force consists. Assemble ten men who, like Paulus Aemilius, have lost
both their sons at the moment when life seemed sweetest, then will the
misfortune appear to vary in every one. Misfortune enters within us,
but must of necessity yield obedience to all our commands. Even as the
order may be that it finds inscribed on the threshold, so will it sow,
or destroy, or reap. If my neighbour, a commonplace man, were to lose
his two sons at the moment when fate had granted his dearest desires,
then would darkness steal over all, unrelieved by a glimmer of light;
and misfortune itself, contemptuous of its too facile success, would
leave naught behind but a handful of colourless cinders. Nor is it
necessary for me to see my neighbour again to be aware that his sorrow
will have brought to him pettiness only; for sorrow does merely restore
to us that which our soul had lent in happier days.
41. But this was the misfortune that befell Paulus Aemilius. Rome,
still aglow with his triumph, waited, dismayed, wondering what was to
happen. Were the gods defying the sage, and how would the sage reply?
Would the hero be crushed by his sorrow, or would sorrow acknowledge
its master? Mankind, at moments like these, seems aware that destiny is
yet once again making trial of the strength of her arm, and that change
of some kind must befall if her blow crush not where it alights. And
see with what eagerness men at such moments will question the eyes of
their chiefs for the password against the invisible.
But Paulus Aemilius has gathered together an assembly of the people of
Rome; he advances gravely towards them, and thus does he speak: "I, who
never yet feared anything that was human, have, amongst such as were
divine, always had, a dread of fortune as faithless and inconstant;
and, for the very reason that in this war she had been as a favourable
gale in all my affairs, I still expected some change and reflux of
things. In one day I passed the Ionian Sea, and reached Corcyra from
Brundisium; thence in five more I sacrificed at Delphi, and in other
five days came to my forces in Macedonia, where, after I had finished
the usual sacrifices for the purifying of the army, I entered on my
duties, and in the space of fifteen days put an honourable period to
the war. Still retaining a jealousy of fortune, even from the smooth
current of my affairs, and seeing myself secure and free from the
danger of any enemy, I chiefly dreaded the change of the goddess at
sea, whilst conveying home my victorious army, vast spoils, and a
captive king. Nay, indeed, after I was returned to you safe, and saw
the city full of joy, congratulating, and sacrifices, yet still I
distrusted, well knowing that fortune never conferred any great
benefits that were unmixed and unattended with probabilities of
reverse. Nor could my mind, that was still as it were in labour, and
always foreseeing something to befall this city, free itself from this
fear, until this great misfortune befell me in my own family, and till,
in the midst of those days set apart for triumph, I carried two of the
best of sons, my only destined successors, one after another to their
funerals. Now therefore, I am myself safe from danger, at least as to
what was my greatest care; and I trust and am verily persuaded that,
for the time to come, fortune will prove constant and harmless unto
you; since she has sufficiently wreaked her jealousy at our great
successes on me and mine, and has made the conqueror as marked an
example of human instability as the captive whom he led in triumph,
with this only difference, that Perseus, though conquered, does yet
enjoy his children, while the conqueror Aemilius is deprived of his."
42. This was the Roman fashion of accepting the greatest sorrow that
can befall a man at the moment when sorrow is felt the most keenly--at
the moment of his greatest happiness. And there are many ways of
accepting misfortune--as many, indeed, as there are generous feelings
or thoughts to be found on the earth; and every one of those thoughts,
every one of those feelings, has a magic wand that transforms, on the
threshold, the features and vestments of sorrow. Job would have said,
"The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away: blessed be the name of the
Lord"; and Marcus Aurelius perhaps, "If it be no longer allowed me to
love those I loved high above all, it is doubtless that I may learn to
love those whom I love not yet."
