Vexilla
regis prodeunt Inferni!" Who can hear it without the same thrill, as
when Napoleonic trumpets heralded the Emperor! In the presence of
such moments the whole elaboration of the Beatrice Cult falls away.
That romantic perversion of the sex instinct is but the psychic
motive force. Once started on his splendid and terrible road, the poet
forgets everything except the "Principle of Beauty" and the
"Memory of Great Men." Parallel with these things is Dante's
passion of reverence for the old historic places--provinces, cities,
rivers and valleys of his native Italy. Even when he lifts up his voice
to curse them, as he curses his own Firenze, it is but an inversion of
the same mood. The cities where men dwelt then took to themselves
living personalities; and Dante, who in love and hate was Italian of
the Italians, was left indifferent by none of these. How strange to
modern ears this thrill of recognition, when one exile, even among
the dead, meets another, of their common citizenship of "no mean
city!" Of this classic "patriotism" the world requires a Renaissance,
that we may be saved from the shallowness of artificial commercial
Empires. The new "inter-nationalism" is the sinister product of a
generation that has grown "deracinated," that has lost its roots in the
soil. It is an Anglo-Germanic thing and opposed to it the proud
tenacity of the Latin race turns, even today, to what Barres calls the
"worship of one's Dead."

Anglo-Saxon Industrialism, Teutonic Organization, have their world
place; but it is to the Latin, and, it may be, to the Slav also, that the
human spirit must turn in those subtler hours when it cannot "live by
bread alone."

The modern international empires may obliterate local boundaries
and trample on local altars. In spite of them, and in defiance of them,
the soul of an ancient race lives on, its saints and its artists forging
the urn of its Phoenix-ashes!

Dante himself, dreaming over the high Virgilian Prophecy of a
World-State, under a Spiritual Caesar, yearned to restore the Pax
Romana to a chaotic world. Such a vision, such an Orbis Terrarum
at the feet of Christ, has no element in common with the material
dominance of modern commercial empires. It much more closely
resembles certain Utopias of the modern Revolutionary. In its spirit
it is not less Latin than the traditional customs of the City-States it
would include. Its real implication may be found in the assimilative
genius of t