On Something (Dodo Press) (14 page)

We stopped at last before a little square house with "The Lilacs" painted
on its gate; there was a parched little lawn, a little fountain, a tripod
supporting a globular mirror, and we went in.

Matthieu's uncle met us; he was in a cotton suit walking about among his
flowers and enjoying the evening. He was a man of about fifty, short,
strong, brown, and abrupt. Though it was already evening and one could see
little, we knew well enough that his eyes were steady and dark. For he
had the attitude and carriage of those men who invigorate France. His
self-confidence was evident in his sturdy legs and his arms akimbo, his
vulgarity in his gesture, his narrowness in his forward and peering look,
his indomitable energy in every movement of his body. It did not surprise
me to learn in his later conversation that he was a Republican. He spoke
at once to us both, saying in a kind of grumbling shout:

"Well, gunners!"

Then he spoke roughly to his nephew, telling him we were late: to me
a little too politely saying he put no blame on me, but only on his
scapegrace of a nephew. I said that our lateness was due to having to
find the Sergeant. He answered:

"One must always put the blame on some one else," which was rank bad
manners.

He led the way into the house. The dining-room gave on to a veranda,
and beyond this was another little lawn with trees. In the dark a few
insects chirped, and, as the evening was warmish, one smelt the flowers.
The windows had been left open. Everything was clean, neat, and bare. On
the walls were two excellent old prints, a badly drawn certificate of
membership in some society or other, a still worse portrait of a local
worthy, and a water-colour painted, I suppose, by his daughter.

He introduced me to his wife, a hard-featured woman, with thin hair, full
of duty, busy and precise—fresh from the kitchen. We unhooked our swords
with the conventional clatter, and sat down to the meal.

I will confess that as we ate those excellent dishes (they were all
excellent) and drank that ordinary wine, I seemed to be living in a book
rather than among living men. Here was I, a young English boy, thrust
by accident into the French army. Fairly acquainted with its language,
though I spoke it with an accent; taken (of course) by my host for a pure
Englishman, though half my blood was French. Here was I sitting at his
side and watching things, and learning—as for him, men like him, of whom
England has some few left in forgotten villages, and who are, when they
can be found, the strength of a State,
they
never bother about
learning anything far removed from their realities.

I noticed the one servant going in and out rapidly, bullied a good deal by
her master, deft but nervous. I noticed how everything was solid and good:
the chairs, table, clock, clothes—and especially the cooking. I saw his
local newspaper neatly folded on the mantelpiece. I saw the pet dog of his
retirement crouching at his side, and I heard the chance sayings he threw
to his nephew, the maxims granted to youth long ago. I wondered how much
that nephew would inherit. I guessed about ten thousand pounds at the
least, and twenty at the most. I was almost inclined to cross myself at
the thought of such a lot of money.

My host grew more genial: he asked me questions on England. His wife also
was interested in that country. They both knew more about it than their
class in England knows about France: and this astonished me, for, in the
gentry, English gentlemen know more about France than French gentlemen
know about England.

He asked me if agriculture were still in a bad way; why we had not more
of the people at the Universities; why we allowed only lords into our
Parliament, and whether there were more French commercial travellers in
England than English commercial travellers in France. In all these points
I admitted, supplemented, and corrected, and probably distorted his
impressions.

He asked me if English gunners were good. I said I did not know, but I
thought so. He replied that the English drivers had a high reputation in
his country—his brother (the brother of an ironmonger) was a Captain of
the Horse Artillery, and had told him so. And this he said to me, who wore
a French uniform, but whose heart was away up in Arun Valley, in my own
woods, and at rest and alone.

In the last hour when we had to be getting back a certain tenderness came
into his somewhat mercenary look. He devoted himself more to his nephew;
he took him aside, and, with some ceremony, gave him money. He offered us
cigars. We took one each. His round French face became all wrinkles, like
a cracked plate. He said:

"Bah! Take them by the pocketful! We know what life is in the regiment,"
and he crammed half a dozen each into the pocket of our tunics. But when
he said "We know what the life is," he lied. For he had only been a
"mobile" in '70. He had voted, but never suffered, the conscription.

So we said good night to this man, our host, who had so regaled us. I may
be wrong, but I fancy he was an anti-clerical. He was a hard man, just,
eager, and attentive, narrow, as I have said, and unconsciously (as I have
also said) building up the nation.

There was the Ironmonger of Bar-le-Duc; and there are hundreds of
thousands of the same kind.

There is a force in Gaul which is of prime consequence to all Europe. It
has canalized European religion, fixed European law, and latterly launched
a renewed political ideal. It is very vigorous to-day.

It was this force which made the massacres of September, which overthrew
Robespierre, which elected Napoleon. In a more concentrated form, it was
this force which combined into so puissant a whole the separate men—not
men of genius—who formed the Committee of Public Safety. It is this
force which made the Commune, so that to this day no individual can quite
tell you what the Commune was driving at. And it is this force which at
the present moment so grievously misunderstands and overestimates the
strength of the armies which are the rivals of the French; indeed, in that
connexion it might truly be said that the peace of Europe is preserved
much more by the German knowledge of what the French army is, even than
by French ignorance of what the German army is.

