Page:Education and Life; (IA educationlife00bakerich).pdf/244

 *ern days we need the spirit of the hero who places honor above life, the spirit that places character above material advantage. Without it we are like Falstaff, going about asking "What is honor?" and complaining because it "hath no skill in surgery." Balzac, describing one of his human types, paints a striking picture. A miser is on his death bed. As the supreme moment approaches, and a golden crucifix is held before his face, he fixes his glazing eyes upon it with a look of miserly greed, and, with a final effort of his palsied hand, attempts to grasp it. He takes with him to the other world in his soul the gold, not the Christ crucified.

There are people who demand a series of ever varied, thrilling, fully satisfying emotional experiences. For them "the higher life consists in a sort of enthusiastic fickleness. The genius must wander like a humming-bird in the garden of divine emotions." When they do not save themselves by devotion to scholarly work or by refuge in the church, they frequently end in pessimism, madness, or suicide. They exalt the Ego, do not lose self in the pursuit of proper objects of utility. Nordau has done the world one service in branding them as degenerates, living in abnormal excitement, instead of employing the calm, strong, balanced use of their powers. Their fate is fittingly suggested by a choice sentence from a well-known writer, describing Byron's "Don Juan": "It is a mountain stream, plunging down dreadful chasms, singing through grand forests, and losing itself in a lifeless gray alkali desert." Goethe's Faust sets forth—be it noted, under the guidance of the devil—to find