o.d of the Christian blent with that of ancient fatality, lurking in nature"s impenetrable twilight, whence it eagerly watched, contested, and saddened the projects, the feelings, the thoughts and the happiness of man.
6
This unknown would most frequently appear in the shape of death. The presence of death--infinite, menacing, for ever treacherously active--filled every interstice of the poem. The problem of existence was answered only by the enigma of annihilation. And it was a callous, inexorable death; blind, and groping its mysterious way with only chance to guide it; laying its hands preferentially on the youngest and the least unhappy, since these held themselves less motionless than others, and that every too sudden movement in the night arrested its attention. And around it were only poor little trembling, elementary creatures, who shivered for an instant and wept, on the brink of a gulf; and their words and their tears had importance only from the fact that each word they spoke and each tear they shed fell into this gulf, and were at times so strangely resonant there as to lead one to think that the gulf must be vast if tear or word, as it fell, could send forth so confused and m.u.f.fled a sound.
7
Such a conception of life is not healthy, whatever show of reason it may seem to possess; and I would not allude to it here were it not for the fact that we find this idea, or one closely akin to it, governing the hearts of most men, however tranquil, or thoughtful, or earnest they may be, at the approach of the slightest misfortune. There is evidently a side to our nature which, notwithstanding all we may learn and master and the cert.i.tudes we may acquire, destines us never to be other than poor, weak, useless creatures, consecrated to death, and playthings of the vast and indifferent forces that surround us. We appear for an instant in limitless s.p.a.ce, our one appreciable mission the propagation of a species that itself has no appreciable mission in the scheme of a universe whose extent and duration baffle the most daring, most powerful brain. This is a truth; it is one of those profound but sterile truths which the poet may salute as he pa.s.ses on his way; but it is a truth in the neighbourhood of which the man with the thousand duties who lives in the poet will do well not to abide too long. And of truths such as this many are lofty and deserving of all our respect, but in their domain it were unwise to lay ourselves down and sleep. So many truths environ us that it may safely be said that few men can be found, of the wickedest even, who have not for counsel and guide a grave and respectable truth. Yes, it is a truth--the vastest, most certain of truths, if one will--that our life is nothing, and our efforts the merest jest; our existence, that of our planet, only a miserable accident in the history of worlds; but it is no less a truth that, to us, our life and our planet are the most important, nay, the only important phenomena in the history of worlds. And of these truths which is the truer? Does the first of necessity destroy the second? Without the second, should we have had the courage to formulate the first? The one appeals to our imagination, and may be helpful to it in its own domain; but the other directly interests our actual life. It is well that each have its share. The truth that is undoubtedly truest from the human point of view must evidently appeal to us more than the truth which is truest from the universal point of view. Ignorant as we are of the aim of the universe, how shall we tell whether or no it concern itself with the interests of our race? The probable futility of our life and our species is a truth which regards us indirectly only, and may well, therefore, be left in suspense. The other truth, that indicates clearly the importance of life, may perhaps be more restricted, but it has a direct, incontestable, actual bearing upon ourselves. To sacrifice or even subordinate it to an alien truth must surely be wrong. The first truth should never be lost sight of; it will strengthen and illumine the second, whose government will thus become more intelligent and benign: the first truth will teach us to profit by all that the second does not include. And if we allow it to sadden our heart or arrest our action, we have not sufficiently realised that the vast but precarious s.p.a.ce it fills in the region of important truths is governed by countless problems which as yet are unsolved; while the problems whereon the second truth rests are daily resolved by real life. The first truth is still in the dangerous, feverish stage, through which all truths must pa.s.s before they can penetrate freely into our heart and our brain; a stage of jealousy, truculence, which renders the neighbourhood of another truth insupportable to them. We must wait till the fever subsides; and if the home that we have prepared in our spirit be sufficiently s.p.a.cious and lofty, we shall find very soon that the most contradictory truths will be conscious only of the mysterious bond that unites them, and will silently join with each other to place in the front rank of all, and there help and sustain, that truth from among them which calmly went on with its work while the others were fretfully jangling; that truth which can do the most good, and brings with it the uttermost hope.
