diance 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 greatne