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.