Light

by Henri Barbusse

"But," the official voices trumpet, "there is another magic formula—the great common Past of every nation."

Yes, there is the Past. That long Golgotha of oppressed peoples; the Law of the Strong, changing life's humble festival into useless and recurring hecatombs; the chronology of that crushing of lives and ideas which always tortured or executed the innovators; that Past in which sovereigns settled their personal affairs of alliances, ruptures, dowries and inheritance with the territory and blood which they owned; in which each and every country was so squandered—it is common to all. That Past in which the small attainments of moral progress, of well-being and unity (so far as they were not solely semblances) only crystallized with despairing tardiness, with periods of doleful stagnation and frightful alteration along the channels of barbarism and force; that Past of somber shame, that Past of error and disease which every old nation has survived, which we should learn by heart that we may hate it—yes, that Past is common to all, like misery, shame and pain. Blessed are the new nations, for they have no remorse!

And the blessings of the past—the splendor of the French Revolution, the huge gifts of the navigators who brought new worlds to the old one, and the miraculous exception of scientific discoveries, which by a second miracle were not smothered in their youth—are they not also common to all, like the undying beauty of the ruins of the Parthenon, Shakespeare's lightning and Beethoven's raptures, and like love, and like joy?

The universal problem into which modern life, as well as past life, rushes and embroils and rends itself, can only be dispersed by a universal means which reduces each nation to what it is in truth; which strips from them all the ideal of supremacy stolen by each of them from the great human ideal; a means which, raising the human ideal definitely beyond the reach of all those immoderate emotions, which shout together "Mine is the only point of view," gives it at last its divine unity. Let us keep the love of the motherland in our hearts, but let us dethrone the conception of Motherland.

I will say what there is to say: I place the Republic before France. France is ourselves. The Republic is ourselves and the others. The general welfare must be put much higher than national welfare, because it is much higher. But if it is venturesome to assert, as they have so much and so indiscriminately done, that such national interest is in accord with the general interest, then the converse is obvious; and that is illuminating, momentous and decisive—the good of all includes the good of each; France can be prosperous even if the world is not, but the world cannot be prosperous and France not. The moving argument reëstablishes, with positive and crowding certainties which touch us softly on all sides, that distracting stake which Pascal tried to place, like a lever in the void—"On one side I lose; on the other I have all to gain."

* * * * * *

Amid the beauty of these dear spots on Chestnut Hill, in the heart of these four crossing ways, I have seen new things; not that any new things have happened, but because I have opened my eyes.

I am rewarded, I the lowest, for being the only one of all to follow up error to the end, right into its holy places; for I am at last disentangling all the simplicity and truth of the great horizons. The revelation still seems to me so terrible that the silence of men, heaped under the roofs down there at my feet, seizes and threatens me. And if I am but timidly formulating it within myself, that is because each of us has lived in reality more than his life, and because my training has filled me, like the rest, with centuries of shadow, of humiliation and captivity.

It is establishing itself cautiously; but it is the truth, and there are moments when logic seizes you in its godlike whirlwind. In this disordered world where the weakness of a few oppresses the strength of all; since ever the religion of the God of Battles and of Resignation has not sufficed by itself to consecrate inequality. Tradition reigns, the gospel of the blind adoration of what was and what is—God without a head. Man's destiny is eternally blockaded by two forms of tradition; in time, by hereditary succession; in space, by frontiers, and thus it is crushed and annihilated in detail. It is the truth. I am certain of it, for I am touching it.

But I do not know what will become of us. All the blood poured out, all the words poured out, to impose a sham ideal on our bodies and souls, will they suffice for a long time yet to separate and isolate humanity in absurdity made real? History is a Bible of errors. I have not only seen blessings falling from on high on all which supported evil, and curses on all which could heal it; I have seen, here below, the keepers of the moral law hunted and derided, from little Termite, lost like a rat in unfolding battle, back to Jesus Christ.