I say the disadvantages of this force or quality in a commonwealth are
apparent, for the weakness and disadvantages of something extraneous to
ourselves are never difficult to grasp. What is of more moment for us
is to understand, with whatever difficulty, the strength which such a
quality conveys. Not to have understood that strength, nay, not to have
appreciated the existence of the force of which I speak, has made nearly
all the English histories of France worthless. French turbulence is
represented in them as anarchy, and the whole of the great story which has
been the central pivot of Western Europe appears as an incongruous series
of misfortunes. Even Carlyle, with his astonishing grasp of men and his
power of rapid integration from a few details (for he read hardly anything
of his subject), never comprehended this force. He could understand a
master ordering about a lot of servants; indeed, he would have liked
to have been a servant himself, and
was
one to the best of his
ability; but he could not understand self-organization from below. Yet
upon the existence of that power depends the whole business of the
Revolution. Its strength, then, (and principal advantage), lies in the
fact that it makes democracy possible at critical moments, even in a large
community.

There is no one, or hardly any one, so wicked or so stupid as to deny the
democratic ideal. There is no one, or hardly any one, so perverted that,
were he the member of a small and simple community, he would be content to
forgo his natural right to be a full member thereof. There is no one, or
hardly any one, who would not feel his exclusion from such rights, among
men of his own blood, to be intolerable. But while every one admits the
democratic ideal, most men who think and nearly all the wiser of those
who think, perceive its one great obstacle to lie in the contrast between
the idea and the action where the obstacle of complexity—whether due
to varied interests, to separate origins, or even to mere numbers—is
present.

The psychology of the multitude is not the psychology of the individual.
Ask every man in West Sussex separately whether he would have bread made
artificially dearer by Act of Parliament, and you will get an overwhelming
majority against such economic action on the part of the State. Treat them
collectively, and they will elect—I bargain they will elect for years
to come—men pledged to such an action. Or again, look at a crowd when
it roars down a street in anger—the sight is unfortunately only too
rare to-day—you have the impression of a beast majestic in its courage,
terrible in its ferocity, but with something evil about its cruelty and
determination. Yet if you stop and consider the face of one of its members
straggling on one of its outer edges, you will probably see the bewildered
face of a poor, uncertain, weak-mouthed man whose eyes are roving from
one object to another, and who appears all the weaker because he is under
the influence of this collective domination. Or again, consider the jokes
which make a great public assembly honestly shake with laughter, and
imagine those jokes attempted in a private room! Our tricky politicians
know well this difference between the psychologies of the individual
and of the multitude. The cleverest of them often suffer in reputation
precisely because they know what hopeless arguments and what still more
hopeless jests will move collectivities, the individual units of which
would never have listened to such humour or to such reasoning.

The larger the community with which one is dealing, the truer this is; so
that, when it comes to many millions spread upon a large territory, one
may well despair of any machinery which shall give expression to that very
real thing which Rousseau called the General Will.

In the presence of such a difficulty most men who are concerned both for
the good of their country and for the general order of society incline,
especially as they grow older, to one, or other of the old traditional
organic methods by which a State may be expressed and controlled. They
incline to an oligarchy such as is here in England where a small group of
families, intermarried one with the other, dining together perpetually
and perpetually guests in each other's houses, are by a tacit agreement
with the populace permitted to direct a nation. Or they incline to the
old-fashioned and very stable device of a despotic bureaucracy such as
manages to keep Prussia upright, and did until recently support the
expansion of Russia.

The evils of such a compromise with a political idea are evident enough.
The oligarchy will be luxurious and corporately corrupt, and individually
somewhat despicable, with a sort of softness about it in morals and in
military affairs. The despot or the bureaucracy will be individually
corrupt, especially in the lower branches of the system, and hatefully
unfeeling.

"But," (says your thinker, especially as he advances in age) "man is so
made that he
cannot
otherwise be collectively governed. He cannot
collectively be the master, or at any rate permanently the master of his
collective destiny, whatever power his reason and free will give him over
his individual fate. The nation" (says he), "especially the large nation,
certainly has a Will, but it cannot directly express that Will. And if it
attempts to do so, whatever machinery it chooses—even the referendum—will
but create a gross mechanical parody of that subtle organic thing, the
National soul. The oligarchy or the bureaucracy" (he will maintain, and
usually maintain justly) "inherit, convey, and maintain the national
spirit more truly than would an attempted democratic system."

General history, even the general history of Western Europe, is upon the
whole on the side of such a criticism. Andorra is a perfect democracy, and
has been a perfect democracy for at least a thousand years, perhaps since
first men inhabited that isolated valley. But there is no great State
which has maintained even for three generations a democratic system
undisturbed.

Now it is peculiar to the French among the great and independent nations,
that they are capable, by some freak in their development, of rapid
communal
self-expression. It is, I repeat, only in crises that
this power appears. But such as it is, it plays a part much more real and
much more expressive of the collective will than does the more ordinary
organization of other peoples.

Those who attacked the Tuileries upon the 10th of August acted in a manner
entirely spontaneous, and succeeded. The arrest of the Royal Family at
Varennes was not the action of one individual or of two; it was not Drouet
nor was it the Saulce family. It was a great number of individuals (the
King had been recognized all along the journey), each thinking the same
thing under the tension of a particular episode, each vaguely tending to
one kind of action and tending with increasing energy towards that action,
and all combining, as it were, upon that culminating point in the long
journey which was reached at the archway of the little town in Argonne.

To have expressed and portrayed this common national power has been the
saving of the principal French historians, notably of Michelet. It has
furnished them with the key by which alone the history of their country
could be made plain. Nothing is easier than to ridicule or deny so
mystical a thing. Taine, by temperament intensely anti-national, ridiculed
it as he ridiculed the mysteries of the Faith; but with this consequence,
that his denial made it impossible for him to write the history of his
country, and compelled him throughout his work, but especially in his
history of the Revolution, to perpetual, and at last to somewhat crude,
forms of falsehood.