messenger only, come very simply to warn us on certain days of our
life that the hour has sounded at last when we needs must judge
ourselves.

46. Men of inferior degree, it is true, are not given to judging
themselves, and therefore is it that fate passes judgment upon them.
They are the slaves of a destiny of almost unvarying sternness, for
it is only when man has been judged by himself that destiny can be
transformed. Men such as these will not master, or alter within
them, the event that they meet; nay, they themselves become morally
transformed by the very first thing that draws near them. If
misfortune befall them, they grovel before it and stoop down to its
level; and misfortune, with them, would seem always to wear its
poorest and commonest aspect. They see the finger of fate in every
least thing that may happen--be it choice of profession, a
friendship that greets them, a woman who passes, and smiles. To them
chance and destiny always are one; but chance will be seldom
propitious if accepted as destiny. Hostile forces at once take
possession of all that is vacant within us, nor filled by the
strength of our soul; and whatever is void in the heart or the mind
becomes a fountain of fatal influence. The Margaret of Goethe and
Ophelia of Shakespeare had perforce to yield meekly to fate, for
they were so feeble that each gesture they witnessed seemed fate's
own gesture to them. But yet, had they only possessed some fragment
of Antigone's strength--the Antigone of Sophocles--would they not
then have transformed the destinies of Hamlet and Faust as well as
their own? And if Othello had taken Corneille's Pauline to wife and
not Desdemona, would Desdemona's destiny then, all else remaining
unchanged, have dared to come within reach of the enlightened love
of Pauline? Where was it, in body or soul, that grim fatality