Fatalism

“ Instead of materialism, it might be more reasonable, perhaps, to dread fatalism; but fatalism is a rock on which all systems, philosophical and religious, when carried to abstract conclusions, have tended to drift. ”

“ For the benefit of those who object that there is too great a leaning to what they would call "the dangerous doctrine of fatalism" in these old-world beliefs, it may be well to quote a few reassuring words from a very able and voluminous writer on these subjects, Dr. ”

“ That sinister countenance seemed to him to presage some approaching calamity.
Thus, there are men whom fate has marked on the forehead with a fatal stamp. The mysterious sign is not displayed at every time and before all; but at certain epochs of life, when the unknown breath caresses the predestinated or cursed head, the mark all at once appeals, like a tawny light in the depth of night.
A curse! Fatality has moulded that man's brain, it has left its potent impress on his skull. ”

“ Were not the motives so deep, devilish, and villanous, we might sit as spectators, and enjoy the horrors; but when we know that the whole was real—that the motive was serious—that the death's head and cross bones were real representatives of the red warm human blood that was doomed to flow, ere the terrible tragedy ended; we turn away, like Harold, pale and trembling; and as we retreat, we look round in affright, and are still followed by the skeletons of the dead. ”

“ But beware when any one you love is seated in that corner of the settle where the cushion invites rest, lest it be your fate to mourn and wail as it is mine to curse the hour when I sought to clear my way by murder. For the doom of the man of blood is upon me. The hindrance is gone from my life, but a horror has entered it beyond the conception of any soul that has not yielded itself to the unimaginable influences emanating from an accomplished crime. ”

“ I wish to die with thee, if fate brings thy turn to perish first, and not to prolong my span of life at all, when once dismal death has cast thee to the tomb.
"For if thou chance to close thy eyes for ever, a victim to the maddened attack of the men-at-arms;—by whatsoever doom thy breath be cut off, by sword or disease, by sea or soil, I forswear every wanton and corrupt flame, and vow myself to a death like thine; that they who were bound by one marriage-union may be embraced in one and the same punishment. ”

“ Stepping across the earth, which is but a broad executioner's block for pale, stooping humanity, he enters the larva world of blotted out men. The rotten chain of beings reaches down into this slaughter field of souls. Here the dead are pictured as eternally horripilating at death! "As annihilation, the white shapelessness of revolting terror, passes by each unsouled mask of a man, a tear gushes from the crumbled eye, as a corpse bleeds when its murderer approaches." ”

“ If Fate so rules, that I should feel
The miseries of a widow's life,
Can man's device the doom repeal?
Unequal seems to be a strife,
Between Humanity and Fate;
None have on earth what they desire;
Death comes to all or soon or late ”

“ There had been some sort of bond between them till the vision of death rose before each shrinking soul. Shoulder to shoulder in crime, they fell apart as their doom approached; and rushing, shrieking, each man for himself, they one and all sought to escape by doors, windows or any outlet which promised release from this fatal spot. One rushed by me—I do not know which one—and I felt as if a flame from hell had licked me, his breath was so hot and the moans he uttered so like the curses we imagine to blister the lips of the lost. ”

“ Slowly, at last, came the step of the dead, heavily ascending the stairs;—he entered—I rushed to meet him, and the long pent up agony of my soul burst forth in madness uncontrolled. ‘Monster!—murderer!—destroyer of thy father and thy brother! why comest thou thus to torture and not kill? why is thy bloody hand for ever raised, and yet forbearing to fall? If thine aim be vengeance, strike—strike—strike—thou blood-bespotted horror! ”

“ Man strives with obstacles under the form of superstition,86 under the form of prejudice, and under the form of the elements. A triple fatality weighs upon us—the fatality of dogmas, the fatality of laws, the fatality of matter. In Notre Dame the author has denounced the first; in Les Misérables he has described the second; in this book he points out the third.
With these three fatalities that envelop mankind is mingled the inward fatality—the highest fatality—the human heart. ”

“ HOW blest is he, who for his country dies,
Since death pursues the coward as he flies?
The youth in vain would fly from Fate's attack,
With trembling knees and Terrour at his back;
Though Fear should lend him pinions like the wind,
Yet swifter Fate will seize him from behind. ”