43. And let us not think that these are mere empty words wherewith they
console themselves, words that in vain seek to hide the wound that
bleeds but the more for the effort. But if it were so, if empty words
could console, that surely were better than to be bereft of all
consolation. And further, if we have to admit that all this is
illusion, must we not, in mere justice, also admit that illusion is the
solitary thing that the soul can possess; and in the name of what other
illusion shall we venture to rate this illusion so lightly? Ah, when
the night falls and the great sages I speak of go back to their lonely
dwelling, and look on the chairs round the hearth where their children
once were, but never shall be again--then, truly, can they not escape
some part of the sorrow that comes, overwhelming, to those whose
suffering no noble thought chastens. For it were wrong to attribute to
beautiful feeling and thought a virtue they do not possess. There are,
external tears that they cannot restrain; there are holy hours when
wisdom cannot yet console. But, for the last time let us say it,
suffering we cannot avoid for suffering there ever must be; still does
it rest with ourselves to choose what our suffering shall bring. And
let us not think that this choice, which the eye cannot see, is truly a
very small matter, and helpless to comfort a sorrow whose cause the
eyes never cease to behold. Out of small matters like these are all
moral joys built up, and these are profounder far than intellectual or
physical joys. Translate into words the feeling that spurs on the hero,
and how trivial it seems! Insignificant too does the idea of duty
appear that Cato the younger had formed, when compared with the
enormous disturbance it caused in a mighty empire, or the terrible
death it brought on. And yet, was not Cato's idea far greater than the
disturbance, or death, that ensued? Do we not feel, even now, that Cato
was right? And was not his life rendered truly and nobly happy, thanks
to this very idea, that the reason of man will not even consider, so
unreasonable does it appear? All that ennobles our life, all that we
respect in ourselves, the mainsprings of our virtue, the limits that
feeling will even impose upon vices or crimes--all these appear veriest
trifles when viewed by the cold eye of reason; and yet do they fashion
the laws that govern every man's life. Would life be endurable if we
did not obey many truths that our reason rejects? The wretchedest even
obeys one of these; and the more truths there are that he yields to,
the less wretched does he become. The assassin will tell you, "I
murder, it is true, but at least do not steal." And he who has stolen
steals, but does not betray; and he who betrays would at least not
betray his brother. And thus does each one cling for refuge to his last
fragment of spiritual beauty. No man can have fallen so low but he
still has a retreat in his soul, where he ever shall find a few drops
of pure water, and be girt up anew with the strength that he needs to
go on with his life. For here again reason is helpless, unable to
comfort; she must halt on the threshold of the thief's last asylum,
even as she must halt on the threshold of Job's resignation, of the
love of Marcus Aurelius, of the sacrifice made by Antigone. She halts,
is bewildered, she does not approve; and yet knows full well that to
rise in revolt were only to combat the light whereof she is shadow; for
amidst all this she is but as one who stands with the sun full upon
him. His shadow is there at his feet; as he moves, it will follow; as
he rises or stoops, its outline will alter; but this shadow is all he
commands, that he masters, possesses, of the dazzling light that
enfolds him. And so has reason her being, too, beneath a superior
light, and the shadow cannot affect the calm, unvarying splendour. Far
distant as Marcus Aurelius may be from the traitor, it is still from
the selfsame well that they both draw the holy water that freshens
their soul; and this well is not to be found in the intellect. For,
strangely enough, it is not in our reason that moral life has its
being; and he who would let reason govern his life would be the most
wretched of men. There is not a virtue, a beautiful thought, or a
generous deed, but has most of its roots hidden far away from that
which can be understood or explained. Well might man be proud could he
trace every virtue, and joy, and his whole inward life, to the one
thing he truly possesses, the one thing on which he can depend--in a
word, to his reason. But do what he will, the smallest event that
arrives will quickly convince him that reason is wholly unable to offer
him shelter; for in truth we are beings quite other than merely
reasonable creatures.
