those who cannot read sensational novels, or, indeed, any
novels at all, just because they see so many sensational novels being
enacted round them in painful facts of sinful flesh and blood. There are
those, too, who have looked in the mirror too often to wish to see their
own disfigured visage in it any more; who are too tired of themselves and
ashamed of themselves to want to hear of people like themselves; who want
to hear of people utterly unlike themselves, more noble, and able, and
just, and sweet, and pure; who long to hear of heroism and to converse
with heroes; and who, if by chance they meet with an heroic act, bathe
their spirits in that, as in May-dew, and feel themselves thereby, if but
for an hour, more fair.

If any such shall chance to see these words, let me ask them to consider
with me that one word Hero, and what it means.

Hero; Heroic; Heroism. These words point to a phase of human nature, the
capacity for which we all have in ourselves, which is as startling and as
interesting in its manifestations as any, and which is always beautiful,
always ennobling, and therefore always attractive to those whose hearts
are not yet seared by the world or brutalized by self-indulgence.

But let us first be sure what the words mean. There is no use talking
about a word till we have got at its meaning. We may use it as a cant
phrase, as a party cry on platforms; we may even hate and persecute our
fellow-men for the sake of it: but till we have clearly settled in our
own minds what a word means, it will do for fighting with, but not for
working with. Socrates of old used to tell the young Athenians that the
ground of all sound knowledge was--to understand the true meaning of the
words which were in their mouths all day long; and Socrates was a wiser
man than we shall ever see. So, instead of beginning an oration in
praise of heroism, I shall ask my readers to think with me what heroism
is.

Now, we shall always get most surely at the meaning of a word by getting
at its etymology--that is, at what it meant at first. And if heroism
means behaving like a hero, we must find out, it seems to me, not merely
what a hero may happen to mean just now, but what it meant in the
earliest human speech in which we find it.

A hero or a heroine, then, among the old Homeric Greeks, meant a man or
woman who was like the gods; and who, from that likeness, stood superior
to his or her fellow-creatures. Gods, heroes, and me