LIGHT
I am leaning this evening out of the open window. As in bygone nights,
I am watching the dark pictures, invisible at first, taking shape--the
steeple towering out of the hollow, and broadly lighted against the
hill; the castle, that rich crown of masonry; and then the massive
sloping black of the chimney-peopled roofs, which are sharply outlined
against the paler black of space, and some milky, watching windows.
The eye is lost in all directions among the desolation where the
multitude of men and women are hiding, as always and as everywhere.
That is what is. Who will say, "That is what must be!"
I have searched, I have indistinctly seen, I have doubted. Now, I
hope.
I do not regret my youth and its beliefs. Up to now, I have wasted my
time to live. Youth is the true force, but it is too rarely lucid.
Sometimes it has a triumphant liking for what is now, and the
pugnacious broadside of paradox may please it. But there is a degree
in innovation which they who have not lived very much cannot attain.
And yet who knows if the stern greatness of present events will not
have educated and aged the generation which to-day forms humanity's
effective frontier? Whatever our hope may be, if we did not place it
in youth, where should we place it?
Who will speak--see, and then speak? To speak is the same thing as to
see, but it is more. Speech perpetuates vision. We carry no light; we
are things of shadow, for night closes our eyes, and we put out our
hands to find our way when the light is gone; we only shine in speech;
truth is made by the mouths of men. The wind of words--what is it? It
is our breath--not all words, for there are artificial and copied ones
which are not part of the speaker; but the profound words, the cries.
In the human cry you feel the effort of the spring. The cry comes out
of us, it is as living as a child. The cry goes on, and makes the
appeal of truth wherever it may be, the cry gathers cries.
There is a voice, a low and untiring voice, which helps those who do
not and will not see themselves, a voice which brings them together,
Books--the book we choose, the favorite, the book you open, which was
waiting for you!
Formerly, I hardly knew any books. Now, I love what they do. I have
brought together as many as I could. There they are, on the shelves,
with their immense titles, their regular, profound contents; they are
there, all around me, arranged like houses.
* * * * * *
Who will tell the truth? But it is not enough to say things in order
to let them be seen.
Just now, pursued by the idea of my temptation at the War Museum, I
imagined that I had acted on it, and that I was appearing before the
judges. I should have told them a fine lot of truths, I should have
proved to them that I had done right. I should have made myself, the
accused, into the prosecutor.
No! I should not have spoken thus, for I should not have known! I
should have stood stammering, full of a truth throbbing within me,
choking, unconfessable truth. It is not enough to speak; you must know
words. When you have said, "I am in pain," or when you have said, "I
am right," you have said nothing in reality, you have only spoken to
yourself. The real presence of truth is not in every word of truth,
because of the wear and tear of words, and the fleeting multiplicity of
arguments. One must have the gift of persuasion, of leaving to truth
its speaking simplicity, its solemn unfoldings. It is not I who will
be able to speak from the depths of myself. The attention of men
dazzles me when it rises before me. The very nakedness of paper
frightens me and drowns my looks. Not I shall embellish that whiteness
with writing like light. I understand of what a great tribune's sorrow
is made; and I can only dream of him who, visibly summarizing the
immense crisis of human necessity in a work which forgets nothing,
which seems to forget nothing, without the blot even of a misplaced
comma, will proclaim our Charter to the epochs of the times in which we
are, and will let us see it. Blessed be that simplifier, from whatever
country he may come,--but all the same, I should prefer him, at the
bottom of my heart, to speak French.
Once more, he intervenes within me who first showed himself to me as
the specter of evil, he who guided me through hell. When the
death-agony was choking him and his head had darkened like an eagle's,
he hurled a curse which I did not understand, which I understand now,
on the masterpieces of art. He was afraid of their eternity, of that
terrible might they have--when once they are imprinted on the eyes of
an epoch--the strength which you can neither kill nor drive in front of
you. He said that Velasquez, who was only a chamberlain, had succeeded
Philip IV, that he would succeed the Escurial, that he would succeed
even Spain and Europe. He likened that artistic power, which the Kings
have tamed in all respects save in its greatness, to that of a
poet-reformer who throws a saying of freedom and justice abroad, a book
which scatters sparks among humanity somber as coal. The voice of the
expiring prince crawled on the ground and throbbed with secret blows:
"Begone, all you voices of light!"
