Page 2078 - les-miserables

lieu of triumph. It serves those who deny it without com-
plaint, 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 ral-
lies 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 infalli-
bly 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; ob-

2078 Les Miserables