The strangest feature of the present time is the confusion which reigns in our instincts and feelings--in our ideas, too, save at our most lucid, most tranquil, most thoughtful moments--on the subject of the intervention of the unknown or mysterious in the truly grave events of life. We find, amidst this confusion, feelings which no longer accord with any precise, living, accepted idea; such, for instance, as concern the existence of a determinate G.o.d, conceived as more or less anthropomorphic, providential, personal, and unceasingly vigilant. We find feelings which, as yet, are only partially ideas; as those which deal with fatality, destiny, the justice of things. We find ideas which will soon turn into feelings; those that treat of the law of the species, evolution, selection, the will-power of the race, &c. And, finally, we discover ideas which still are purely ideas, too uncertain and scattered for us to be able to predict at what moment they will become feelings, and thus materially influence our actions, our acceptance of life, our joys, and our sorrows.
9
If in actual life this confusion is not so apparent, it is only because actual life will but rarely express itself, or condescend to make use of image or formula to relate its experience. This state of mind, however, is clearly discernible in all those whose self-imposed mission it is to depict real life, to explain and interpret it, and throw light on the hidden causes of good and evil destiny. It is of the poets I speak, of dramatic poets above all, who are occupied with external and active life; and it matters not whether they produce novels, tragedies, the drama properly so called, or historical studies, for I give to the words poets and dramatic poets their widest significance.
It cannot be denied that the possession of a dominant idea, one that may be said to exclude all others, must confer considerable power on the poet, or "interpreter of life;" and in the degree that the idea is mysterious, and difficult of definition or control, will be the extent of this power and its conspicuousness in the poem. And this is entirely legitimate, so long as the poet himself has not the least doubt as to the value of his idea; and there are many admirable poets who have never hesitated, paused, or doubted. Thus it is that we find the idea of heroic duty filling so enormous a s.p.a.ce in the tragedies of Corneille, that of absolute faith in the dramas of Calderon, that of the tyranny of destiny in the works of Sophocles.
10
Of these three ideas, that of heroic duty is the most human and the least mysterious; and although far more restricted to-day than at the time of Corneille--for there are few such duties which it would not now be reasonable, and even heroic, perhaps, to call into question, and it becomes ever more and more difficult to find one that is truly heroic--conditions may still be imagined under which recourse thereto may be legitimate in the poet.
But will he discover in faith--to-day no more than a shadowy memory to the most fervent believer--that inspiration and strength, by whose aid Corneille was able to depict the G.o.d of the Christians as the august, omnipresent actor of his dramas, invisible but untiringly active, and sovereign always? Or is it possible still for a reasonable being, whose eyes rest calmly on the life about him, to believe in the tyranny of fate; of that sluggish, unswerving, preordained, inscrutable force which urges a given man, or family, by given ways to a given disaster or death? For though it be true that our life is subject to many an unknown force, we at least are aware that these forces would seem to be blind, indifferent, unconscious, and that their most insidious attacks may be in some measure averted by the wisest among us. Can we still be allowed, then, to believe that the universe holds a power so idle, so wretched, as to concern itself solely in saddening, frustrating, and terrifying the projects and schemes of man?
Immanent justice is another mysterious and sovereign force, whereof use has been made; but it is only the feeblest of writers who have ventured to accept this postulate in its entirety: only those to whom reality and probability were matters of smallest moment. The affirmation that wickedness is necessarily and visibly punished in this life, and virtue as necessarily and visibly rewarded, is too manifestly opposed to the most elementary daily experience, too wildly inconsistent a dream, for the true poet ever to accept it as the basis of his drama. And, on the other hand, if we refer to a future life the bestowal of reward and punishment, we are merely entering by another gate the region of divine justice. For, indeed, unless immanent justice be infallible, permanent, unvarying, and inevitable, it becomes no more than a curious, well-meaning caprice of fate; and from that moment it no longer is justice, or even fate: it shrinks into merest chance--in other words, almost into nothingness.
There is, it is true, a very real immanent justice; I refer to the force which enacts that the vicious, malevolent, cruel, disloyal man shall be morally less happy than he who is honest and good, affectionate, gentle, and just. But here it is inward justice whose workings we see; a very human, natural, comprehensible force, the study of whose cause and effect must of necessity lead to psychological drama, where there no longer is need of the vast and mysterious background which lent its solemn and awful perspective to the events of history 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 ca.n.a.ls 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 l.u.s.tral 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 circ.u.mstances arise when he rather would tell himself that he is not free. The unbending, malignant G.o.ddess 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 gained by a kind of sentimental vanity in us, which complacently dwells on the measureless force that for ever keeps watch on our plans, and confers on our simplest action a mysterious, eternal significance. Fatality, briefly, explains and excuses all things, by relegating to a sufficient distance in the invisible or the unintelligible all that it would be hard to explain, and more difficult still to excuse.
