at last she is pointed out to him. She lives in an enormous and
luxurious palace; but her wealth is dwindling day by day, and the doors
and windows of her abode are shrinking. She explains to him that she
passes thus, alternately, from misery to opulence; and that her
situation at a given moment determines the future of all the children
who may come into the world at that moment. "You were born," she says,
"when my prosperity was on the wane; and that is the cause of your
ill-luck." The only way, she tells him, to hoodwink or get the better
of fortune would be to substitute the luck of Militza, his niece, for
his own, seeing that she was born at a propitious period. All he need
do, she says, is to take this niece into his house, and to declare to
any one who may ask him that all he has belongs to Militza.
He does as she bids him, and his affairs at once take a new turn. His
herds multiply and grow fat, his trees are bent beneath the masses of
fruit, unexpected inheritances come in, his land bears prodigious
crops. But one morning, as he stands there, his heart filled with
happiness, eyeing a magnificent cornfield, a stranger asks him who the
owner may be of these wonderful ears of wheat that, as they sway to and
fro beneath the dew, seem twice as heavy and twice as high as the ears
in the adjoining field. He forgets himself, and answers, "They are
mine." At that very instant fire breaks out in the opposite end of the
field, and commences its ravages. Then he remembers the advice that he
has neglected to follow: he runs after the stranger shouting, "Stop,
come back: I made a mistake: what I told you was not true! This field
is not mine: it belongs to my niece Militza!" And the flames have no
sooner heard than they suddenly fall away, and the corn shoots up
afresh.
2
This naive and very ancient image, which might almost serve to-day as
an illustration of our actual ignorance, proves that the mysterious
problem of chance has not changed, from the time of man's first
questioning glance. We have our thoughts, which build up our intimate
happiness or sorrow; and upon this events from without have more or
less influence. In some men these thoughts will have acquired such
strength, such vigilance, that without their consent nothing can enter
the structure of crystal and brass, they have been able to raise on the
hill that commands the wonted road of adventures. And we have our
will, which our thoughts feed and sustain; and many useless or harmful
events can be held in check by our will. But around these islets,
within which is a certain degree of safety, of immunity from attack,
extends a region as vast and uncontrollable as the ocean, a region
swayed by chance as the waves are swayed by the wind. Neither will nor
thought can keep one of these waves from suddenly breaking upon us; and
we shall be caught unawares, and perhaps be wounded and stunned. Only
when the wave has retreated can thought and will begin their beneficent
action. Then they will raise us, and bind up our wounds; restore
animation, and take careful heed that the mischief the shock has
wrought shall not reach the profound sources of life. Their mission
extends no further, and may, on the surface, appear very humble. In
reality, however, unless chance assume the irresistible form of cruel
disease or death, the workings of will and thought are sufficient to
neutralise all its efforts, and to preserve what is best and most
essential to man in human happiness.
3
Redoubtable, multitudinous chance is for ever threading its watchful
way through the midst of the events we have foreseen, and round and
about our most deliberate actions, wherewith we are slowly tracing the
broad lines of our existence. The air we breathe, the time we
traverse, the space through which we move, are all peopled by lurking
circumstances, which pick us out from among the crowd. The least study
of their habits will quickly convince us that these strange daughters
of hazard, who should be blind and deaf as their father, by no means
act in his irresponsible fashion. They are well aware of what they are
doing, and rarely make a mistake. With inexplicable certainty do they
move to the passer-by whom they have been sent to confront, and lightly
touch his shoulder. Two men may be travelling upon the same road, and
at the same hour; but there will be no hesitation or doubt in the ranks
of the double, invisible troop whom fortune has ambushed there.
Towards one a band of white virgins will hasten, bearing palms and
amphorae, presenting the thousand unexpected delights of the journey;
as the other approaches, the "Evil Women," whom Aeschylus tells of,
will hurl themselves from the hedges, as though they were charged to
avenge, upon this unwitting victim, some inexpiable crime committed by
him before he was born.
4
There is scarcely one of us who has not been able, in some measure, to
follow the workings of destiny in life. We have all known men who met
with a prosperity or disaster entirely out of relation to any of their
actions; men upon whom good or bad luck seemed suddenly, at a turn of
the road, to spring from the ground or descend from the stars,
undeserved, unprovoked, but complete and inevitable. One, we will say,
who scarcely has given a thought to some appointment for which he knows
his rival to be better equipped, will see this rival vanish at the
decisive moment, another, who has counted upon the protection of a most
influential friend, will see this friend die on the very day when his
assistance could be of value. A third, who has neither talent nor
beauty, will arrive each morning at the Palace of Fortune, Glory or
Love at the brief instant when every door lies open; while another, a
man of great merit, who long has pondered the legitimate step he is
taking, presents himself at the hour when ill-luck shall have closed
the gate for the next half-century. One man will risk his health
twenty times in imbecile feats, and never experience the least
ill-effect; another will deliberately venture it in an honourable
cause, and lose it without hope of return. To help the first,
thousands of unknown people, who never have seen him, will be obscurely
working; to hinder the second, thousands of unknown people labour, who
are ignorant of his existence. And all, on the one side as well as the
other, are totally unaware of what they are doing; they obey the same
minute, widely-distributed order; and at the prescribed moment the
detached pieces of the mysterious machine join, dovetail, unite; and we
have two complete and dissimilar destinies set into motion by Time.