* * * * * *
But what shall _we_ say? Let us spell out the Magna Charta of which we
humbly catch sight. Let us say to the people of whom all peoples are
made: "Wake up and understand, look and see; and having begun again
the consciousness which was mown down by slavery, decide that
everything must be begun again!"
Begin again, entirely. Yes, that first. If the human charter does not
re-create everything, it will create nothing.
Unless they are universal, the reforms to be carried out are utopian
and mortal. National reforms are only fragments of reforms. There
must be no half measures. Half measures are laughter-provoking in
their unbounded littleness when it is a question for the last time of
arresting the world's roll down the hill of horror. There must be no
half measures because there are no half truths. Do all, or you will do
nothing.
Above all, do not let the reforms be undertaken by the Kings. That is
the gravest thing to be taught you. The overtures of liberality made
by the masters who have made the world what it is are only comedies.
They are only ways of blockading completely the progress to come, of
building up the past again behind new patchwork of plaster.
Never listen, either, to the fine words they offer you, the letters of
which you see like dry bones on hoardings and the fronts of buildings.
There are official proclamations, full of the notion of liberty and
rights, which would be beautiful if they said truly what they say. But
they who compose them do not attach their full meaning to the words.
What they recite they are not capable of wanting, nor even of
understanding. The one indisputable sign of progress in ideas to-day
is that there are things which they dare no longer leave publicly
unsaid, and that's all. There are not all the political parties that
there seem to be. They swarm, certainly, as numerous as the cases of
short sight; but there are only two--the democrats and the
conservatives. Every political deed ends fatally either in one or the
other, and all their leaders have always a tendency to act in the
direction of reaction. Beware, and never forget that if certain
assertions are made by certain lips, that is a sufficient reason why
you should at once mistrust them. When the bleached old republicans[1]
take your cause in their hands, be quite sure that it is not yours. Be
wary as lions.
[Footnote 1: The word is used here much in the sense of our word
"Tories."--Tr.]
Do not let the simplicity of the new world out of your sight. The
social trust is simple. The complications are in what is overhead--the
accumulation of delusions and prejudice heaped up by ages of tyrants,
parasites, and lawyers. That conviction sheds a real glimmer of light
on your duty and points out the way to accomplish it. He who would dig
right down to the truth must simplify; his faith must be brutally
simple, or he is lost. Laugh at the subtle shades and distinctions of
the rhetoricians and the specialist physicians. Say aloud: "This is
what is," and then, "That is what must be."
You will never have that simplicity, you people of the world, if you do
not seize it. If you want it, do it yourself with your own hands. And
I give you now the talisman, the wonderful magic word--you _can_!
That you may be a judge of existing things, go back to their origins,
and get at the endings of all. The noblest and most fruitful work of
the human intelligence is to make a clean sweep of every enforced
idea--of advantages or meanings--and to go right through appearances in
search of the eternal bases. Thus you will clearly see the moral law
at the beginning of all things, and the conception of justice and
equality will appear to you beautiful as daylight.
Strong in that supreme simplicity, you shall say: I am the people of
the peoples; therefore I am the King of Kings, and I will that
sovereignty flows everywhere from me, since I am might and right. I
want no more despots, confessed or otherwise, great or little; I know,
and I want no more. The incomplete liberation of 1789 was attacked by
the Kings. Complete liberation will attack the Kings.
But Kings are not exclusively the uniformed ones among the trumpery
wares of the courts. Assuredly, the nations who have a King have more
tradition and subjection than the others. But there are countries
where no man can get up and say, "My people, my army," nations which
only experience the continuation of the kingly tradition in more
peaceful intensity. There are others with the great figures of
democratic leaders; but as long as the entirety of things is not
overthrown--always the entirety, the sacred entirety--these men cannot
achieve the impossible, and sooner or later their too-beautiful
inclinations will be isolated and misunderstood. In the formidable
urgency of progress, what do the proportions matter to you of the
elements which make up the old order of things in the world? All the
governors cling fatally together among themselves, and more solidly
than you think, through the old machine of chancelleries, ministries,
diplomacy, and the ceremonials with gilded swords; and when they are
bent on making war for themselves there is an unquenchable likeness
between them all, of which you want no more. Break the chain; suppress
all privileges, and say at last, "Let, there be equality."