“ For Man's grim Justice goes its way, And will not swerve aside: It slays the weak, it slays the strong, It has a deadly stride: With iron heel it slays the strong, The monstrous parricide! We waited for the stroke of eight: Each tongue was thick with thirst: For the stroke of eight is the stroke of Fate That makes a man accursed, And Fate will use a running noose For the best man and the worst. ”

“ Many motives impel me to beg earnestly for life. I feel the natural horror of a violent death, the universal dread of untimely dissolution. I am desirous to recompense the injury I have done to the clergy, to the world, and to religion, and to efface the scandal of my crime, by the example of my repentance: but, above all, I wish to die with thoughts more composed, and calmer preparation. ”

“ Have you not, lastly, often read, and as often been told, that bodily death is one of the most tremendous evils which man has to fear, and consequently to be dreaded as the scourge of all scourges, and the plague of all plagues, in the long catalogue of human miseries? ”

“ From the fact that it is a tragedy flow all the forms and tests by which we say it is a murder or an execution, a martyrdom or a suicide. They all depend on an echo or vibration, not only in the soul of man, but in the souls of all men. ”

“ But this is not all: sometimes more dismal effects attend this inquisition, for death is but too often the cure of their madness and end of their sorrows; some with ill usage, some with grief, and many with both, are barbarously cut off in the prime of their years and flower of their health, who otherwise might have been mothers of a numerous issue, and survived many years. This is murder in the deepest sense, and much more cruel than dagger or poison, because more lingering; they die by piecemeal, and in all the agonies and terrors of a distracted mind. ”

“ Yet you look not like one who has had nights of delirium, and days in which the heart lay in the breast, as a corpse endowed with consciousness might lie in the grave, feeling the worm gnaw it, and the decay corrupt, and yet incapable of resistance or of motion. ”

“ Disease curtails the gathering years of some, Some fall a rival's enmity beneath,
Sharp steel, or pinion'd-lead sends others home—
Poison and thunder fill the nets of death:
Some are o'erpower'd by wasting pestilence—
The murderer's bloody stroke is some men's doom,
The headsman summons others to the tomb,
But I—am called by love to speed me hence. ”

“ A look of evil and scornful triumph had hardened on them, and made death so life-like and so terrible, that the beholder at once took flight, as swiftly as if the stiffened corpse would rise up and follow. ”

“ The death of others instills in you so much horror that your own death becomes an object of desire; that is to say, if by dying, you would be in some degree useful! One calls to mind deaths which have put an end to angers and to revolts. One only retains this ambition, to be a useful corpse. ”

“ Does a dead Man talk and walk? I wish I may never meet with more frightful Ghosts than you are. Pa.Ay, indeed, you make a Jest of it; but for all that, you kill poor me, and more cruelly too, than if you stuck a Dagger in my Breast. For now I, poor Wretch as I am, die a lingering Death. Ma.Prithee tell me, how many Women with Child have miscarried at the Sight of thee? Pa.My Paleness shews I have no more Blood in my Body than a Ghost. ”

“ A guillotine from Hell will be erected, where a demon will execute a headsman. The hour will be four, and we shall form the crowd round the scaffold.
Probably things will be like this. But if the dead do return, in what shapes will they appear? What part of their incomplete and mutilated body will they keep? Which will they choose? Shall the head or the trunk appear as a spectre?
Alas! what has Death done with the soul? ”

“ With his own sense imagines it endued.
So he complains because he was born mortal,
Nor sees that there will be in real death
No other self which living can lament
That he has perished, none that will stand by
And grieve over his burnt and mangled corpse.
For if it be an evil after death
To be mauled by teeth of beasts, why should it seem
Less cruel to be laid out on a pyre
And scorched with hot flames, or to be embalmed
In stifling honey, or to lie stiff and cold
Couched on the cool slab of a chilly stone,
Or to be crushed down under a weight of earth? ”

“ Why full of terror, Compassed with error, Trouble thy heart, For thy mortal part? The soul flies home— The corpse is dumb. Of all thou didst have, Follows naught to the grave. Thou fliest thy nest, Swift as a bird to thy place of rest. ”