44. But if it be not our reason that chooses what suffering shall bring
us, whereby is the choice then made? By the life we have lived till
then, the life that has moulded our soul. Wisdom matures but slowly;
her fruits shall not quickly be gathered. If my life has not been as
that of Paulus Aemilius, there shall be no comfort for me in the
thoughts whereby he was consoled, not though every sage in the world
were to come and repeat them to me. The angels that dry our eyes bear
the form and the features of all we have said and thought--above all,
of what we have done, prior to the hour of misfortune. When Thomas
Carlyle (a sage, although somewhat morbid) lost the wife he had
tenderly loved, with whom he had lived forty years, then did his sorrow
too, with marvellous exactness, become as had been the bygone life of
his love. And therefore was this sorrow of his majestic and vast;
consoling and torturing alike in the midst of his self-reproach, his
regret, and his tenderness--as might be meditation or prayer on the
shore of a gloomy sea. In the sorrow that floods our heart we have, as
it were, a synthetic presentment of all the days that are gone; and as
these were, so shall our sorrow be poignant, or tender and gentle. If
there be in my life no noble or generous deeds that memory can bring
back to me, then, at the inevitable moment when memory melts into
tears, must these tears, too, be bereft of all that is generous or
noble. For tears in themselves have no colour, that they may the better
reflect the past life of our soul; and this reflection becomes our
chastisement or our reward. There is but one thing that never can turn
into suffering, and that is the good we have done. When we lose one we
love, our bitterest tears are called forth by the memory of hours when
we loved not enough. If we always had smiled on the one who is gone,
there would be no despair in our grief; and some sweetness would cling
to our tears, reminiscent of virtues and happiness. For our
recollections of veritable love--which indeed is the act of virtue
containing all others--call from our eyes the same sweet, tender tears
as those most beautiful hours wherein memory was born. Sorrow is just,
above all; and even as the cast stands ready awaiting the molten
bronze, so is our whole life expectant of the hour of sorrow, for it is
then we receive our wage.
45. Here, standing close to the mightiest pillar of destiny's throne,
we may see once again how restricted her power becomes on such as
surpass her in wisdom. For she is barbarian still, and many men tower
above her. The commonplace life still supplies her with weapons, which
today are old-fashioned and crude. Her mode of attack, in exterior
life, is as it always has been, as it was in Oedipus' days. She shoots
like a blear-eyed bow-man, aiming straight ahead of her; but if the
target be raised somewhat higher than usual, her arrows fall harmless
to earth.
Suffering, sorrow, tears, regrets--these words, that vary so slightly
in meaning, are names that we give to emotions which in no two men are
alike. If we probe to the heart of these words, these emotions, we find
they are only the track that is left by our faults; and there where
these faults were noble (for there are noble faults as there are mean
or trivial virtues) our sorrow will be nearer akin to veritable
happiness than the happiness of those whose consciousness still is
confined within narrowest limits. Would Carlyle have desired to
exchange the magnificent sorrow that flooded his soul, and blossomed so
tenderly there, for the conjugal joys, superficial and sunless, of his
happiest neighbour in Chelsea? And was not Ernest Renan's grief, when
Henriette, his sister, died, more grateful to the soul than the absence
of grief in the thousands of others who have no love to give to a
sister? Shall our pity go forth to him who, at times, will weep on the
shore of an infinite sea, or to the other who smiles all his life,
without cause, alone in his little room? "Happiness, sorrow"--could we
only escape from ourselves for one instant and taste of the hero's
sadness, would there be many content to return to their own superficial
delights?
Do happiness and sorrow, then, only exist in ourselves, and that even
when they seem to come from without? All that surrounds us will turn to
angel or devil, according as our heart may be. Joan of Arc held
communion with saints, Macbeth with witches, and yet were the voices
the same. The destiny whereat we murmur may be other, perhaps, than we
think. She has only the weapons we give her; she is neither just nor
unjust, nor does it lie in her province to deliver sentence on man. She
whom we take to be goddess, is a disguised messenger only, come very
simply to warn us on certain days of our life that the hour has sounded
at last when we needs must judge ourselves.
46. Men of inferior degree, it is true, are not given to judging
themselves, and therefore is it that fate passes judgment upon them.
They are the slaves of a destiny of almost unvarying sternness, for it
is only when man has been judged by himself that destiny can be
transformed. Men such as these will not master, or alter within them,
the event that they meet; nay, they themselves become morally
transformed by the very first thing that draws near them. If misfortune
befall them, they grovel before it and stoop down to its level; and
misfortune, with them, would seem always to wear its poorest and
commonest aspect. They see the finger of fate in every least thing that
may happen--be it choice of profession, a friendship that greets them,
a woman who passes, and smiles. To them chance and destiny always are
one; but chance will be seldom propitious if accepted as destiny.
