Hazlewood indicated the room where they were dining.
"Which are the English diplomats?" he demanded.
"That's perfectly easy to tell," she replied.
"And why?" he went on. "Simply because they've made no concession to being in Nish at a moment of crisis. I invite you to regard my friend Harry Vereker. See how he defies any Horatian regret for lapsed years. Positively he is still at Oxford. Can't you hear above all this clatter of cosmopolitanism in a pigsty the suave insistency of his voice impressing upon you by its quality of immutable self-assurance that, whatever happens to the rest of the world, nothing vitally deformative ever happens to England?"
"But what has the voice of a secretary to do with the military abuse of Latin derivations?"
"Not much, I admit, except in its serene ruthlessness. An English officer compels a Latin verb to fit in with his notion of what a Latin verb ought to do just in the same way as he expects a Spaniard to regard with pleasure his occupation of Gibraltar: any protest by a grammarian or an idealistic politician would strike him as impertinent. Harry Vereker's voice is a still more ineradicable manifestation of the spirit. Listen! He is asking the waiter in Serbian for salt, but he does so in a way that reminds one of mankind's concession to animals in using forms of communication that the latter can understand. It is not to be supposed that the dog invented patting: Harry's Serbian is his way of patting the waiter: it is his language, not the waiter's. Personally I can't help confessing that I admire this attitude to the world, and I only wish that it could be eternally preserved. The great historical tragedy of this war—I'm putting on one side for the moment the countless personal tragedies that are included in it, and trying to regard the war as Mr. Buckle regarded civilization—the great historical tragedy will be the Englishman's loss of his personality. When we look back at the historical tragedy of the fall of the Roman Empire, we think less of the civis Romanus sum than of the monuments of architecture, law, political craft, and the rest that remain imperishably part of human progress. In the same way a thousand years hence I assume that the British Empire will be considered to have played a part only second to the Roman Empire in the manifest results of its domination. But what has been lost and what will be lost is the individual Roman's attitude and the individual Englishman's. Not all the remains of the Roman Empire have been enough really to preserve for us the indefinable flavor of being a Roman, and with much more material at his disposal I defy the perfect cosmopolitan of mixed Aryan, Mongol, and Semitic blood to realize a thousand years from now Harry Vereker's tone of voice in asking that waiter for the salt. No, no, the cosmopolitan of the future will turn aside from the records of the past and in Esperanto murmur sadly to himself that something is missing from his appreciation. Perhaps I can illustrate my meaning better if I compare the Athenians with the French. I feel that the art of both enduring through time to come will be enough. I have no regret for the personal attitude of the Athenian, and in the same way I don't feel that the cosmopolitan of a thousand years hence will lose anything by not meeting the Frenchman of to-day. It is Athens and France rather than the Athenian or the Frenchman of which the world is enamoured. How often have I heard a foreigner say: 'The politics of England do not please me: I find it a brigand policy, but the individual Englishman is always a gentleman.' An individual Englishman like Byron is worth more to England than twenty Chamberlains or Greys, who yet have more right to represent their country: he comes as such a romantic surprise. A Frenchman like Lafayette is taken for granted. The word of an Englishman is proverbial; the perfidy of Albion equally so."
"And the Germans?" Sylvia asked.
"Oh, they have never been thought worthy of a generalization. We have apprehended them vaguely as one apprehends pigs—as a nation of gross feeders and badly dressed women drinking a mixture of treacle and onions they call beer, with a reputation for guttural peregrination and philosophy."
"Their music," Sylvia protested.
"Yes, that is difficult to explain. Yes, I think we must give them that; but when we remember Bach and Schumann, we must not forget Wagner and the German band."