" THOUGHTS ON THE BATTLE."
[To THIS EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."] fen,—No poet ever preached a gospel more invigorating to his own age, or to ours, at a crisis like the present, than Virgil in the Aeneid. But why alter one of his greatest lines—even to offer it in the guise of " a proverb "? Quidquid Grit, superanda omnis fortune ferendo est (Aeneid V. 710) is said, like his Possunt, quia posse videntur (ib., V. 231)—the "master-word "on which you based a leading article last December (p. 6118)—and his Tu ne cede malls, sed contra audentior ito (ib., VI. 95), to contain the pith and mar- row of the teaching by which he lived himself and wished his fellow-countrymen to live; and by which Italy—undegenerate and indomitable Italy—has lived through the shock and stress of her recent ordeal. The spirit of those lines had been the making and the saving of Rome from the earliest times. It was the soul of the people. In that spirit it was that Ennius, her warrior poet- " the Tiger," you well might call him, of Italy in the Second Punic War—with Hannibal almost at the gates of Rome and no America hurrying to her aid, had written much as M. Clemenceau speaks:—
Qui vicit, non est victor, nisi victu' Jatetur; and again of Roman hearts):— Quae neque Dardaniis campis potuere perire Nee cum capta capi nee cum combusts cremari; and later, of the " one man " (Fabius, their Foch) who " by holding on" restored the equipoise and saved the State :—
Unus-lnno nobis cunctando restituit rem.
Nomura rumores ponebat ante salutem.
Life and literature react upon each other, and no poetry could ever be more bracing and more tonic than the Roman poetry of Ennius and Virgil in which these thoughts were embodied and from which their readers and lovers, ancient and modern, have derived them. Nor can any latter-day war-pamphlets or war-songs equal or surpass the first six Odes of the third book of Horace—tracts for all time, if ever there were such. And that is (or connotes) the answer to those who would " switch off " the classics in our Public Schools and Universities—that and the maxim of General Foch, which you, Sir, cited so effectively on June 8th (p. 559): c'est Caine qui gagne la bataille. It is the spirit—not "big Bertha" and the thousand freaks of applied " frissistfulness "—that will win the war for freedom and save the soul of the world alive.—I
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