In a curious book on "Chance and Destiny," Dr. Foissac gives various
strange examples of the persistent, inexplicable, fundamental,
pre-ordained, irreducible iniquity in which many existences are
steeped. As we go through page after page, we feel almost as though we
were being conducted through the disconcerting laboratories of another
world where, in the absence of every instrument that human justice and
reason might hold indispensable, happiness and sorrow are being
parcelled out and allotted. Take, for instance, the life of
Vauvenargues, one of the most admirable of men, and certainly, of all
the great sages, the most unfortunate. Whenever his fortune hangs in
the balance, he is attacked and prostrated by cruel disease; and
notwithstanding the efforts of his genius, his bravery, his moral
beauty, day after day he is wantonly betrayed or falls victim to
gratuitous injustice; and at the age of thirty-two he dies, at the very
moment when recognition is at last awaiting his work. So too there is
the terrible story of Lesurques,[1] in which we see a thousand
coincidences that might have been contrived in hell, blending and
joining together to work the ruin of an innocent man; while truth,
chained down by fate, dumbly shrieking, as we do when wrestling with
nightmare, is unable to put forth a single gesture that shall rend the
veil of night. There is Aimar de Ransonnet, President of the
Parliament of Paris, one of the most upright of men, who first of all
is suddenly dismissed from his office, sees his daughter die on a
dunghill before his eyes, his son perish at the hands of the
executioner, and his wife struck by lightning; while he himself is
accused of heresy and sent to the Bastille, where he dies of grief
before he is brought to trial.
The calamities that befell Oedipus and the Atrides are regarded by us
as improbable and fabulous; and yet we find in contemporary history
that fatality clings with no less persistence to families such as the
Stuarts, the Colignys,[2] &c., and hounds to their death, with what
almost seems personal vindictiveness, pitiable and innocent victims
like Henrietta of England, daughter of Henry IV., Louise de Bourbon,
Joseph II., and Marie-Antoinette.
And again in another category, what shall we say of the
injustice--unintelligent but apparently almost conscious, almost
systematic and premeditated--of games of chance, duels, battles,
storms, shipwrecks, and fires? Or of the inconceivable luck of a
Chastenet de Puységur who, after forty years' service, in the course of
which he took part in thirty battles and a hundred and twenty sieges,
always in the front rank and displaying the most romantic courage, was
never once touched by shot or steel, while Marshal Oudinot was wounded
thirty-five times, and General Trézel was struck by a bullet in every
encounter? What shall we say of the extraordinary fortune of Lauzun,
Chamillart, Casanova, Chesterfield, &c., or of the inconceivable,
unvarying prosperity that attended the crimes of Sylla, Marius, or
Dionysius the Elder, who, in his extreme old age, after an odious but
fantastically successful life, died of joy on learning that the
Athenians had just crowned one of his tragedies? Or, finally, of
Herod, surnamed the Great or the Ascalonite, who swam in blood,
murdered one of his wives and five of his children, put to death every
upright man who might chance to offend him, and yet was fortunate in
all his undertakings?
6
These famous examples, which might be indefinitely multiplied, are in
truth no more than the abnormal and historic presentments of what is
shown to us every day, in a humbler but not less emphatic fashion, by
the thousand and one caprices of propitious or contrary fortune at work
on the small and ill-lit stage of ordinary life.
Doubtless, we must, first of all, when closely examining such insolent
prosperity or unvarying disaster, attribute a royal share to the
physical or moral causes which are capable of explaining them. Had we
ourselves known Vauvenargues, we should probably have detected a
certain timidity, irresolution or misplaced pride in his character
whereby he was disabled from allowing the opportunity to mature or from
seizing it with sufficient vigour. And Lesurques, it may be, was
deficient in ability, in one knows not what, in that prodigious
personal force that one expects to find in falsely-accused innocence.
