The second characteristic of the patriotism of the modern ‘clerks’ is a desire to relate the form of their own minds to a form of the _national_ mind, which they naturally brandish against other national forms of mind. We all know how, during the last fifty years, so many men of learning on both banks of the Rhine have asserted their views in the name of _French_ science, of _German_ science. We know how acridly so many of our writers in the same period have vibrated with _French_ sensibility, _French_ intelligence, _French_ philosophy. Some declare that they are the incarnation of Aryan thought, Aryan painting, Aryan music, to which others reply by discovering that a certain master had a Jewish grandmother, and so venerate Semitic genius in him. Here it is not a question of inquiring whether the form of mind of a scholar or an artist is the signature of his nationality or his race and to what extent, but of noting the desire of the modern ‘clerks’ that it should be so, and noting how new a thing this is. Racine and La Bruyère never dreamed of setting up their works before themselves and before the world as manifestation of the French mind, nor did Goethe and Wincklemann relate theirs to the genius of Germany.[44] Here, chiefly among the artists, is a very remarkable fact. It is very remarkable to see men whose activity consists, one might say professionally, in the assertion of individuality, men who became so violently conscious of this truth a century ago with the Romantic movement, now (as it were) abdicating this sort of consciousness and trying to feel themselves as the expression of some general existence, a manifestation of a collective mind. It is true that this abdication of the individual in favour of ‘a great impersonal and eternal Whole’ satisfies another sort of Romanticism. It is true that this impulse of the artist may also be explained by the desire (which Barrès does not conceal) to increase the enjoyment of himself by himself, since the consciousness of the individual ego is doubled in profundity by consciousness of the national ego, while at the same time the artist finds new lyrical themes in this second consciousness. It may also be admitted that the artist is not blind to his own interest in calling himself the expression of the genius of his nation, thereby inviting the whole race to applaud itself in the work he put before it.[45] Whatever their motives may have been, the great minds or the minds reputed such, by relating the whole of their value so noisily to their nation, have laboured in a direction contrary to that expected of them; they have flattered the vanity of nations, they have fed full the arrogance with which each nation flings its superiority in the face of its neighbours.[46]