On Something Part 11

THE IRONMONGER

When I was in the French army we came one day with the guns in July along a straight and dusty road and clattered into the village called Bar-le-Duc.

Of the details of such marches I have often written. I wish now to speak of another thing, which, in long accounts of mere rumbling of guns, one might never have time to tell, but which is really the most important of all experiences under arms in France--I mean the older civilians, the fathers.

Who made the French army? Who determined to recover from the defeats and to play once more that determined game which makes up half French history, the "Thesaurization," the gradual reacc.u.mulation of power? The general answer to such questions is to say: "The nation being beaten had to set to and recover its old position." That answer is insufficient. It deals in abstractions and it tells you nothing. Plenty of political societies throughout history have sat down under disaster and consented to sink slowly. Many have done worse--they have maintained after sharp warnings the pride of their blind years; they have maintained that pride on into the great disasters, and when these came they have sullenly died. France neither consented to sink nor died by being overweening. Some men must have been at work to force their sons into the conscription, to consent to heavy taxation, to be vigilant, acc.u.mulative, tenacious, and, as it were, constantly eager. There must have been cla.s.ses in which, unknown to themselves, the stirp of the nation survived; individuals who, aiming at twenty different things, managed, as a resultant, to carry up the army to the pitch in which I had known it and to lay a slow foundation for recovered vigour. Who were these men?

I had read of them in Birmingham when I was at school; I had read of them in books when I read of the Hundred Years' War and of the Revolution.

I was to read of them again in books at Oxford. But on that Sat.u.r.day at Bar-le-Duc I _saw_ one of them, and by as much as the physical impression is worth more than the secondary effect of history, my sight of them is worth writing down.

A man in my battery, one Matthieu, told me he had leave to go out for the evening, and told me also to go and get leave. He said his uncle had asked him to dine and bring a friend. It seemed his uncle lived in a villa on the heights above the town; he was an ironmonger who had retired. I went to my Sergeant and asked him for leave.

My Sergeant was a n.o.ble who was working his way up through the ranks, and when I found him he was checking off forage at a barn where some of our men were working. He looked me hard in the eyes, and said in a drawling lackadaisical voice:

"You are the Englishman?"

"Yes, Sergeant," said I a little anxiously (for I was very keen to get a good dinner in town after all that marching).

"Well," said he, "as you are the Englishman you can go." Such is the logic of the service.

The army is no place to argue, and I went. I suppose what he meant was, "As we are both more or less in exile, take my blessing and be off," but he may merely have meant to be inconsequent, for inconsequence is the wit of schoolboys and soldiers. I went up the hill with my friend.

The long twilight was still broad over the hill and the old houses of Bar-le-Duc, as we climbed. It was night by the clock, but one could have seen to read. We were tired, and talked of nothing in particular, but such things as we said were full of the old refrain of conscripts: "Dog of a trade," "When shall we be out of it?" Even as we spoke there was pride in our b.r.e.a.s.t.s at the noise of trumpets in the mist below along the river and the Eighth making its presence known, and our uniforms and our swords.

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 att.i.tude and carriage of those men who invigorate France. His self-confidence was evident in his st.u.r.dy 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 cla.s.s 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.

A FORCE IN GAUL

There is a force in Gaul which is of prime consequence to all Europe. It has ca.n.a.lized 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 ma.s.sacres 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 princ.i.p.al 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 mult.i.tude is not the psychology of the individual.

Ask every man in West Suss.e.x 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 a.s.sembly 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 mult.i.tude. 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 princ.i.p.al 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.

Not to recognize this National force has, again, led men into another error: they will have it that the great common actions of Frenchmen are due to some occult force or to a master. They will explain the Crusades by the cunning organization of the Papacy; the French Revolution by the cunning organization of the Masonic lodges; the Napoleonic episode by the individual cunning and plan of Bonaparte. Such explanations are puerile.

The blow of 1870 was perhaps the most severe which any modern nation has endured. By some accident it did not terminate the activity of the French nation. The Southern States of America remain under the effect of the Civil War. All that is not Prussian in Germany remains prostrate-- especially in ideas--under the effect of the Prussian victory over it. The French but barely escaped a similarly permanent dissolution of national character: but they did escape it; and the national mark, the power of spontaneous and collective action, after a few years' check, began to emerge.

Upon two occasions an attempt was made towards such action. The first was in the time of Boulanger, the second during the Dreyfus business. In both cases the nation instinctively saw, or rather felt, its enemy. In both there was a moment when the cosmopolitan financier stood in physical peril of his life. Neither, however, matured; in neither did the people finally move.

Latterly several partial risings have marked French life. Why none of them should have culminated I will consider in a moment. Meanwhile, the foreign observer will do well to note the character of these movements, abortive though they were. It is like standing upon the edge of a crater and watching the heave and swell of the vast energies below. There may have been no actual eruption for some time, but the activities of the volcano and its nature are certain to you as you gaze. The few days that pa.s.sed two years ago in Herault are an example.