This spirit of adventure that makes men willing to face danger, and even death, to get some new experience or to render some service, the spirit that makes some men explore strange places, or seek for the South Pole, or fight in great battles—this spirit of adventure never dies. Sometimes the story is of a knight clad in armor, and sometimes it is about a man in khaki who died the other day that his fellows might live—the spirit is the same. Men no longer dress like Lancelot, or like George Washington, but they do the same sort of things. And people like to read of these things or hear the stories told just as much now as they did when the first traveler returned to the little village in Greece, or when Sir Gareth and Sir Gawain won their victories, or when General Putnam or Mad Anthony Wayne, in our Revolutionary War, performed some brave act for the American cause. And now, all over the world, groups gather about the soldier who has returned from Flanders Fields with his stories of valor. Always the spirit of adventure lives; always we like to hear what it brings back to us of news about life. If we have had no chance yet to do a thing worth men’s praise, we get a larger view of life, a better sense of what life really means, from reading or hearing such stories. And we mean to do brave things ourselves, some day, so the stories thrill us with the sense of what life holds for us.
These things we must remember, then, as we read. Through these stories we become partners in all the brave deeds of the past. And, again, the spirit of adventure is ever-living and is as keen today as in the past. And, finally, by such stories our own knowledge of the fine qualities of human nature is increased and our own experience enlarged so that we become braver and better because we see what wonderful things life can bring.
THE DAYS OF CHIVALRY