One man is as good as another. That means that no man carries within
himself any privilege which puts him above the universal law. It means
an equality in principle, and that does not invalidate the legitimacy
of the differences due to work, to talent, and to moral sense. The
leveling only affects the rights of the citizen; and not the man as a
whole. You do not create the living being; you do not fashion the
living clay, as God did in the Bible; you make regulations. Individual
worth, on which some pretend to rely, is relative and unstable, and no
one is a judge of it. In a well-organized entirety, it cultivates and
improves itself automatically. But that magnificent anarchy cannot, at
the inception of the human Charter, take the place of the obviousness
of equality.
The poor man, the proletarian, is nobler than another, but not more
sacred. In truth, all workers and all honest men are as good as each
other. But the poor, the exploited, are fifteen hundred millions here
on earth. They are the Law because they are the Number. The moral law
is only the imperative preparation of the common good. It always
involves, in different forms, the necessary limitations of some
individual interests by the rest; that is to say, the sacrifice of one
to the many, of the many to the whole. The republican conception is
the civic translation of the moral law; what is anti-republican is
immoral.
Socially, women are the equals of men, without restrictions. The
beings who shine and who bring forth are not made solely to lend or to
give the heat of their bodies. It is right that the sum total of work
should be shared, reduced and harmonized by their hands. It is just
that the fate of humanity should be grounded also in the strength of
women. Whatever the danger which their instinctive love of shining
things may occasion, in spite of the facility with which they color all
things with their own feelings and the totality of their slightest
impulses--the legend of their incapacity is a fog that you will
dissipate with a gesture of _your_ hands. Their advent is in the order
of things; and it is also in order to await with hopeful heart the day
when the social and political chains of women will fall off, when human
liberty will suddenly become twice as great.
People of the world, establish equality right up to the limits of your
great life. Lay the foundations of the republic of republics over all
the area where you breathe; that is to say, the common control in broad
daylight of all external affairs, of community in the laws of labor, of
production and of commerce. The subdivision of these high social and
moral arrangements by nations or by limited unions of nations
(enlargements which are reductions) is artificial, arbitrary, and
malignant. The so-called inseparable cohesions of national interests
vanish away as soon as you draw near to examine them. There are
individual interests and a general interest, those two only. When you
say "I," it means "I"; when you say "We," it means Man. So long as a
single and identical Republic does not cover the world, all national
liberations can only be beginnings and signals!
Thus you will disarm the "fatherlands" and "motherlands," and you will
reduce the notion of Motherland to the little bit of social importance
that it must have. You will do away with the military frontiers, and
those economic and commercial barriers which are still worse.
Protection introduces violence into the expansion of labor; like
militarism, it brings in a fatal absence of balance. You will suppress
that which justifies among nations the things which among individuals
we call murder, robbery, and unfair competition. You will suppress
battles--not nearly so much by the direct measure of supervision and
order that you will take as because you will suppress the causes of
battle. You will suppress them chiefly because it is _you_ who will do
it, by yourself, everywhere, with your invincible strength and the
lucid conscience that is free from selfish motives. You will not make
war on yourself.
You will not be afraid of magic formulas and the churches. Your giant
reason will destroy the idol which suffocates its true believers. You
will salute the flags for the last time; to that ancient enthusiasm
which flattered the puerility of your ancestors, you will say a
peaceful and final farewell. In some corners of the calamities of the
past, there were times of tender emotion; but truth is greater, and
there are not more boundaries on the earth than on the sea!
Each country will be a moral force, and no longer a brutal force; while
all brutal forces clash with themselves, all moral forces make mighty
harmony together.
The universal republic is the inevitable consequence of equal rights in
life for all. Start from the principle of equality, and you arrive at
the people's international. If you do not arrive there it is because
you have not reasoned aright. They who start from the opposite point
of view--God, and the divine rights of popes and Kings and nobles, and
authority and tradition--will come, by fabulous paths but quite
logically, to opposite conclusions. You must not cease to hold that
there are only two teachings face to face. All things are amenable to
reason, the supreme Reason which mutilated humanity, wounded in the
eyes, has deified among the clouds.
