As for us, without rejecting those seductive or terrible spectres, which
perhaps represent interventions of which our instinct has a
presentiment, though our senses do not perceive them, let us, before
all, fix our eyes on the really human and certain parts of that great
accomplished drama. In the centre of the obscure cloud wherein were
amplified, until they exceeded the confines of this terrestrial world,
the acts of the power that, turn by turn, brought nearer and separated a
solemn death and an illusive crown, we distinguish a man who is at last
about to attain the sole object, the essential moment of his life.
Suddenly, an unseen enemy attacks him and lays him low. Forthwith, other
men run up. They are the princes of Science. They do not ask if it be
God, Destiny, Chance, Justice that comes to obstruct the road of the
victim whom they raise. Believers or unbelievers in other spheres or at
other moments, they put no questions to the murky cloud. They are here
the qualified envoys of the reason of our kind, of naked reason,
abandoned to itself as it wanders alone in a monstrous universe.
Deliberately, they cast off from it sentiment, imagination, all that
does not properly belong to it. They use only the purely human, almost
animal portion of its flame, as though they had the certainty that every
being can vanquish a force of nature only by the, so to speak, specific
force which nature has set within him. Thus handled, this flame is
perhaps narrow and weak, but precise, exclusive, invincible as that of
the blow-pipe of the enameller or the chemist. It is fed with facts,
with minute, but sure and innumerable observations. It lights only
insignificant and successive points in the immense unknown; but it does
not stray, it goes where it is directed by the keen eye that guides it,
and the point which it reaches is screened from the influences once
called supernatural. Humbly it interrupts or diverts the order
pre-established by nature. Scarce two or three years ago, it would have
been deranged and scattered before the same enigma. Its luminous ray had
not yet settled with sufficient rigidity and obstinacy on that dark
point; and we should have once more said that Fatality is invincible.
But, now, it held history and destiny in suspense for several weeks and
ended by casting them without the brassbound track which they reckoned
to follow to the end. Henceforth, if God, Chance, Justice, or whatever
name we may give to the hidden idea of the universe, wish to attain
their object, to go their way and triumph as before, they can follow
other roads; but this one remains forbidden to them. In future, they
will have to avoid the imperceptible but insuperable cleft where will
always watch the little jet of flame that turned them back.
It is possible that this royal tragedy has definitely proved to us that
wishes, love, pity, prayers, a whole portion of man's finest moral
forces, are powerless in the face of one exercise of the will of nature.
Immediately, as though to make good the loss and to maintain the rights
of mind over matter at the necessary level, another moral force, or
rather the same flame assuming another form, shoots up, shines forth and
triumphs. Man loses an illusion to gain a certainty. Far from
descending, he rises by one step among the unconscious forces. We have
here, in spite of all the misery that surrounds it, a great and noble
spectacle and something wherewith to arrest the attention of those who
would lose confidence in the destinies of our kind.