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IV
THE SOUL OF NATIONS
1
IN the admirable and touching pages in which Octave Mirbeau
bequeaths his last thoughts to us, the great friend whose loss is mourned by
all who in this world hunger and thirst after justice expresses his surprise at
finding how in the supreme moments of its life the collective soul of the
French nation differs from the soul of each of the individuals of which it is
composed.
He had devoted the best part
of his work to examining, dissecting, presenting in a blinding and sometimes
unbearable light and stigmatizing -- with unequalled eloquence and bitterness
the weaknesses and selfishness, the folly and meannesses, the vanity and sordid
money-sense, the lack of conscience, honesty, charity, dignity, the shameful
stains on the life of his fellow countrymen. And behold, in the hour of
insistent duty, there arises suddenly, as in a fairy scene, out of the quagmire
which he had so long stirred with rough and generous disgust, the purest,
noblest, most patient, fraternal and whole-hearted spirit of heroism and
sacrifice that the world has ever known, not only in the most glorious days of
its history, but even in the time of its most romantic legends, which were but
glorious dreams which it never hoped to realize.
I could say as much of
another nation, which I know well, since it lives in the land where I was born.
The Belgians, in the guise in which we saw them daily, appeared to give us no
promise of a noble soul. They seemed to us narrow and limited, a little
commonplace, honest in a mean, inglorious way, without ideals or generous
aspirations, wholly absorbed by their petty material welfare, their petty local
wrangles. Yet, when the same hour of duty sounded for them, more menacing and
formidable than those of the other nations, because it preceded all of them in
a terrible mystery; while there was everything to gain and nothing to lose,
save honour, if they proved faithless to a plighted word; at the first call of
their conscience aroused as by a thunderbolt, without hesitating or glancing at
what they had to meet or undergo, with an unanimous and irresistible impulse,
they astonished mankind by a decision such as no other people had ever taken
and saved the world, well knowing that themselves could not be saved. And this
assuredly is the noblest sacrifice that the heroes and martyrs who have
hitherto appeared to be the professed exponents of sublime courage are able to
achieve upon this earth of ours.
On the other hand, to those
of us who had had occasion to mix with Germans, who had lived in Germany and
believed that they knew German manners and letters, it seemed beyond doubt that
the Bavarians, Saxons, Hanoverians and Rhinelanders, notwithstanding some
defects of education rather than character which grated upon us a little, also
possessed certain qualities, notably a genial kindness, a gravity, a
laboriousness, a steadiness, an uncomplaining temper, a simplicity in their
domestic life, a sense of duty and a habit of taking life conscientiously,
which we had never known or had succeeded in losing. So, despite the warnings
of history, we were struck dumb with amazement and at first refused to believe
the early tales of atrocities which were not incidental, as in every war, but
deliberate, premeditated, systematic and perpetrated with a light heart by an
entire people setting itself of sober purpose and with a sort of perverse pride
outside the pale of humanity, transforming itself of a sudden into a pack of
devils more formidable and destructive than all those which Hell had hitherto
belched forth into our world.
2
We knew already and Dr.
Gustave Le Bon had demonstrated to us in a curious way that the soul of a crowd
does not resemble the soul of any of its component members. According to the
leaders and the circumstances that control it, the collective soul is sometimes
loftier, juster, more generous and most often more impulsive, more credulous,
more cruel, more barbarous and blind. But a crowd has only a provisional,
momentary soul, which does not survive the short-lived and nearly always
violent event that calls it into being; and its contingent and transitory
psychology is hardly able to tell us how the profound, lasting and, so to
speak, immortal soul of a nation takes shape.
3
It is quite natural that a
nation should not know itself at all and that its acts should plunge it into a
state of bewilderment from which it does not recover until history has explained
them to a greater or lesser degree. None of the men who make up a nation knows
himself; still less does any of them know his fellows. Not one of us really knows who or what he is;
not one of us can say what he will do in unexpected circumstances which are a
trifle more serious than those which form the customary tissue of life. We
spend our existence in questioning and exploring ourselves; our acts are as
much a revelation to ourselves as to others; and, the nearer we draw to our
end, the farther stretches the vista of that which still remains for us to
discover. We own but the smallest part of ourselves; the rest, which is almost
the whole, does not belong to us at all, but merges in the past and the future
and in other mysteries more unknown than the future or the past.
What is true of each one of
us is very much more true of a great nation composed of millions of men. That
represents a future and a past stretching incomparably farther than those of a
single human life. We admit and constantly repeat that a nation is guided by
its dead. It is certain that the dead continue to live in it a far more active
life than is generally believed and that they control it unknown to itself,
even as, at the other end of the ages, the men of the future, that is to say,
all those who are not yet born, all those whom it carries within itself as it
does its dead, play no less important a part in a nation's decisions. But in
its very present, at the moment when it is living and putting forth its
activity on this earth, in addition to the power of those who no longer are and
those who are not yet, there is outside the nation, outside the aggregate of
bodies and brains that make it up, a host of forces and faculties which have
not found or have not wished to take their place, or which do not abide in the
nation consistently, and which nevertheless belong to it as essentially and
direct it as effectively as those which are comprised within it. What our body
contains when we believe ourselves circumscribed is little in comparison with
what it does not contain; and it is in what the body does not contain that the
highest and most powerful part of our being seems to dwell. We must not forget
that it grows stronger each day that we neither die nor come into being, in a
word, that we are not wholly incarnate, and that, on the other hand, our flesh
comprises much more than ourselves. It is this that constitutes all the
floating forces which make up the real soul of a people, forces very much
deeper and more numerous than those which seem fixed in the body and the
spirit. They do not show themselves in the petty incidents of daily life, which
concern only the mean and narrow covering in which a nation goes sheltered; but
they unite, join forces and reveal their passionate ardour at the grave and
tragic hours when everlasting destiny is at stake. They then lay down decisions
which history inscribes on her records, decisions whose grandeur, generosity
and heroism astonish even those who have taken them more or less unknown to
themselves and often in spite of themselves, decisions which are manifested in
their own eyes as an unexpected, magnificent and incomprehensible revelation of
themselves.
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