You will find in “The Disciple” the study of one of these responsibilities. May you find here a proof that the friend who writes these lines has the merit, if he possesses no other, of believing profoundly in the seriousness of his art. May you also find that he thinks of you with great concern. Yes, he has thought of you ever since the days when you were learning to read, when we who are now approaching our fortieth year were scribbling our first verses to the noise of the cannon which roared over Paris. We, in our study chambers, were not gay at that period. The oldest of us had just gone to the war, and those of us who were obliged to remain at college already felt the duty of our country’s rehabilitation press heavily upon us. We often thought of you in that fatal year, 1871. O! young Frenchmen of to-day--all of us who were intending to devote ourselves to literature, my friends and I, repeated the beautiful verses of Theodore de Banville: Ye in whom I hail the light. All ye who will love me, O young men of the coming fight, O holy battalions! We wished this dawn of light to be as bright as ours had been gloomy and misty with a vapor of blood. We wished to be worthy of your love, in leaving to you that which we valued more than we valued ourselves. We said that our work was to make of you and for you, by our public and private acts, by our words, by our fervor, and by our example, a new France, a France redeemed from defeat, a France reconstructed in its external and in its internal life. Young as we were then we knew, because we had learned it from our masters, and this was their best teaching--that triumphs and defeats from without interpreted the qualities and insufficiencies within; we knew that the resurrection of Germany at the beginning of the century had been above all a work of soul, and we recognized that the soul of France had been terribly hurt in 1870, and that it must be helped, healed and cured. We were not the only ones to comprehend in the generous ingenuousness of our youth that the moral crisis was then as it always is, the great crisis of this country; for in 1873 the most valiant of our leaders, Alexandre Dumas, said in the preface to “La Femme de Claude,” addressing the Frenchmen of his age as I am addressing you, my younger brother: “Take care, you are passing through troublous times. You have just paid death and are not through paying for your earlier faults. It is no time to be a wit, a trifler, a libertine, a scoffer, a skeptic, or a wanton; we have had enough of these for a time at least. God, nature, work, marriage, love, children, all these are serious, very serious things, and rise up before you. _All these must live or you will die_”.