Chapter 14 Parents are Concerned to Give the Heroic Impulse
Heroic Poetry Inspires to Noble Living––”To set forth, as only art can, the beauty and the joy of living, the beauty and the blessedness of death, the glory of battle and adventure, the nobility of devotion––to a cause, an ideal, a passion even––the dignity of resistance, the sacred quality of patriotism, that is my ambition here,” says the editor of Lyra Heroica in his preface. We all feel that some such expression of the ’simpler sentiments, more elemental emotions’ should be freely used in the education of children––that, in fact, heroic poetry contains such inspiration to noble living as is hardly to be found elsewhere; and also we are aware that it is only in the youth of peoples that these elemental emotions find free expression in song. We look at our own ballad literature and find plenty of the right material, but it is too occasional and too little connected; and so, though we would prefer that the children should imbibe patriotism and heroism at the one fountain-head, we think it cannot be done. We have no truly English material, so we say, for education in this kind, and we fall back on the Homeric myths in one or other of the graceful and spirited renderings which have been made specially for children.