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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 ennoble 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 space 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 spaces within us; nor can the time thus employed be possibly wasted.

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 assumed 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 God 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.