* * * * * *
You will do away with the rights of the dead, and with heredity of
power, whatever it may be, that inheritance which is unjust in all its
gradations, for tradition takes root there, and it is an outrage on
equality, against the order of labor. Labor is a great civic deed
which all men and all women without exception must share or go down.
Such divisions will reduce it for each one to dignified proportions and
prevent it from devouring human lives.
You will not permit colonial ownership by States, which makes stains on
the map of the world and is not justified by confessable reasons; and
you will organize the abolition of that collective slavery. You will
allow the individual property of the living to stand. It is equitable
because its necessity is inherent in the circumstances of the living,
and because there are cases where you cannot tear away the right of
ownership without tearing right itself. Besides, the love of things is
a passion, like the love of beings. The object of social organization
is not to destroy sentiment and pleasure, but on the contrary to allow
them to flourish, within the limit of not wronging others. It is right
to enjoy what you have clearly earned by your work. That focused
wisdom alone bursts among the old order of things like a curse.
Chase away forever, everywhere, everywhere, the bad masters of the
sacred school. Knowledge incessantly remakes the whole of
civilization. The child's intelligence is too precious not to be under
the protection of all. The heads of families are not free to deal
according to their caprices with the ignorance which each child brings
into the daylight; they have not that liberty contrary to liberty. A
child does not belong body and soul to its parents; it is a person, and
our ears are wounded by the blasphemy--a residue of despotic Roman
tradition--of those who speak of their sons killed in the war and say,
"I have given my son." You do not give living beings--and all
intelligence belongs primarily to reason.
There must no longer be a single school where they teach idolatry,
where the wills of to-morrow grow bigger under the terror of a God who
does not exist, and on whom so many bad arguments are thrown away or
justified. Nowhere must there be any more school-books where they
dress up in some finery of prestige what is most contemptible and
debasing in the past of the nations. Let there be nothing but
universal histories, nothing but the great lines and peaks, the lights
and shadows of that chaos which for six thousand years has been the
fortune of two hundred thousand millions of men.
You will suppress everywhere the advertising of the cults, you will
wipe away the inky uniform of the parsons. Let every believer keep his
religion for himself, and let the priests stay between walls.
Toleration in face of error is a graver error. One might have dreamed
of a wise and universal church, for Jesus Christ will be justified in
His human teaching as long as there are hearts. But they who have
taken His morality in hand and fabricated their religion have poisoned
the truth; more, they have shown for two thousand years that they place
the interests of their caste before those of the sacred law of what is
right. No words, no figures can ever give an idea of the evil which
the Church has done to mankind. When she is not the oppressor herself,
upholding the right of force, she lends her authority to the oppressors
and sanctifies their pretenses; and still to-day she is closely united
everywhere with those who do not want the reign of the poor. Just as
the Jingoes invoke the charm of the domestic cradle that they may give
an impulse to war, so does the Church invoke the poetry of the Gospels;
but she has become an aristocratic party like the rest, in which every
gesture of the sign of the Cross is a slap in the Face of Jesus Christ.
Out of the love of one's native soil, they have made Nationalists; out
of Jesus they have made Jesuits.
Only international greatness will at last permit the rooting up of the
stubborn abuses which the partition walls of nationality multiply,
entangle and solidify. The future Charter--of which we confusedly
glimpse some signs and which has for its premises the great moral
principles restored to their place, and the multitude at last restored
to theirs--will force the newspapers to confess all their resources.
