ned by a
kind of sentimental vanity in us, which complacently dwells on the
measureless force that for ever keeps watch on our plans, and confers
on our simplest action a mysterious, eternal significance. Fatality,
briefly, explains and excuses all things, by relegating to a sufficient
distance in the invisible or the unintelligible all that it would be
hard to explain, and more difficult still to excuse.

13

Therefore it is that so many have turned to the dismembered statue of
the terrible goddess who reigned in the dramas of Euripides, Sophocles,
and Aeschylus, and that the scattered fragments of her limbs have
provided more than one poet with the marble required for the fashioning
of a newer divinity, who should be more human, less arbitrary, and less
inconceivable than she of old. The fatality of the passions, for
instance, has thus been evolved. But for a passion truly to be fatal
in a soul aware of itself, for the mystery to reappear that shall make
crime pardonable by investing it with loftiness and lifting it high
above the will of man: for these we require the intervention of a God,
or some other equally irresistible, infinite force. Wagner, therefore,
in "Tristram and Iseult," makes use of the philtre, as Shakespeare of
the witches in "Macbeth," Racine of the oracle of Calchas in
"Iphigenia" and of Venus' hatred in "Phedre." We have travelled in a
circle, and find ourselves back once more at the very heart of the
craving of former days. This expedient may be more or less legitimate
in archaic or legendary drama, where there is room for all kinds of
poetic fantasy; but in the drama which pretends to actual truth we
demand another intervention, one that shall seem to us more genuinely
irresistible, if crimes like Macbeth's, such a deed of horror as that
to which Agamemnon consented: perhaps, too, the kind of love that
burned in Phedre, shall achieve their mysterious excuse, and acquire a
grandeur and sombre nobility that intrinsically they do not possess.
Take away from Macbeth the fatal predestination, the intervention of
hell, the heroic struggle with an occult justice that for ever is
revealing itself through a thousand fissures of revolting nature, and
Macbeth is merely a frantic, contemptible murderer. Take away the
oracle of Calchas, and Agamemnon becomes abominable. Take away the
hatred of Venus, and what is Phedre but a neurotic creature, whose
"moral quality" and power of resistance to evil