Sometimes, even, and this has been actually seen, fear turns to passion; fright may change into fury, as prudence does into rage; hence this wise saying:
“The enraged moderates.”
There are outbursts of supreme terror, whence springs wrath like a mournful smoke.—“What do these people want?
What have they come there to do?
Let them get out of the scrape.
So much the worse for them.
It is their fault.
They are only getting what they deserve.
It does not concern us.
Here is our poor street all riddled with balls.
They are a pack of rascals.
Above all things, don’t open the door.”—And the house assumes the air of a tomb.
The insurgent is in the death-throes in front of that house; he sees the grape-shot and naked swords drawing near; if he cries, he knows that they are listening to him, and that no one will come; there stand walls which might protect him, there are men who might save him; and these walls have ears of flesh, and these men have bowels of stone.
Whom shall he reproach?
No one and every one.
The incomplete times in which we live.
It is always at its own risk and peril that Utopia is converted into revolution, and from philosophical protest becomes an armed protest, and from Minerva turns to Pallas.
The Utopia which grows impatient and becomes revolt knows what awaits it; it almost always comes too soon.
Then it becomes resigned, and stoically accepts catastrophe in lieu of triumph.
It serves those who deny it without complaint, even excusing them, and even disculpates them, and its magnanimity consists in consenting to abandonment.
It is indomitable in the face of obstacles and gentle towards ingratitude.
Is this ingratitude, however?
Yes, from the point of view of the human race.
No, from the point of view of the individual.
Progress is man’s mode of existence.
The general life of the human race is called Progress, the collective stride of the human race is called Progress.
Progress advances; it makes the great human and terrestrial journey towards the celestial and the divine; it has its halting places where it rallies the laggard troop, it has its stations where it meditates, in the presence of some splendid Canaan suddenly unveiled on its horizon, it has its nights when it sleeps; and it is one of the poignant anxieties of the thinker that he sees the shadow resting on the human soul, and that he gropes in darkness without being able to awaken that slumbering Progress.
“God is dead, perhaps,” said Gerard de Nerval one day to the writer of these lines, confounding progress with God, and taking the interruption of movement for the death of Being.
He who despairs is in the wrong.
Progress infallibly awakes, and, in short, we may say that it marches on, even when it is asleep, for it has increased in size.
When we behold it erect once more, we find it taller.
To be always peaceful does not depend on progress any more than it does on the stream; erect no barriers, cast in no boulders; obstacles make water froth and humanity boil.
Hence arise troubles; but after these troubles, we recognize the fact that ground has been gained.
Until order, which is nothing else than universal peace, has been established, until harmony and unity reign, progress will have revolutions as its halting-places.
What, then, is progress?
We have just enunciated it; the permanent life of the peoples.
Now, it sometimes happens, that the momentary life of individuals offers resistance to the eternal life of the human race.
Let us admit without bitterness, that the individual has his distinct interests, and can, without forfeiture, stipulate for his interest, and defend it; the present has its pardonable dose of egotism; momentary life has its rights, and is not bound to sacrifice itself constantly to the future.
The generation which is passing in its turn over the earth, is not forced to abridge it for the sake of the generations, its equal, after all, who will have their turn later on.—“I exist,” murmurs that some one whose name is All.
“I am young and in love, I am old and I wish to repose, I am the father of a family, I toil, I prosper, I am successful in business, I have houses to lease, I have money in the government funds, I am happy, I have a wife and children, I have all this, I desire to live, leave me in peace.”—Hence, at certain hours, a profound cold broods over the magnanimous vanguard of the human race.
Utopia, moreover, we must admit, quits its radiant sphere when it makes war.
It, the truth of to-morrow, borrows its mode of procedure, battle, from the lie of yesterday.
It, the future, behaves like the past.
It, pure idea, becomes a deed of violence.
It complicates its heroism with a violence for which it is just that it should be held to answer; a violence of occasion and expedient, contrary to principle, and for which it is fatally punished.
The Utopia, insurrection, fights with the old military code in its fist; it shoots spies, it executes traitors; it suppresses living beings and flings them into unknown darkness.
It makes use of death, a serious matter.
It seems as though Utopia had no longer any faith in radiance, its irresistible and incorruptible force.
It strikes with the sword.
Now, no sword is simple.