13
Therefore it is that so many have turned to the dismembered statue of the terrible G.o.ddess who reigned in the dramas of Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus, and that the scattered fragments of her limbs have provided more than one poet with the marble required for the fashioning of a newer divinity, who should be more human, less arbitrary, and less inconceivable than she of old. The fatality of the pa.s.sions, for instance, has thus been evolved. But for a pa.s.sion truly to be fatal in a soul aware of itself, for the mystery to reappear that shall make crime pardonable by investing it with loftiness and lifting it high above the will of man: for these we require the intervention of a G.o.d, or some other equally irresistible, infinite force. Wagner, therefore, in "Tristram and Iseult," makes use of the philtre, as Shakespeare of the witches in "Macbeth," Racine of the oracle of Calchas in "Iphigenia" and of Venus" hatred in "Phedre." We have travelled in a circle, and find ourselves back once more at the very heart of the craving of former days. This expedient may be more or less legitimate in archaic or legendary drama, where there is room for all kinds of poetic fantasy; but in the drama which pretends to actual truth we demand another intervention, one that shall seem to us more genuinely irresistible, if crimes like Macbeth"s, such a deed of horror as that to which Agamemnon consented: perhaps, too, the kind of love that burned in Phedre, shall achieve their mysterious excuse, and acquire a grandeur and sombre n.o.bility that intrinsically they do not possess.
Take away from Macbeth the fatal predestination, the intervention of h.e.l.l, the heroic struggle with an occult justice that for ever is revealing itself through a thousand fissures of revolting nature, and Macbeth is merely a frantic, contemptible murderer. Take away the oracle of Calchas, and Agamemnon becomes abominable. Take away the hatred of Venus, and what is Phedre but a neurotic creature, whose "moral quality" and power of resistance to evil are too p.r.o.nouncedly feeble for our intellect to take any genuine interest in the calamity that befalls her?
14
The truth is that these supernatural interventions to-day satisfy neither spectator nor reader. Though he know it not, perhaps, and strive as he may, it is no longer possible for him to regard them seriously in the depths of his consciousness. His conception of the universe is other. He no longer detects the working of a narrow, determined, obstinate, violent will in the mult.i.tude of forces that strive in him and about him. He knows that the criminal whom he may meet in actual life has been urged into crime by misfortune, education, atavism, or by movements of pa.s.sion which he has himself experienced and subdued, while recognising that there might have been circ.u.mstances under which their repression would have been a matter of exceeding difficulty. He will not, it is true, always be able to discover the cause of these misfortunes or movements of pa.s.sion; and his endeavour to account for the injustice of education or heredity will probably be no less unsuccessful. But, for all that, he will no longer incline to attribute a particular crime to the wrath of a G.o.d, the direct intervention of h.e.l.l, or to a series of changeless decrees inscribed in the book of fate. Why ask of him, then, to accept in a poem an explanation which he refuses in life? Is the poet"s duty not rather to furnish an explanation loftier, clearer, more widely and profoundly human than any his reader can find for himself? For, indeed, this wrath of the G.o.ds, intervention of h.e.l.l, and writing in letters of fire, are to him no more to-day than so many symbols that have long ceased to content him. It is time that the poet should realise that the symbol is legitimate only when it stands for accepted truth, or for truth which as yet we cannot, or will not, accept; but the symbol is out of place at a time when it is truth itself that we seek. And, besides, to merit admission into a really living poem, the symbol should be at least as great and beautiful as the truth for which it stands, and should, moreover, precede this truth, and not follow a long way behind.
15
We see, therefore, how surpa.s.singly difficult it must have become to introduce great crimes, or cruel, unbridled, tragical pa.s.sions, into a modern work, above all if that work be destined for stage presentation; for the poet will seek in vain for the mysterious excuse these crimes or pa.s.sions demand. And yet, for all that, so deeply is this craving for mysterious excuse implanted within us, so satisfied are we that man is, at bottom, never as guilty as he may appear to be, that we are still fully content, when considering pa.s.sions or crimes of this nature, to admit some kind of fatal intervention that at least may not seem too manifestly unacceptable.
