Faith in the goodness of life, acceptance of all its burdens, confidence in the future, were formerly the code of the French family. Since Jean Jacques Rousseau we have replaced belief in the goodness of life by faith in the innate goodness of man. It does not produce the same results. If now we ask those geniuses who represent the highest achievements of humanity what we ought to think about life, how would they answer us? The great minds in art, literature, and history, are only great when they animate us, when they quicken the movement of our blood and stir our resolution. They realise for us the changing beauty of the world and the transient charm of our days. No artist is great without unlimited love of life. I will quote only one example, the most touching; that of Beethoven. Financial worries, family troubles, a most cruel malady--that deafness which shut him up within himself--moral loneliness, unrealised love, such was the record of his life. A weak soul would have given way to despair. From the depth of all his distress he undertook to celebrate joy, and he did so in his Ninth Symphony. It is told of him that once, visiting a lady who had just lost her son and not finding words both strong and gentle enough to express his sympathy, he sat down at the piano and played. He played a song of sorrow, but a song of hope also. Thus in our suffering the great masters of art come to our help. In the lives of great men we can learn courage and the taste for life. There is no reading more consoling, and I quite understand the influence exercised by Plutarch. I wish that biographies of the great men of France, well written, concise and vigorous, were recommended to be read, particularly by our young men. They would incite them to live well. They give us constant occasion to compare our empty days with those well-filled lives, and then we bewail our inaction, our idleness, the pettiness of our lot, which we do not know how to enlarge. In the life of La Play, that admirable defender of the French family, I lately read this anecdote. He had just recovered from a serious illness, which had brought him to the brink of the grave and the course of which he had traced with his usual clearness. After his recovery, when he was asked what thoughts the feeling of his approaching end had provoked in him, he replied in these memorable words, which may serve me as a conclusion: “From the brink of the grave I measured, not the vanity of life, but its importance.” H. B. April and September, 1905. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 1: Grazia Deledda, “Cenere.”] [Footnote 2: Theodore Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life.”] THE FEAR OF LIVING THE FEAR OF LIVING PART I CHAPTER I MARCEL’S HOMECOMING