For this once, a military despotism was vanquished by a feudal one.
I cannot pass with indifference the engraving which shows the meeting of 'Wellington and BlUcher at the moment of victory at Waterloo; I stand gazing at it every time, and every time my heart is chilled and frightened. That calm, British figure, which promises nothing brilliant, and that grey, roughly good-natured, German condottiere. The Irishman in the English service, a man without a fatherland, and the Pn�ssian whose fatherland is in the barracks, greet each other gladly; and how should they not be glad? They have just turned history off the high road and up to the hubs in mud-mud out of which it will not be hauled in fifty years. It was dawn . . . Europe was still asleep in those days and did not know that her destinies had been altered-and
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how? Bliicher hurried and Grouchy was too late! How many misfortunes, how many tears did that victory cost the nations!
And how many misfortunes, how much blood would a victory of the opposing side have cost them?
Both nature and history are going nowhere, and therefore they are ready to go anywhere to which they are directed, if this is possible, that is, if nothing obstructs them. They are composed au fur et a mesure of an immense multitude of particles acting upon and meeting with each other, checking and attracting each other; but man is by no means lost because of this, like a grain of sand in a mountain ; is not more subject to the elements nor more tightly bound down by necessity: he grows up, by reason of having understood his plight, into a helmsman who proudly ploughs the waves with his boat, making the bottomless abyss serve him as a path of communication.
Having neither programme, set theme nor unavoidable denouement, the dishevelled improvisation of history is ready to walk with anyone; anyone can insert into it his line of verse and, if it is sonorous, it will remain his line until the poem i s torn up, s o long a s the past ferments in its blood and memory. A multitude of possibilities, episodes, discoveries, in history and in nature, lies slumbering at every step. The rock had only to be touched with science and water flowed out of it-and what is water? Think what has been done by compressed steam, or by electricity, since man, not Jupiter, took them into his hands.
Man's share in this is a great one and full of poetry: it is a kind of creation. The elements, matter, are indifferent: they can slumber for a thousand years and never wake up; but man sends them out to work for him, and they go. The sun had long been travelling across the sky: suddenly man intercepted its ray; he retained the trace of it, and the sun began to make portraits for him.
Nature never fights against man; this is a base, religious calumny. She is not intelligent enough to fight: she is indifferent. 'In proportion as a man knows her, so can he govern her,'
said Bacon, and he was perfectly right. Nature cannot thwart man unless man thwarts her laws; she, as she goes on with her work, will unconsciously do his work for him. Men know this, and it is on this basis that they are masters of the seas and lands.
But man has not the same respect for the objectivity of the historical world: here he is at home and does not stand on ceremony. In history it is easier for him to be carried passively along by the current of events, or to burst into it with a knife
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and a shout: 'General prosperity or death ! ' than to observe the flooding and ebbing of the waves on which he floats, to study the rhythm of their fluctuations, and by that same means to discover for himself unending fairways.
Of course, the position of man in history is more complicated: here he is at one time boat, wave and pilot.
'If only there were a chart! '
'But i f Columbus had had a chart someone else would have discovered America.'
'Why?'
'Because it would have had to have been discovered to get on to the chart.'
It is only by depriving history of every predestined course that man and history become something earnest, effective and filled with profound interest. If events are stacked in advance, if the whole of history is the unfolding of some anti-historic plot, if the result of it all is one performance, one mise en scene, then at least let us too take up wooden swords and tin shields. Are we to shed real blood and real tears for the performance of a charade by providence? If there is a pre-ordained plan, history is reduced to an insertion of figures in an algebraical formula, and the future is mortgaged before its birth.
People who speak with horror of Owen's depriving man of freewill and moral splendour are reconciling predestination not only with freedom but also with the hangman!-except on the authority of the text that 'the son of man must be betrayed, but woe unto him who shall betray him.'40
Is it to be wondered at that with such elucidation the simplest everyday subjects become, thanks to scholastic interpretation, utterly incomprehensible? Can there be, for instance, a fact more 40 Theologians, in general, are more courageous than doctrinaires; they say plainly that without the will of God a hair will not fall from the head, and the responsibility for every act, even for the intention, they leave with man. Scientific fatalism asserts that they do not even speak of persons, of accidental carriers of an idea . . . (that is, there is no mention of us, the ordinary man, and as for such persons as Alexander of Macedon or Peter l-our ears have been stunned with their universal, historical vocation) . The doctrinaires; you see, are like great proprietors: they deal with the economy of history en gros, wholesale . . . but where is the boundary betwPen individuals and the herd? At what point do a few grains, as my dear Athenian sophists used to ask, become a heap?
It goes without saying that we have never confused predestination with the theory of probabilities ; we have the right to make deductions from the past to the future. \Vhen we perform an induction, we know what we
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patent to everyone than the observation that the longer a man lives the more chance he has of making his fortune; the longer he looks at one object the better he sees it if nothing disturbs him and he does not go blind ? And out of this fact they have contrived the idol of progress, a kind of golden calf, growing incessantly and promising to grow to infinity.
Is it not simpler to grasp that man lives not for the fulfilment of his destiny, not for the incarnation of an idea, not for progress, but solely because he was born; and he was born for (however bad a word that is) . . . for the present, which does not at all prevent his either receiving a heritage from the past or leaving something in his will. To idealists this seems humiliating and coarse: they will take absolutely no account of the fact that the great significance of us men, with all our unimportance, with the hardly discernible flicker of the life of each person, consists in just this: that while we are alive, until the knot held together by us has been resolved into its elements, we are for all that ourselves, and not dolls destined to suffer progress or embody some homeless idea. We must be proud of not being needles and thread in the hands of fate as it sews the motley stuff of history .