By means of a young language, simple and modest, it will unite all
foreigners--those prisoners of themselves. It will mow down the
hateful complexity of judicial procedure, with its booty for the
somebodies, and its lawyers as well, who intrude the tricks of
diplomacy and the melodramatic usages of eloquence into the plain and
simple machinery of justice. The righteous man must go so far as to
say that clemency has not its place in justice; the logical majesty of
the sentence which condemns the guilty one in order to frighten
possible evil-doers (and never for another reason) is itself beyond
forgiveness. International dignity will close the taverns, forbid the
sale of poisons, and will reduce to impotence the vendors who want to
render abortive, in men and young people, the future's beauty and the
reign of intelligence. And here is a mandate which appears before my
eyes--the tenacious law which must pounce without respite on all public
robbers, on all those, little and big, cynics and hypocrites, who, when
their trade or their functions bring the opportunity, exploit misery
and speculate on necessity. There is a new hierarchy to make mistakes,
to commit offenses and crimes--the true one.
You can form no idea of the beauty that is possible! You cannot
imagine what all the squandered treasure can provide, what can be
brought on by the resurrection of misguided human intelligence,
successively smothered and slain hitherto by infamous slavery, by the
despicable infectious necessity of armed attack and defense, and by the
privileges which debase human worth. You can have no notion what human
intelligence may one day find of new adoration. The people's absolute
reign will give to literature and the arts--whose harmonious shape is
still but roughly sketched--a splendor boundless as the rest. National
cliques cultivate narrowness and ignorance, they cause originality to
waste away; and the national academies, to which a residue of
superstition lends respect, are only pompous ways of upholding ruins.
The domes of those Institutes which look so grand when they tower above
you are as ridiculous as extinguishers. You must widen and
internationalize, without pause or limit, all which permits of it.
With its barriers collapsed, you must fill society with broad daylight
and magnificent spaces; with patience and heroism must you clear the
ways which lead from the individual to humanity, the ways which were
stopped up with corpses of ideas and with stone images all along their
great curving horizons. Let everything be remade on simple lines.
There is only one people, there is only one people!
If you do that, you will be able to say that, at the moment when you
planned your effort and took your decision, you saved the human species
as far as it is possible on earth to do it. You will not have brought
happiness about. The fallacy-mongers do not frighten us when they
preach resignation and paralysis on the plea that no social change can
bring happiness, thus trifling with these profound things. Happiness
is part of the inner life, it is an intimate and personal paradise; it
is a flash of chance or genius which comes sweetly to life among those
who elbow each other, and it is also the sense of glory. No, it is not
in your hands, and so it is in nobody's hands. But a balanced and
heedful life is necessary to man, that he may build the isolated home
of happiness; and death is the fearful connection of the happenings
which pass away along with our profundities. External things and those
which are hidden are essentially different, but they are held together
by peace and by death.
To accomplish the majestically practical work, to shape the whole
architecture like a statue, base nothing on impossible modifications of
human nature; await nothing from pity.
Charity is a privilege, and must disappear. For the rest, you cannot
love unknown people any more than you can have pity on them. The human
intelligence is made for infinity; the heart is not. The being who
really suffers in his heart, and not merely in his mind or in words, by
the suffering of others whom he neither sees nor touches, is a nervous
abnormality, and he cannot be argued from as an example. The repulse
of reason, the stain of absurdity, torture the intelligence in a more
abundant way. Simple as it may be, social science is geometry. Do not
accept the sentimental meaning they give to the word "humanitarianism,"
and say that the preaching of fraternity and love is vain; these words
lose their meaning amid the great numbers of man. It is in this
disordered confusion of feelings and ideas that one feels the presence
of Utopia. Mutual solidarity is of the intellect--common-sense, logic,
methodical precision, order without faltering, the ruthless inevitable
perfection of light!
In my fervor, in my hunger, and from the depths of my abyss, I uttered
these words aloud amid the silence. My great reverie was blended with
song, like the Ninth Symphony.
* * * * * *
I am resting on my elbows at the window. I am looking at the night,
which is everywhere, which touches me, _me_, although I am only I, and
it is infinite night. It seems to me that there is nothing else left
me to think about. Things cling together; they will save each other,
and will do their setting in order.
