It is, I am given to understand, a familiar axiom of mathematics that no
number of ciphers placed in front of significant units, or tens or
hundreds of units, adds in the smallest degree to the numerical value of
those units. The figure one becomes of no more importance however many
noughts are marshalled in front of it--though, indeed, in the
mathematics of human nature this is not so. Is not a man or woman
considered great in proportion to the number of ciphers that walk in
front of him, from a humble brace of domestics to guards of honour and
imperial armies?
A parallel profound truth of mathematics is that a nought, however many
times it be multiplied, remains nought; but again we find the reverse
obtain in the mathematics of human nature. One might have supposed that
the result of one nobody multiplied even fifty million times would still
be nobody. However, such is far from being the case. Fifty million
nobodies make--a nation. Of course, there is no need for so many. I am
reckoning as a British subject, and speak of fifty million merely as an
illustration of the general fact that it is the multiplication of
nobodies that makes a nation. 'Increase and multiply' was, it will be
remembered, the recipe for the Jewish nation.
Nobodies of the same colour, tongue, and prejudices have but to
congregate together in a crowd sufficiently big for other similar crowds
to recognise them, and then they are given a name of their own, and
become recognised as a nation--one of the 'Great Powers.'
Beyond those differences in colour, tongue, and prejudices there is
really no difference between the component units--or rather ciphers--of
all these several national crowds. You have seen a procession of various
trades-unions filing toward Hyde Park, each section with its particular
banner with a strange device: 'The United Guild of Paperhangers,' 'The
Ancient Order of Plumbers,' and so on. And you may have marvelled to
notice how alike the members of the various carefully differentiated
companies were. So to say, they each and all might have been plumbers;
and you couldn't help feeling that it wouldn't have mattered much if
some of the paper-hangers had by mistake got walking amongst the
plumbers, or _vice versa_.
So the great trades-unions of the world file past, one with the odd word
'Russia' on its banner; another boasting itself 'Germany'--this with a
particularly bumptious and self-important young man walking backward in
front of it, in the manner of a Salvation Army captain, and imperiously
waving an iron wand; still another 'nation' calling itself 'France'; and
yet another boasting the biggest brass band, and called 'England.' Other
smaller bodies of nobodies, that is, smaller nations, file past with
humbler tread--though there is really no need for their doing so. For,
as we have said, they are in every particular like to those haughtier
nations who take precedence of them. In fact, one or two of them, such
as Norway and Denmark--were a truer system of human mathematics to
obtain--are really of more importance than the so-called greater
nations, in that among their nobodies they include a larger percentage
of intellectual somebodies.
Remembering that percentage of wise men, the formula of a nation were
perhaps more truly stated in our first mathematical image. The wise men
in a nation are as the units with the noughts in front of them. And when
I say wise men I do not, indeed, mean merely the literary men or the
artists, but all those somebodies with some real force of character,
people with brains and hearts, fighters and lovers, saints and thinkers,
and the patient, industrious workers. Such, if you consider, are really
no integral part of the nation among which they are cast. They have no
part in what are grandiloquently called national interests--war,
politics, and horse-racing to wit. A change of Government leaves them as
unmoved as an election for the board of guardians. They would as soon
think of entering Parliament or the County Council, as of yearning to
manage the gasworks, or to go about with one of those carts bearing the
legend 'Aldermen and Burgesses of the City of London' conspicuously upon
its front. Their main concern in political changes is the rise and fall
of the income-tax, and, be the Cabinet Tory or Liberal, their rate
papers come in for the same amount. It is likely that national changes
would affect them but little more. What more would a foreign invasion
mean than that we should pay our taxes to French, Russian, or German
officials, instead of to English ones? French and Italians do our
cooking, Germans manage our music, Jews control our money markets;
surely it would make little difference to us for France, Russia, or
Germany to undertake our government. The worst of being conquered by
Russia would be the necessity of learning Russian; whereas a little
rubbing up of our French would make us comfortable with France. Besides,
to be conquered by France would save us crossing the Channel to Paris,
and then we might hope for cafés in Regent Street, and an emancipated
literature. As a matter of fact, so-called national interests are merely
certain private interests on a large scale, the private interests of
financiers, ambitious politicians, soldiers, and great merchants.
Broadly speaking, there are no rival nations--there are rival markets;
and it is its Board of Trade and its Stock Exchange rather than its
Houses of Parliament that virtually govern a country. Thus one seaport
goes down and another comes up, industries forsake one country to bless
another, the military and naval strengths of nations fluctuate this way
and that; and to those whom these changes affect they are undoubtedly
important matters--the great capitalist, the soldier, and the
politician; but to the quiet man at home with his wife, his children,
his books, and his flowers, to the artist busied with brave translunary
matters, to the saint with his eyes filled with 'the white radiance of
eternity,' to the shepherd on the hillside, the milkmaid in love, or the
angler at his sport--what are these pompous commotions, these busy,
bustling mimicries of reality? England will be just as good to live in
though men some day call her France. Let the big busybodies divide her
amongst them as they like, so that they leave one alone with one's fair
share of the sky and the grass, and an occasional, not too vociferous,
nightingale.
The reader will perhaps forgive the hackneyed references to Sir Thomas
Browne peacefully writing his _Religio Medici_ amid all the commotions
of the Civil War, and to Gautier calmly correcting the proofs of his new
poems during the siege of Paris. The milkman goes his rounds amid the
crash of empires. It is not his business to fight. His business is to
distribute his milk--as much after half-past seven as may be
inconvenient. Similarly, the business of the thinker is with his
thought, the poet with his poetry. It is the business of politicians to
make national quarrels, and the business of the soldier to fight them.
But as for the poet--let him correct his proofs, or beware the printer.
The idea, then, of a nation is a grandiloquent fallacy in the interests
of commerce and ambition, political and military. All the great and
good, clever and charming people belong to one secret nation, for which
there is no name unless it be the Chosen People. These are the lost
tribes of love, art, and religion, lost and swamped amid alien peoples,
but ever dreaming of a time when they shall meet once more in Jerusalem.
Yet though they are thus aliens, taking and wishing no part in the
organisation of the 'nations' among which they dwell, this does not
prevent those nations taking part and credit in them. And whenever a
brave soldier wins a battle, or an intrepid traveller discovers a new
land, his particular nation flatters itself, as though it--the million
nobodies--had done it. With a profound indifference to, indeed an active
dislike of, art and poetry, there is nothing on which a nation prides
itself so much as upon its artists and poets, whom, invariably, it
starves, neglects, and even insults, as long as it is not too silly to
do so.
Thus the average Englishman talks of Shakespeare--as though he himself
had written the plays; of India--as though he himself had conquered it.
And thus grow up such fictions as 'national greatness' and 'public
opinion.'
For what is 'national greatness' but the glory reflected from the
memories of a few great individuals? and what is 'public opinion' but
the blustering echoes of the opinion of a few clever young men on the
morning papers?
For how can people in themselves little become great by merely
congregating into a crowd, however large? And surely fools do not become
wise, or worth listening to, merely by the fact of their banding
together.
A 'public opinion' on any matter except football, prize-fighting, and
perhaps cricket, is merely ridiculous--by whatever brutal physical
powers it may be enforced--ridiculous as a town council's opinion upon
art; and a nation is merely a big fool with an army.