Page:The Yellow Book - 06.djvu/359

Rh 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. They 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 in difference 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, they starve, neglect, and even insult 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"