Of all the gods who tread the spangled skies,
Thou most unjust, most odious in our eyes!
Inhuman discord is thy dear delight,
The waste of slaughter, and the rage of fight!”
It is most true. Such has ever been War for War’s sake, and when the Germans themselves are wounded and beaten, they complain like Mars of old of “lawless force.”
But Raemaekers has introduced another touch more Roman than Greek, and reminding us perhaps of Tacitus rather than of Homer.
Who was Caligula, and what does his name mean? “Little Jackboots,” in his childhood the spoiled child of the camp, as a man, and Cæsar, the first of the thoroughly mad, as well as bad, Emperors of Rome, the first to claim divine honours in his lifetime, to pose as an artist and an architect, an orator and a littérateur, to have executions carried out under his own eyes, and while he was at meals; who made himself a God, and his horse a Consul.
Minerva blacking the boots of Caligula—it is a clever combination!
But there is an even worse use of Pallas, which War and the German War-lords have made. They have found a new Pallas of their own, not the supernal Goddess of Heavenly Wisdom and Moderation, but her infernal counterfeit, sung of by a famous English poet in prophetic lines that come back to us to-day with new force.
Who loves not Knowledge, who shall rail