MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
pROFESSOR GUSTAVE LE BON, were he alive today, would observe with professional satisfaction the develop- ment of the oil crisis in Persia. One of the main argu- ments in his Psychologie des Ponies was that you can make a crowd believe things which, as separate individuals, they would disbelieve. A crowd, that is, can develop states of mind different from those of the units composing it ; and a herd can be lashed into corporate rage or panic by causes that would not disturb the isolated sheep, goat or cow. The Persians, I fear, are specially prone to these group emotions. In the month of Muharrem I have seen the audiences at the Passion plays sob and weep in real spiritual agony at the thought of the death of Hussein ; here is no mummery, not even a condition produced by religious ecstasy ; the impression conveyed is one of deeply felt personal humiliation, anger and misery. The audience sways with crossed arms, nursing broken hearts, while the tears tumble down every cheek and loud wails" rise ; then off they go to their supper, and Hussein and his woes are as if they had never been. When a demos so subject to hysteria really obtains control over a nation, then the ordinary principles of law, politics, or diplomacy cease to apply. Self-mutilation, self- immolation even, are resorted to for reasons that the individual would be unable to explain. Gusts of fury, hatred, vengeance and misery can be evoked about things that people had never noticed, or worried about, before ; and great forces are let loose which, until they have spent themselves in exhaustion, are totally uncontrollable. It should be evident by now that nothing is gained either by becoming angry with these outbursts or dis- missing them as irrational and unimportant ; they are, in fact, extremely dangerous outbursts, and the damage that they can do may prove irreparable.
* * * * We have always been told that it is useless, when dealing with a hysterical patient, to preach sweet reason. There are only two things to be done. The first is to slap him or her very sharply on the cheek. The alternative is to leave hint or her severely alone. I feel myself that it would be most foolish to slap the Persians on the cheek ; we could occupy Abadan with com- parative ease ; we could even push on, I suppose, to the edge of the Bakhtiari hills without provoking intervention or employ- ing too many divisions. But I do not see how you are to induce 20,000 Persian workmen to function normally under the stimulus of bayonets. Yet again and again, during the last weeks, have I heard men who should know better abusing the Government for weakness and timidity, and suggesting that if a less effeminate administration were in power the Persians would, "long before now," have been taught a lesson. "What sort of lesson ? " I ask humbly. And then the Persians are denounced in terms that would seem outrageous in the mouth of a farmer abusing juvenile delinquents in his orchard. I mind that sort of thing. I hate to hear Persians abused as if they had no dignity of their own. They are an older and less mongrel race than we are ; they have swayed great empires and created magnificent art ; and they have produced a literature which, unlike our own literature, has become woven with the thoughts and feelings of even the poorest among them. When I hear these men seated in London clubs and growling at each other from the depths of leather chairs, I seem to catch for a moment some surmise of why the Oriental can dislike us so much. It is not our arrogance that hurts them so much as our Obtuseness. * * * * • In summer, when I lived in Persia, we used to move some eight miles from the capital to a village on the slopes of the Elburz. We lived in a large compound shaded by plane trees and murmur* at night with tilt .sound of the stream flushing through the bathing-pool, flushing through the little channels in the garden, splashing in the fountains that enlivened thel houses where we slept. It would be hot during the day, but at night, sleeping out on the balcony, one had two blankets and a feeling of clear air passing from the mountains to the plaln.1 Every morning when the early sun lit my balcony I would wake and eat my nectarines ; and always at the same hour a shepherd, boy with his pipe would pass the garden wall singing in falsetto words that I was unable to catch or understand. But one day, when I was out riding early with a Persian scholar, we inter- cepted this ugly little boy as he drove his goats past the com- pound wall. We asked him to sing his tune. His was, as I have said, a shrill little voice, scrannel as his poor face. But my friend was able to catch and understand the words. "It is Hafiz," he said, "that the lad sings." So every morning there- after, when woken by those notes coming down the hill-side, I would listen with respect. Here were the words of the great Shirazi breaking upon the tingling air. Now in England, I have often heard garage hands and even hop-pickers and private soldiers burst suddenly into song. But it is not Marvell or Herrick that they sing. I should like to say to these clubmen who deride Persia, "That's all very well. But our shepherds can't sing real poetry." "I should hope not indeed" would be the reply,' * * * * I am not suggesting that the Persians have behaved reason ably ; I agree that their conduct has been atrocious, and will have tragic consequences both for them and for us. But when a hysterical patient smashes the lacquer mirror that she used to be so fond of, perplexity rather than anger or contempt is the emotion we should feel. Because, when I was in Persia, they used to be fond of the Oil Company. There was no feel- ing at all in those days that it was some monstrous capitalist exploitation, destructive of Persian economy and an insult to Persian self-respect. They felt that it was one of the wonders of the world ; that it was a source of great national riches ; and that it had been extremely clever of them to induce the British to invest so much money and to do so much hard work very largely for Persia's own benefit. I am not suggesting either that the reversal of this feeling is artificial. The Persians probably feel as intensely the humiliation and cruelty that the Company has imposed upon them as they feel about the death of Hussein, without pausing for one instant to consider that each of these two sorrows is equally fictional. Individual Persians would• probably admit that the agitation is unreal and the future prospects black indeed ; but once they become a crowd, these very individuals, as Gustave Le Bon pointed out, will shake their fists and scream and slobber with the rest. The foreign reporters in the hotel may feel that the crowd has been paid to make this demonstration or that they are frightened of not dis- playing full enthusiasm in the anti-British wave. They may have been given a penny or two ; they are .certainly afraid of being thought unpatriotic ; but there is something more behind it all. There is the atmosphere of the Taziya, of the Passion play. * * * * My mind goes back to a day some twenty years ago when I had all but completed a slow trek across the Bakhtiari mom.; tains. From dawn to evening, in slow caravan, we had picked our way in and out of the boulders and the thistles, camping by night among the pomegranates and the oleanders of a valley stream. Up and down we went day after day, crossing and re, crossing the Karoun river, searching always for rare tulips that we never found. And then one day, as we topped another pass and gazed down over the plain of Malamir, our escort began clamouring. They pointed excitedly to a distant plume of smoke some thirty miles away, rising beyond another crest " Edarehl Edareh!" they shouted, "The Company! Th i Company! " There was no hatred in their cry ; only affectionate pride.
Previous page