Hostile forces at once take possession of all that is vacant within us,
nor filled by the strength of our soul; and whatever is void in the
heart or the mind becomes a fountain of fatal influence. The Margaret
of Goethe and Ophelia of Shakespeare had perforce to yield meekly to
fate, for they were so feeble that each gesture they witnessed seemed
fate's own gesture to them. But yet, had they only possessed some
fragment of Antigone's strength--the Antigone of Sophocles--would they
not then have transformed the destinies of Hamlet and Faust as well as
their own? And if Othello had taken Corneille's Pauline to wife and not
Desdemona, would Desdemona's destiny then, all else remaining
unchanged, have dared to come within reach of the enlightened love of
Pauline? Where was it, in body or soul, that grim fatality lurked? And
though the body may often be powerless to add to its strength, can this
ever be true of the soul? Indeed, the more that we think of it, the
clearer does it become that there could be one destiny only that might
truly be said to triumph over man, the one that might have the power
loudly to cry unto all, "From this day onward there shall come no more
strength to thy soul, neither strength nor ennoblement." But is there a
destiny in the world empowered to hold such language?
47. And yet virtue often is chastised, and the advent of misfortune
hastened, by the soul's very strength; for the greater our love may be,
the greater the surface becomes we expose to majestic sorrow; wherefore
none the less does the sage never cease his endeavours to enlarge this
beautiful surface. Yes, it must be admitted, destiny is not always
content to crouch in the darkness; her ice-cold hands will at times go
prowling in the light, and seize on more beautiful victims. The tragic
name of Antigone has already escaped me; and there will, doubtless, be
many will say, "She surely fell victim to destiny, all her great force
notwithstanding; and is she not the instance we long have been seeking
in vain?" It cannot be gainsaid: Antigone fell into the hands of the
ruthless goddess, for the reason that there lay in her soul three times
the strength of any ordinary woman. She died; for fate had contrived it
so that she had to choose between death and what seemed to her a
sister's imperative duty. She suddenly found herself wedged between
death and love--love of the purest and most disinterested kind, its
object being a shade she would never behold on earth. And if destiny
thus has enabled to lure her into the murderous angle that duty and
death had formed, it was only because her soul, that was loftier far
than the soul of the others, saw, stretching before it, the
insurmountable barrier of duty--that her poor sister Ismene could not
see, even when it was shown her. And, at that moment, as they both
stood there on the threshold of the palace, the same voices spoke to
them; Antigone listening only to the voice from above, wherefore she
died; Ismene unconscious of any save that which came from below--and
she lived. But instil into Antigone's soul something of the weakness
that paralysed Ophelia and Margaret, would destiny then have thought it
of service to beckon to death as the daughter of Oedipus issued from
the doorway of Creon's palace? It was, therefore, solely because of the
strength of her soul that destiny was able to triumph. And, indeed, it
is this that consoles the wise and the just--the heroes; destiny can
vanquish them only by the good she compels them to do. Other men are
like cities with hundred gates, that she finds unguarded and open; but
the upright man is a fortified city, with the one gate only--of light;
and this gate remains closed till love be induced to knock, and to
crave admission. Other men she compels to obey her; and destiny, doing
her will, wills nothing but evil; but would she subdue the upright, she
needs must desire noble acts. Darkness then will no longer enwrap her
approach. The upright man is secure in the light that enfolds him; and
only by a light more radiant still can she hope to prevail. Destiny
then will become more beautiful still than her victim. Ordinary men she
will place between personal sorrow and the misfortune of others; but to
master the hero or saint, she must cause him to choose between the
happiness of others and the grief that shall fall on himself. Ordinary
men she lays siege to with the aid of all that is ugly; against the
others she perforce must enlist whatever is noblest on earth. Against
the first she has thousands of weapons, the very stones in the road
becoming engines of mischief; but the others she can only attack with
one irresistible sword, the gleaming sword of duty and truth. In
Antigone's story is found the whole tale of destiny's empire on wisdom.
