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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 God, 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, etc. 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.

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 space 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.

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 God 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?