Page:The Muse in Arms, Osborn (ed), 1917.djvu/24

xx suddenly aware that the last self-sacrifice, after all, is but the price that is due for the beauty of England inwrought inextricably in his being:

Also he sees, in the self-same moment of vision, that the bravery of her lost sons will add to the beauty of the land adored. Furthermore, these soldier-poets ask nothing of England for themselves; they are not sorry for themselves because she is "cold and will not understand"; they are well content if only she will remain herself, the Gloriana of all the lands that ever have been or ever shall be. Therein their patriotism (to use the cold, inadequate, apologetic term) exceeds that of the ancient Athenians, for whom Athens was not a mother-queen but a darling, dangerous mistress so that the withdrawal of her favour was poison in the very heart's blood, driving Alcibiades into ruthless treachery and making of Thucydides a merciless cynic, whose history was intended to hold up the violet-crowned city to the smiling derision of all sequent centuries. Only in Houston Chamberlain has the ancient type of Greek traitor, the victim of an ingrowing egoism, dismally revisited this tragic star. That Germany's pride is less than ours appears in the fact that the Germans have used him as the Spartans used Alcibiades, whereas we have taken none of the help proffered by the many Germans who had already sold Germany in their squalid souls.

The symbolism in which love of country is shadowed