VI
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.
UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE