allegiance of Englishmen, not the glorified and idealised form of a woman as in Italy or France. We have no ideal representation of England'; 'John Bull' is our type, in which we are half laughing at ourselves. True, there is Britannia,' but she is just stage-property, and has little to do with the emotional lien which binds the country and its sons; one cannot imagine a British soldier fighting and dying with the word 'Britannia' on his lips, as his French and Italian brothers are doing daily for Italia' and 'La France.' We have not made anything so definite as a portrait of ourselves. With our natural unconsciousness, or rather with our deep, instinctive, self-preservative distaste for handling roots, our ideals and aspirations are, perhaps, less obvious to ourselves and to others than is the case with our chief foe and some of our allies. They are not, and we do not wish them to be, so logical, so definite as those of the Latin races; we have an inborn distrust of any demonstration but fact. The 'Topsy' theory of the British Empire-"spects I growed' the only adequate theory, but desperately puzzling to our friends and exasperating to our foes, has allowed that Empire to develope more like a product of nature than the volitional outcome of the human brain; and so, at each stage of its growth, at each new crisis, by tentative obedience to the pressure of its surroundings-that is to say, by its blunders and mistakes, always fluid and therefore remediable-it is enabled to emerge into the new atmosphere, which it can breathe, into a world with which it is homogeneous, with no brain-imposed contradictions to its environment. This harmony with environment is probably what the Englishman means by 'right'; 6 τό τ ̓ ἐν χρόνῳ μακρῷ νόμιμον αξὶ φύσει τε πεφυκός. The law that abides and endures ages long, The eternal and nature-born-these things be strong.' His ideal and his inspiration are, at bottom, ethical. Germany, with immense pains and sweat of brain, has evolved a picture of herself which we think hideous and she considers lovely-an ideal Germania,' with which the nation, Narcissus-like, has fallen in love. They have drunk the cup of the Potsdam Circe, and now, 'so perfect is their misery, Not once perceive their foul disfigurement, But boast themselves more comely than before.' All the sentimentality of the race has rushed to the adoration of this image. The Germans believe their ideal and their aspirations to be eminently practical, but as a matter of fact they have not escaped, and cannot escape, the essence of their own nature. Their politik is not, in truth, real-politik, for it leaves out of account, or disdains to understand, the psychology of their neighbours, which is a serious factor in the reality of their surroundings. It is pre-eminently a schwärmerei-politik, for it is dominated and guided by the profoundly sentimental dream of 'Germania' as they conceive her, sole and isolated in the world of men, imposing her will at her sole beneplacet-'Che libito fe lecito in sua legge '-for the good of mankind, they say. By the German character the world may yet be saved'; in that line their poet, Geibel, has condensed their arrogant aspiration. We are constrained to admit the initial strength which this concentrated sentimentality gives to the race. It makes them all-of-a-piece, with a brutal directness of aim which, with the help of treachery, has won them successes against an unsuspecting and unprepared environment, but which could be considered as 'practical' only by a brain that had surrendered itself blindly to the conclusions of a narrow logic, ignoring the infinite subtlety both of nature and of man. Such a brain is slavishly subservient to man-made premises; it is the brain of a púσa doûλoç, a nature-born slave, with its wearisome iteration of therefores' and 'musts' which characterise all German press-and war-literature. A race intensely busy on its object, patiently ready for sacrifice; tüchtig, aber nicht geistreich; tapfer, aber nicht heldenmütig'-it is their ideal that is wrong and will lose them the war. The type is not new; Euripides, long ago, foretold its doom; this is Prof. Gilbert Murray's rendering: 'O strength of God, slow art thou and still, Yet failest never! On them that worship the ruthless Will, On them that dream, doth His judgement wait; And greater ever Things which are not of God. . . . For all is vain, And yet the appearance of strength displayed by this type, its promise of very material successes, its flattery of the orgoglio umano and of the brain, the fallacious lucidity of its deductive method, relying on arbitrary premises, render it dangerously attractive. It is but too close to a large part of our human desires; it appeals to our material appetites; and it has thrown over the nations, Italy among them, a sort of glamour mingled of fear and admiration for the 'blond brute.' With France, also, the ideal is a race-picture, an autoportrait, a vision of 'La France,' so clear, so clean, so net; a soul burning with a hard gem-like flame,' yielding the purest light of the intellect; a personality elegant, finished, artistic to the finger-tips; lean and spare like some master of the rapier, supple and flashing as his blade; bursting, in the very crisis of the struggle, into that immortal phrase, Debout les Morts. What, then, is Italy's ideal? The Italy to whom Italians have sworn allegiance is an Italy of historical continuity in the spiritual, if not yet entirely in the political world; the Italy of Rome, the Renaissance and the Risorgimento; the Italy to whom the West owes three such gifts as the Law, the Church and the Arts, and three such splendid languages as French, Spanish and Italian; the Madre antica of European civilisation, and now the sorella neonata, the youngest born among the nations of the European family, drawing knowledge and wisdom from her centuries of past achievement, and hope and strength from her new birth. She is the vase that holds the aroma of those ancient words fides, pietas, jus, officia, honos, decor, and a dozen others, which mean so much for mankind and are so profoundly humane that they can take on the nuance of later ethical teaching and yet retain their antique connotation; a personality more conscious of itself than England, more humane, may be, than France, a middle term between the two; the parent of our ancient culture as opposed to that new-fangled idol on the Spree. That is how Italians think of their Italy when they abstract the ideal of their country from the Italy of work-a-day politics. Ideals are, of course, idealised. ་ The religious fervour of the races, where any may be found, is drawn within the orbit of their various racial ideals and coloured by them, and finds expression in literature so true to the race and yet so diverse in quality as Christ in Flanders,' compared, for instance, with 'Lettres d'un Soldat.' In obedience to its worship of brute force and under pressure of its ideal, Germany has evolved that pleasing type of deity, Jehovah with the attributes of Moloch, whose church is the parade-ground, whose liturgy is the drill-book, whose ritual is the goosestep, whose fitting litany is 'The Hymn of Hate.' Contrast that hymn with the expression of Italian religious sentiment, where it exists at all-the gracious presence of the Madonna, the august beneficence of the Padre Eterno; for that is how an Italian feels it if he feels it in any sense. There is no break in the secular continuity; the historical forms are retained and are sufficient; the new spirit evoked by the war, the blending of Italian patriotism with Italian piety, so dear to the heart of the saintly peasant of Riese, Pope Pius X, finds a ready home within the ancient formulæ. A soldier of the line, a Bersagliere, sent me from the Italian front, from trenches 6000 feet above the sea, beaten by snowstorm and blizzard, three beautiful hymns circulating among the men up there who care for such things. They are appeals to the heart of the Madonna and the pity and loving-kindness of the Father for help in human suffering and for aid to Italy. I quote two. A MARIA PER LA VITTORIA DELLE NOSTRE ARMI. 'All' armi Italiche su estremi lidi, A quei che soffrono ne la battaglia 'Leviamo fervida, con umil cuore, 'Al serto fulgido de la tua gloria A DIO, SIGNORE DELLE VITTORIE. 'Padre nostro che regni ne' cieli, O Signor della Vittoria, forza donaci e valor; 'Tu ci hai data la patria bella O Signor della Vittoria, forza donaci e valor; Tu che esalti e disperdi le genti, O Signor della Vittoria, forza donaci e valor; Che ti pregano in faccia al nemico; * Over our soldiers in a distant land, To thee we lift, with ever humble heart, To that bright crown of thine effulgent glory |