But again I am seized by the sharpest of my agonies--I am afraid that
the multitude may rest content with the partial gratifications to be
granted them everywhere by those who will use all their clinging,
cunning power to prevent the people from understanding, and then from
wishing. On the day of victory, they will pour intoxication and
dazzling deceptions into you, and put almost superhuman cries into your
mouths, "We have delivered humanity; we are the soldiers of the Right!"
without telling you all that such a statement includes of gravity, of
immense pledges and constructive genius, what it involves in respect
for great peoples, whoever they are, and of gratitude to those who are
trying to deliver themselves. They will again take up their eternal
mission of stupefying the great conscious forces, and turning them
aside from their ends. They will appeal for union and peace and
patience, to the opportunism of changes, to the danger of going too
quickly, or of meddling in your neighbor's affairs, and all the other
fallacies of the sort. They will try again to ridicule and strike down
those whom the newspapers (the ones in their pay) call dreamers,
sectarians, and traitors; once again they will flourish all their old
talismans. Doubtless they will propose, in the fashionable words of
the moment, some official parodies of international justice, which they
will break up one day like theatrical scenery; they will enunciate some
popular right, curtailed by childish restrictions and monstrous
definitions, resembling a brigand's code of honor. The wrong torn from
confessed autocracies will hatch out elsewhere--in the sham republics,
and the self-styled liberal countries who have played a hidden game.
The concessions they will make will clothe the old rotten autocracy
again, and perpetuate it. One imperialism will replace the other, and
the generations to come will be marked for the sword. Soldier,
wherever you are, they will try to efface your memory, or to exploit
it, by leading it astray, and forgetfulness of the truth is the first
form of your adversity! May neither defeat nor victory be against you.
You are above both of them, for you are all the people.
The skies are peopled with stars, a harmony which clasps reason close,
and applies the mind to the adorable idea of universal unity. Must
that harmony give us hope or misgiving?
We are in a great night of the world. The thing is to know if we shall
wake up to-morrow. We have only one succor--_we_ know of what the
night is made. But shall we be able to impart our lucid faith, seeing
that the heralds of warning are everywhere few, and that the greatest
victims hate the only ideal which is not one, and call it utopian?
Public opinion floats over the surface of the peoples, wavering and
submissive to the wind; it lends but fleeting conscience and conviction
to the majority; it cries "Down with the reformers!" It cries
"Sacrilege!" because it is made to see in its vague thoughts what it
could not itself see there. It cries that they are distorting it,
whereas they are enlarging it.
I am not afraid, as many are, and as I once was myself, of being
reviled and slandered. I do not cling to respect and gratitude for
myself. But if I succeed in reaching men, I should like them not to
curse me. Why should they, since it is not for myself? It is only
because I am sure I am right. I am sure of the principles I see at the
source of all--justice, logic, equality; all those divinely human
truths whose contrast with the realized truth of to-day is so
heart-breaking. And I want to appeal to you all; and that confidence
which fills me with a tragic joy, I want to give it to you, at once as
a command and as a prayer. There are not several ways of attaining it
athwart everything, and of fastening life and the truth together again;
there is only one--right-doing. Let rule begin again with the sublime
control of the intellect. I am a man like the rest, a man like you.
You who shake your head or shrug your shoulders as you listen to
me--why are we, we two, we all, so foreign to each other, when we are
not foreign?
I believe, in spite of all, in truth's victory. I believe in the
momentous value, hereafter inviolable, of those few truly fraternal men
in all the countries of the world, who, in the oscillation of national
egoisms let loose, stand up and stand out, steadfast as the glorious
statues of Right and Duty. To-night I believe--nay, I am certain--that
the new order will be built upon that archipelago of men. Even if we
have still to suffer as far as we can see ahead, the idea can no more
cease to throb and grow stronger than the human heart can; and the will
which is already rising here and there they can no longer destroy.
I proclaim the inevitable advent of the universal republic. Not the
transient backslidings, nor the darkness and the dread, nor the tragic
difficulty of uplifting the world everywhere at once will prevent the
fulfillment of international truth. But if the great powers of
darkness persist in holding their positions, if they whose clear cries
of warning should be voices crying in the wilderness--O you people of
the world, you the unwearying vanquished of History, I appeal to your
justice and I appeal to your anger. Over the vague quarrels which
drench the strands with blood, over the plunderers of shipwrecks, over
the jetsam and the reefs, and the palaces and monuments built upon the
sand, I see the high tide coming. Truth is only revolutionary by
reason of error's disorder. Revolution is Order.
* * * * * *