This excuse, however, will be sought by us only when the persons guilty of crimes which are contrary to human nature, when the victims of misfortunes which they could not foresee, and which seem undeserved to us, inexplicable, wholly abnormal, are more or less superior beings, possessed of their fullest share of consciousness. We are loath to admit that an extraordinary crime or disaster can have a purely human cause. In spite of all, we persistently seek in some way to explain the inexplicable. We should not be satisfied if the poet were simply to say to us: "You see here the wrong that was done by this strong, this conscious, intelligent man. Behold the misfortune this hero encountered; this good man"s ruin and sorrow. See, too, how this sage is crushed by tragic, irremediable wickedness. The human causes of these events are evident to you. I have no other explanation to offer, unless it be perhaps the indifference of the universe towards the actions of man." Our dissatisfaction would vanish if he could succeed in conveying to us the sensation of this indifference, if he could show it in action; but, as it is the property of indifference never to interfere or act, that would seem to be more or less unachievable.
16
But when we turn to the by no means inevitable jealousy of Oth.e.l.lo, or to the misfortunes of Romeo and Juliet, which were surely not preordained, we discover no need of explanation, or of the purifying influence of fatality. In another drama, Ford"s masterpiece, ""Tis Pity She"s a Wh.o.r.e," which revolves around the incestuous love of Giovanni for his sister Annabella, we are compelled either to turn away in horror, or to seek the mysterious excuse in its habitual haunt on the sh.o.r.e of the gulf. But even here, the first painful shock over, we find it is not imperative. For the love of brother for sister, viewed from a standpoint sufficiently lofty, is a crime against morality, but not against human nature; and there is at least some measure of palliation in the youth of the pair, and in the pa.s.sion that blinds them. Oth.e.l.lo, too, the semi-barbarian who does Desdemona to death, has been goaded to madness by the machinations of Iago; and even this last can plead his by no means gratuitous hatred. The disasters that weighed so heavily on the lovers of Verona were due to the inexperience of the victims, to the manifest disproportion between their strength and that of their enemies; and although we may pity the man who succ.u.mbs to superior human force, his downfall does not surprise us.
We are not impelled to seek explanation elsewhere, to ask questions of fate; and unless he appear to fall victim to superhuman injustice, we are content to tell ourselves that what has happened was bound to happen. It is only when disaster occurs after every precaution is taken that we could ourselves have devised, that we become conscious of the need for other explanation.
17
We find it difficult, therefore, to conceive or admit as naturally, humanly possible that a crime shall be committed by a person who apparently is endowed with fullest intelligence and consciousness; or that misfortune should befall him which seems in its essence to be inexplicable, undeserved, and unexpected. It follows, therefore, that the poet can only place on the stage (this phrase I use merely as an abbreviation: it would be more correct to say, "cause us to a.s.sist at some adventure whereof we know personally neither the actors nor the totality of the circ.u.mstances") faults, crimes, and acts of injustice committed by persons of defective consciousness, as also disasters befalling feeble beings unable to control their desires--innocent creatures, it may be, but thick-sighted, imprudent, and reckless.
Under these conditions there would seem to be no call for the intervention of anything beyond the limit of normal human psychology.
But such a conception of the theatre would be at absolute variance with real life, where we find crimes committed by persons of fullest consciousness, and the most inexplicable, inconceivable, unmerited misfortunes befalling the wisest, the best, most virtuous and prudent of men. Dramas which deal with unconscious creatures, whom their own feebleness oppresses and their own desires overcome, excite our interest and arouse our pity; but the veritable drama, the one which probes to the heart of things and grapples with important truths--our own personal drama, in a word, which for ever hangs over our life--is the one wherein the strong, intelligent, and conscious commit errors, faults, and crimes which are almost inevitable; wherein the wise and upright struggle with all-powerful calamity, with forces destructive to wisdom and virtue: for it is worthy of note that the spectator, however feeble, dishonest even, he may be in real life, still enrols himself always among the virtuous, just, and strong; and when he reflects on the misfortunes of the weak, or even witnesses them, he resolutely declines to imagine himself in the place of the victims.