Nor can it be denied that the Stuarts, no less than Joseph II. and
Marie-Antoinette, were guilty of enormous blunders that invited
disaster; or that Lauzun, Casanova, and Lord Chesterfield had flung to
the winds those essential scruples that hinder the honest man. So too
is it certain that although the existence of Sylla, Marius, Dionysius
the Elder, and Herod the Ascalonite may have been externally almost
incomparably fortunate, few men, I fancy, would care to have lurking
within them the strange, restless, blood-stained phantom, possessed
neither of thought nor of feeling, on which the happiness must depend
(if the word happiness be indeed applicable here) that is founded upon
unceasing crime. But, this deduction being made, and on the most
reasonable, most liberal scale (which will become the more generous as
we see more of life and understand it better, and penetrate further
into the secrets of little causes and great effects), we shall still be
forced to admit that there remains, in these obstinately recurring
coincidences, in these indissoluble series of good or evil fortune,
these persistent runs of good or bad luck, a considerable, often
essential, and sometimes exclusive share that can be ascribed only to
the impenetrable, incontrovertible will of a real but unknown power;
which is known as Chance, Fatality, Destiny, Luck, Fortune, good or
evil Star, Angel with the White Wings, Angel with the Black Wings, and
by many other names, that vary in accordance with the more or less
imaginative, more or less poetic genius of centuries and peoples. And
here we have one of the most serious, most perplexing problems of all
those that have to be solved by man before he may legitimately regard
himself as the principal, independent and irrevocable inhabitant of
this earth.
7
Let us reduce the problem to its simplest terms, and submit it to our
reason. First, however, let us consider whether it affects man alone.
We have with us, upon this curiously incomprehensible globe, silent and
faithful companions of our existence; and we shall often find it
helpful to let our eyes rest upon these when, having reached certain
altitudes that perhaps are illusory, giddiness seizes our brain and
inclines us too readily to the idea that the stars, the gods or the
veiled representatives of the sublime laws of the universe, are
concerned solely with us. These poor brothers of our animal life, that
are so calmly, so confidently resigned, would appear to know many
things that we have forgotten; they are the tranquil custodians of the
secret that we seek so anxiously. It is evident that animals, and
notably domestic animals, have also a kind of destiny. They too know
what prolonged and gratuitous happiness means; they also have
encountered the persistent misfortune for which no cause can be found.
They have the same right as we to speak of their star, their good or
bad luck, their prosperity or disaster. Compare the fate of the
cab-horse, that ends its days at the knacker's, after having passed
through the hands of a hundred brutal and nameless masters, with that
of the thorough-bred which dies of old age in the stable of a
kind-hearted master; and from the point of view of justice (unless we
accept the Buddhist theory, that life in this world is the reward or
punishment of an anterior existence) explanation is as completely
lacking as in the case of the man whom chance has reduced to poverty or
raised to wealth. There is, in Flanders, a breed of draught-dogs upon
which destiny alternately lavishes her favour and her spite. Some will
be bought by a butcher, and lead a magnificent life. The work is
trifling: in the morning, harnessed four abreast, they draw a light
cart to the slaughter-house, and at night, galloping joyously,
triumphantly, home through the narrow streets of the ancient towns with
their tiny, lit-up gables, bring it back, overflowing with meat.
Between-times there is leisure, and marvellous leisure, among the rats
and the waste of the slaughter-house. They are copiously fed, they are
fat, they shine like seals, and taste in its fulness the only happiness
dreamed of by the simple and ferreting instinct of the honest dog. But
their unfortunate brethren of the same litter, that the lame
sand-pedlar buys, or the old collector of household refuse, or the
needy peasant with his great, cruel clogs--these are chained to heavy
carts or shapeless barrows; they are filthy, mangy, hairless,
emaciated, starving; and follow till they die the circles of a hell
into which they were thrust by a few coppers dropped into some horny
palm. And, in a world less directly subject to man, there must
evidently be partridges, pheasants, deer, hares, which have no luck,
which never escape the gun; while others, one knows not how or why,
emerge unscathed from every battue.
They, therefore, are exposed, like ourselves, to incontestable
injustice. But it does not occur to us, when considering their
hardships, to set all the gods in motion or seek explanation from the
mysterious powers; and yet what happens to them may well be no more
than the image, naively simplified, of what happens to us. It is true
that we play the precise part, in their case, of those mysterious
powers whom we seek in our own. But what right have we to expect from
these last more consciousness, more intelligent justice, than we
ourselves show in our dealings with animals? And in any event, if this
instance shall only have deprived chance of a little of its useless
prestige and have proportionately augmented our spirit of initiative
and struggle, there will be a gain the importance of which is by no
means to be despised.
8
Still further allowance must therefore be made; but yet there
undoubtedly remains--at least as far as the more complex life of man is
concerned--a cause of good or evil fortune as yet untouched by our
explanations, in the often visible will of chance, which one might
almost call the "small change" of fatality. We know--and this is one
of those formless but fundamental ideas on the laws of life that the
experience of thousands of years has turned into a kind of instinct--we
know that men exist who, other things being equal, are "lucky" or
"unlucky." Circumstances permitted me to follow very closely the
career of a friend of mine who was dogged by persistent ill-fortune. I
do not mean to imply by this that his life was unhappy. It is even
remarkable that the malign influences always respected the broad lines
of his veritable happiness; probably because these were well guarded.