“ Then he springs up, and with the look and action of a fury bursting hot from the abyss, he snatches the instrument of death, and, after ripping up the bosom of the loved, suspected, hated, lamented, fair one, he stabs himself to the heart, and exhibits a striking proof, how terrible a creature a puny mortal is, when agitated by an infernal passion. ”

“ The grim monster death having done its terrible work leaves its impress on the faces of its unfortunate victims. Passion, determination and conflicting emotions plainly stamped on the faces of the victims now wrapt in the cold embrace of death. ”

“ The naked, strong body has known death, and sits in utter dejection, finished, hulked, a weight of shame. And what remains of life is in the face, whose expression is sinister and gruesome, like that of an unrelenting criminal violated by torture. The criminal look of misery and hatred on the fixed, violated face and in the bloodshot eyes is almost impossible. ”

“ Her look hath crippling in it, and her curse
All plagues which on mortality can light;
Death is his doom if she behold, . . . or worse, . . .
Diseases loathsome and incurable,
And inward sufferings that no tongue can tell. ”

“ I gave a gasp and pulled off more cushions, then I fell on my knees, struck down by the greatest horror which a man can feel. Death lay before me—violent, uncalled-for death—and the victim was a woman. ”

“ And the realization of death, in the revolt of one’s whole being, is invested with a special horror—that of being crushed and pulverized, of being not even a dead man, but a nameless heap, a handful of fleshly dust. ”

“ True, where both parties are good and pure, no harm may at first ensue, but at last an abnormal susceptibility results, by which any man or woman may be led into "the jaws of death, into the mouth of hell." ”

“ Very odious, I confess, are the lessons of Fate. Who likes to have a dapper phrenologist pronouncing on his fortunes? Who likes to believe that he has hidden in his skull, spine, and pelvis, all the vices of a Saxon or Celtic race, which will be sure to pull him down, — with what grandeur of hope and resolve he is fired, — into a selfish, huckstering, servile, dodging animal? ”

“ Then he said: “Whereas blood rained on you, many men’s blood shall be shed, yours and others; but when ye heard a great din, then ye must have been shown the crack of doom, and ye shall all die speedily. ”

“ Death has been painted as a skeleton grasping a scythe, a grinning skull, a threatening figure with terrible face and uplifted dart, a bony scarecrow shaking an hour-glass—all that could alarm and repel has been gathered round this rightly-named King of Terrors. ”

“ CHAPTER VI Vengeance IT strikes a chill through me, even yet, to recall the awful horror of that instant. The fer-de-lance—death in a few heartbeats, and such a death!—a death that melts a man into an abomination! ”

“ Who has told us, what God can only tell, that misfortunes are judgments, or that death is one? That death which is common to all men? And as to the different and disastrous manners of dying; have not fire and sword, famine and pestilence, poison and torture, wild beasts and accidents, destroyed as many good men as evil men? ”

“ Death came no longer as of old, knocking painfully at the door of life, but strode noiselessly in, and, before one was well aware, smote his victim—no one could tell how, for the strong man, who appeared hale and well one hour, was weak and helpless the next, and fell without knowing whence the blow came. ”

“ A mad horror had forged in him a readiness to commit the crime—and the deep, unconscious image of future murder, dormant in the lower strata of spiritual life, the tormenting itch to murder, a condition of primitive wrath, oppressed his diseased will. ”

“ If he had taken the whole world, he could not have done one whit worse, provided that he left alive and sound that prey whom he now leads away. Beauty, courtesy, and knowledge, and whatsoever appertaining to goodness a lady can have, has Death, who has destroyed all good in the person of my lady the empress, snatched from us and cheated us of. Thus hath Death slain us." "Ah, God!" say the leeches, "thou hatest this city, we know it well, for that we came not here a little space ago. If we had come yesterday, Death might have esteemed himself highly, if he had taken aught from us by force." ”

“ It is true that the fatality shown is no longer the goddess of old, or rather (at least to the bulk of mankind) the clearly determinate God, inflexible, implacable, arbitrary, blind, although constantly watchful; the fatality of to-day is vaster, more formless, more vague, less human or actively personal, more indifferent and more universal. In a word, it is now no more than a provisional appellation bestowed, until better be found, on the general and inexplicable misery of man. ”