THE EVERLASTING YEA

Evening Star, Issue 23685, 19 September 1940, Page 7

THE EVERLASTING YEA

“ Fortitude is one of the greatest things in the world. That is because it is a positive thing, idealistic, and idealism possesses a quality that such lesser counterparts as endurance and resignation have not, and, in spite of their inherent nobility, cannot have ' Simply to endure the present, simply to accept with resignation the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, is to find cold comfort, little inspiration, for the time that may lie ahead. Even the animals have endurance. “ But fortitude is a spiritual thing;at its very root is an assurance that if man can only hold out—- “ ‘ Sudden the worst turns the best to the brave, The black minute’s at end, And the element’s rage, the fiend voices that rave Shall dwindle, shall blend, Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain, Then a light . . “ So wrote Robert Browning, and as there must be more fortitude on the earth to-day than ever there was in the whole history of mankind—recent example has again dwarfed precept—our Browning and the Brownings of other lands, other languages, have become world poets, with a message to hearten tho whole world. “ That .sturdy philosopher of the last century, Thomas Carlyle,, may be regarded as in essence the prose-writing equivalent of Browning. Carlyle, speaking of fortitude in his own fashion, had a name for it—‘ The Everlasting Yea.’ ” —‘ Liverpool Rost.’