For he had in him a strong moral existence, profound thoughts and
hopes, feelings and convictions. He was well aware that these were
possessions that fortune could not touch: which indeed could not be
destroyed without his consent. Destiny is not invincible; through
life's very centre runs a great inward canal, which we have the power
to turn towards happiness or sorrow; although its ramifications, that
extend over our days, and the thousand tributaries that flow in from
external hazards, are all independent of our will.
It is thus that a beautiful river, streaming down from the heights and
ashine with magnificent glaciers, passes at length through plains and
through cities, whence it receives only poisonous water. For an
instant the river is troubled; and we fear lest it lose, and never
recover again, the image of the pure blue sky that the crystal
fountains had lent: the image that seemed its soul, and the deep and
the limpid expression of its great strength. But if we rejoin it, down
yonder, beneath those great trees, we shall find that it has already
forgotten the foulness of the gutters. It has caught the azure again
in its transparent waves; and flows on to the sea, as clear as it was
on the days when it first smilingly leapt from its source on the
mountains.
And so, as regards this friend of mine, although forced more than once
to shed tears, they were at least not of the kind that memory never
forgets, not of those that fall from our eyes as we mourn our own
death. Every failure, the inevitable disappointment once over, served
only in effect to knit him the closer to his secret happiness, to
affirm this within him, and draw a more sombre outline around it, that
it might thereby appear the more precious, and ardent, and certain.
But no sooner had he quitted this charmed enclosure than hostile
incidents vied with each other in their attacks upon him. As for
instance--he was a very good fencer: he had three duels, and was
wounded each time by a less skilful adversary. If he went on board
ship, the voyage would rarely be prosperous. Whatever undertaking he
put money into was sure to turn out badly. A judicial error, into
which a whole series of curiously malevolent circumstances dragged him,
was productive of long and serious trouble. Further, although his face
was agreeable, and the expression of his eyes loyal and frank, he was
not what one calls "sympathetic": he did not arouse at first sight that
spontaneous affection which we often give, without knowing why, to the
unknown who passes, to an enemy even. Nor was he more fortunate in his
affections. Of a loving disposition, and infinitely worthier of being
loved than most of those to whom he was sacrificed by the
chance-governed heart of women--here again he met with nothing but
treachery, deceit and sorrow. He went his way, extricating himself as
best he could from the paltry snares that malicious fortune prepared at
every step; nor was he discouraged or deeply saddened, only somewhat
surprised at so strange a persistence; until at last there came the
great and solitary good fortune of his life: a love that was the
complement of the one that was eager within him, a love that was
complete, passionate, exclusive, unalterable. And from that moment it
was as though he had come under the influence of another star, the
beneficent rays of which were blending with his own; vexatious events
grew slowly remoter, fewer, warier of attacking him, tardier in their
approach. They seemed reluctantly to abandon their habit of selecting
him as their victim. He actually saw his _luck turn_. And now that he
has gone back, as it were, into the indifferent and neutral atmosphere
of chance common to most men, he smiles when he remembers the time when
every gesture of his was watched by the invisible enemy, and aroused a
danger.
9
Let us not look to the gods for an explanation of these phenomena.
Until these gods shall have clearly explained themselves, there is
nothing that they can explain for us. And destiny, which is merely the
god of which we know least, has less right than any of the others to
intervene and cry to us, as it does from the depths of its inscrutable
night: "It is I who so willed it!" Nor let us invoke the illimitable
laws of the universe, the intentions of history, the will of the
worlds, the justice of the stars. These powers exist: we submit to
them, as we submit to the might of the sun. But they act without
knowing us; and within the wide circle of their influence a liberty
remains to us still that is probably immense. They have better work on
hand than to be for ever bending over us to lift a blade of grass or
drop a leaf in the little paths of our anthill. Since we ourselves are
here the parties concerned, it is, I imagine, within ourselves that the
key of the mystery shall be found; for it is probable that every
creature carries within him the best solution of the problem that he
presents. Within us, underlying the conscious existence that our
reason and will control, is a profounder existence, one side of which
connects with a past beyond the record of history, the other with a
future that thousands of years cannot exhaust. We may safely conceive
that all the gods lie hidden within it; that those wherewith we have
peopled the earth and the planets will emerge one by one, in order to
give it a name and a form that our imagination may understand. And as
man's vision grows clearer, as he shows less desire for image and
symbol, so will the number of these names, the number of these forms,
tend to diminish. He will slowly arrive at the stage when there shall
be one only that he will proclaim, or reserve; when it shall be
revealed to him that this last form, this last name, is truly no more
than the last image of a power whose throne was always within him.
Then will the gods that had gone forth from us be found again in
ourselves; and it is there that we will question them to-day.
10