XI. The Little Joys of Life.
Has enthusiasm gone out of fashion? Are the young no longer hero-worshippers? A recent writer complains of the sadness of American youth. “The absence of animal spirits among our well-to-do young people is a striking contrast to the exuberance of that quality in most European countries,” says this author, in the Atlantic Monthly.
Our young people laugh very much, but they are not, as a rule, cheerful; and they are amiable only when they “feel like being amiable.” This is the most fatal defect in American manners among the young. The consideration for others shown only when a man is entirely at peace with himself is not politeness at all: it is the most unrefined manifestation of selfishness.
Before we condemn the proverbial artificiality of the French, let us contrast it with the brutality of the average carper at this artificiality. “A Frenchman,” he will say, “will lift his hat to you, but he would not give you a sou if you were starving.” Let us take that assertion for its full value. We are not starving; we do not want his sou, but we do want to have our every-day life made as pleasant as possible. And is your average brutal and bluff and uncivilized creature the more anxious to give his substance to the needy because he is ready on all occasions to tread on the toes of his neighbor? He holds all uttered pleasant things to be lies, and the suppression of the brutal a sin against truth. One sees this personage too often not to understand him well. He is half civilized. King Henry VIII. was of this kind—charming, bluff old fellow, bubbling over with truth and frankness, slapping Sir Thomas More on the back, and full of delicious horseplay, when his dinner agreed with him! It is easy to comprehend that the high politeness of the best of the French is the result of the finest civilization. No wonder Talleyrand looked back and said that no man really enjoyed life who had not lived before the Revolution.
But why should enthusiasm have gone out? Why should the young have no heroes? Have the newspaper joke, the levity of Ingersoll and the irreverence of the stump-speakers, the cynicism of Puck and the insolence of Judge, driven out enthusiasm? George Washington is mentioned—what inextinguishable laughter follows!—the cherry-tree, the little hatchet! What novel wit that name suggests! One must laugh, it is so funny! And, then, the scriptural personages! The paragraphers have made Job so very amusing; and Joseph and Daniel!—how stupid people must be who do not roar with laughter at the mere mention of these august names!
Cannot this odious, brutal laughter, which is not manly or womanly, be stopped? Ridicule cannot kill it, but an appeal to all the best feelings of the human heart might; for all the best feelings of the human heart are outraged. How funny death has become! When shall we grow tired of the joke about the servant who lighted the fire with kerosene, and went above; or the quite too awfully comical jeu d’esprit about the boy who ate green apples, and is no more? These jokes are in the same taste that would put the hair of a skeleton into curl-papers. Still we laugh.
A nation without reverence has begun to die: its feet are cold, though it may still grin. A nation whose youth are without enthusiasm has no future beyond the piling up of dollars. It is not so with our country yet; but the fact remains: enthusiasm is dying, and hero-worship needs revival.
One can easily understand why, among Catholics, there is not as much hero-worship as there ought to be. It is because our greatest heroes are not even mentioned in current literature, and because they are not well presented to our young people. St. Francis Xavier was a greater hero than Nelson; yet Nelson is popularly esteemed the more heroic, because Southey wrote his life well. But St. Francis’s life is written for the mystic, for the devotee. It is right, of course; but our young people are not all mystics or devotees; consequently St. Francis seems afar off—a saint to be vaguely remembered, but nothing more.
If the saints whose heroism appeals most to the young could be brought nearer to the natural young person, they would soon be as friends, daily companions—heroes, not distant beings whose halos guard them from contact. One need only know St. Francis of Assisi to be very fond of him. He had a sense of humor, too, but no sense of levity. And yet the only readable life of this hero and friend has been written by a Protestant. (I am not recommending it, for there are some things which Mrs. Oliphant does not understand.) And there is St. Ignatius Loyola. And there is St. Charles Borromeo—that was a man! And St. Philip Neri, who had a sense of humor, and was entirely civilized at the same time. And St. Francis of Sales! His “Letters to Persons in the World” make one wish that he had not died so soon. What tact, what knowledge of the world! How well he persuades people without diplomacy, by the force of a fine nature open to the grace of God!
Our young people need only know the saints—not out of Alban Butler’s sketches, but illumined with reality—to be filled with an enthusiasm which Carlyle would have had them waste on the wrong kind of heroes.