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.

One of the most interesting pictures of a priest in American literature—which of late abounds in pictures of good priests—is that of PÈre Michaux, in Miss Woolson’s novel “Anne.” He believed that “all should live their lives, and that one should not be a slave to others; that the young should be young, and that some natural, simple pleasure should be put into each twenty-four hours. They might be poor, but children should be made happy; they might be poor, but youth should not be overwhelmed by the elders’ cares; they might be poor, but they could have family love around the poorest hearthstone; and there was always time for a little pleasure, if they would seek it simply and moderately.”

But PÈre Michaux was French: he had not been corrupted by that American Puritanism which has, somehow or other, got into the blood of even the Irish Celts on this side of the Atlantic. Pleasures are not spontaneous or simple, and joy is only possible after a long period of worry. Simple pleasures—the honest little wild flowers that peep up between the every-day crevices of each twenty-four hours—are neglected because we have not been taught to see them. Life may be serious without being sad; but, influenced by the Puritan gloom, sadness and seriousness have come to be confounded.

Man was not made to be sad. Unless something is wrong with him, he is not sad by temperament. And sadness ought to be repressed in early youth. The sad child in the stories is pathetic, but the authors generally have the good sense to kill him when he is young. The sad child in real life ought not to be tolerated. And if his parents have made him sad by putting their burden of the trials of life on him so early, they have done him irreparable wrong. Simple pleasures are the sunlight of life; and the little plants struggle to the sunshine and find light for themselves, darken their dwelling-place as you will. The frown in the household, the scolding voice, the impatience with childish folly—all these things are against the practice of the Church and her saints. The Catholic sentiment is one of joy—not the Sabbath any more, but the Sunday, the day of smiles, of rejoicing; the day on which, as old Christian legends have it, the sun is supposed to dance in honor of the first Easter.

How much the French and Germans, who have not lost the Catholic traditions, make of the little joys of life! If the grandfather’s name-day come, there is the pot of flowers, the little cake with its ornaments. And how many other feasts are made by the poorest of them out of what the Americans, rich by comparison, would look on but as a patch upon his poverty! There should be no dark days for the young. It is so easy to make them happy, if they have not been distorted by their surroundings out of the capability of enjoying little pleasures. The mother who teaches her daughters that poverty is not death to all joy, and that the enjoyment of simple things makes life easier and keeps people younger—such a mother is kinder to her girls, gives them a better gift than the diamond necklace which the spoiled girl craves, and then finds good only so far as it excites envy in others.

Children should not be made to bear a weight of sadness. That girl will not long for an electric doll if she has been taught to get the poetry of life out of a rag-baby. And the boy will not pine for an improved bicycle, and sulk without it, if he has learned to swim. The greatest pleasures are the easiest had—

Those who have suffered and borne suffering best are the most anxious that the young should enjoy the simple joys of life. Like this PÈre Michaux, they look for a little pleasure in each twenty-four hours. Is it a wild rose laid by a plate at the simple dinner, a new story, a romp, ungrudging permission for some small relaxation of the ordinary rules, or a brave attempt to keep sorrow away from the young? No matter; it is a little thing done for the Holy Child and for childhood, that ought to be holy and joyous.

There is a commercial axiom that declares that we get out of anything just as much as we put into it. This may be true in trade or not; it is certainly true of other things in life.

When the frost begins to make the blood tingle, and the glow of neighborly fires has more than usual comfort for the passer-by, as he sees them through windows and thinks of his own, the fragrance of home seems to rise more strongly than ever, and then there is a longing that the home-circle may revolve around a common centre. Sometimes this longing takes the form of resolutions to make life more cheerful; and sometimes even the father wonders if he, in some way, cannot make home more attractive. As a rule, however, he leaves it to the mother; and if the young people yawn and want to go out, it must be her fault. The truth is, he expects to reap without having sown.

Home can be made cheerful only by an effort. Why, even friendship and love will perish if they are not cultivated; and so if the little virtues of life—the little flowers—are not carefully tended they must die. Young people cannot be imprisoned or kept at home by force. We cannot get over the change that has come about—a change that has eliminated the old iron hand and rod from family life. We must take things as they are. And the only way to direct the young, to influence, to help them, is to interest them.

Books are resources and consolation; study is a resource and consolation. Both are strong factors in the best home-life; and the man who can look back with gratitude to the time when, around the home-lamp, he made one of the circle about his father’s table, has much to be thankful for; and we venture to assert that the coming man whose father will give him such a remembrance to be thankful for can never be an outcast, or grow cold, or bitter, or cynical.

But the taste for books does not come always by nature: it must be cultivated. And everything between covers is not a book; and a taste for books cannot be cultivated in a bookless house. It may be said that there is no Catholic literature, or that it is very expensive to buy books, or that it is difficult to get a small number of the best books, or to be sure that one has the best in a small compass.

None of these things is true—none of them. There is a vast Catholic literature, and a vast literature, not professedly Catholic, which is good and pure, which will stimulate a desire for study, and help to cultivate every quality of the mind and heart. Does anybody realize how many good books twelve or fifteen dollars will buy nowadays? And, after all, there are not fifty really great books in all languages. If one have fifty books, one has the best literature in all languages. A book-shelf thus furnished is a treasure which neither adversity nor fatigue nor sickness itself can take away. Each child may even have his own book-shelf, with his favorites on it, and such volumes as treat of his favorite hobby—for every child old enough should have a hobby, even if it be only the collecting of pebbles, and every chance should be given to enjoy his hobby and to develop it into a serious study. A little fellow who used to range his pebbles on the table in the lamplight, and get such hints as he could about them out of an old text-book, is a great geologist. And a little girl who used to hang over her very own copy of Adelaide Procter’s poems is spoken of as one of the cleverest newspaper men (though she is a woman) in the city of New York. The taste of the early days, encouraged in a humble way, became the talent which was to make their future.

There should be no bookless house in all this land—least of all among Catholics, whose ancestors in Christ preserved all that is great in literature. Let the trashy novels, paper-backed, soiled, borrowed or picked up, be cast out. Let the choosing of books not be left to mere chance. A little brains put into it will be returned with more than its first value. What goes into the precious minds of the young ought not to be carelessly chosen. And it is true that, in the beginning, it is the easiest possible thing to interest young people in good and great books. But if one lets them wallow in whatever printed stuff happens to come in their way, one finds it hard to conduct them back again. Let the books be carefully chosen—a few at a time—be laid within the circle of the evening lamp—and God bless you all!