Jesus who died for us, Curtius who leaped into the gulf, Socrates who
refused to desist from his teaching, the sister of charity who yields
up her life to tending the sick, the humble wayfarer who perishes
seeking to rescue his fellows from death--all these have been forced to
choose, all these bear the mark of Antigone's glorious wound on their
breast. For truly those who live in the light have their magnificent
perils also; and wisdom has danger for such as shrink from
self-sacrifice, though it may be that they who shrink from
self-sacrifice are perhaps not very wise.
48. Pronounce the word "destiny," and in the minds of all men an image
arises of gloom and of terror--of death. In their thoughts they regard
it, instinctively, as the lane that leads straight to the tomb. Most
often, indeed, it is only the name that they give unto death, when its
hand is not visible yet. It is death that looms in the future, the
shadow of death upon life. "None can escape his destiny" we often
exclaim when we hear of death lying in wait for the traveller at the
bend of the road. But were the traveller to encounter happiness
instead, we would never ascribe this to destiny; if we did, we should
have in our mind a far different goddess. And yet, are not joys to be
met with on the highways of life that are greater than any misfortune,
more momentous even than death? May a happiness not be encountered that
the eye cannot see? and is it not of the nature of happiness to be less
manifest than misfortune, to become ever less apparent to the eye as it
reaches loftier heights? But to this we refuse to pay heed. The whole
village, the town, will flock to the spot where some wretched adventure
takes place; but there are none will pause for an instant and let their
eyes rest on a kiss, or a vision of beauty that gladdens the soul, a
ray of love that illumines the heart. And yet may the kiss be
productive of joy no less great than the pain that follows a wound. We
are unjust; we never associate destiny with happiness; and if we do not
regard it as being inseparable from death, it is only to connect it
with disaster even greater than death itself.
49. Were I to refer to the destiny of OEdipus, Joan of Arc, Agamemnon,
you would give not a thought to their lives, but only behold the last
moments of all, the pathway of death. You would stoutly maintain that
their destiny was of the saddest, for that their end was sad. You
forget, however, that death can never be happy; but nevertheless it is
thus we are given to judging of life. It is as though death swallowed
all; and should accident suddenly end thirty years Lot unclouded joy,
the thirty years would be hidden away from our eyes by the gloom of one
sorrowful hour.
50. It is wrong to think of destiny only in connection with death and
disaster. When shall we cease to believe that death, and not life, is
important; that misfortune is greater than happiness? Why, when we try
to sum up a man's destiny, keep our eyes fixed only on the tears that
he shed, and never on the smiles of his joy? Where have we learned that
death fixes the value of life, and not life that of death? We deplore
the destiny of Socrates, Duncart, Antigone, and many others whose lives
were noble; we deplore; their destiny because their end was sudden and
cruel; and we are fain to admit that misfortune prevails over wisdom
and virtue alike. But, first of all, you yourself are neither just nor
wise if you seek in wisdom and justice aught else but wisdom and
justice alone. And further, what right have we thus to sum up an entire
existence in the one hour of death? Why conclude, from the fact that
Socrates and Antigone met with unhappy ends, that it was their wisdom
or virtue brought unhappiness to them? Does death occupy more space in
life than birth? Yet do you not take the sage's birth into account as
you ponder over his destiny. Happiness or unhappiness arises from all
that we do from the day of our birth to the day of our death; and it is
not in death, but indeed in the days and the years that precede it,
that we can discover a man's true happiness or sorrow--in a word, his
destiny. We seem to imagine that the sage, whose terrible death is
written in history, spent all his life in sad anticipation of the end
his wisdom prepared; whereas in reality, the thought of death troubles
the wise far less than it troubles the wicked. Socrates had far less
cause than Macbeth to dread an unhappy end. And unhappy as his death
may have been, it at least had not darkened his life; he had not spent
all his days in dying preliminary deaths, as did the Thane of Cawdor.
But it is difficult for us not to believe that a wound, that bleeds a
few hours, must crumble away into nothingness all the peace of a
lifetime.