The Pain of Youth
It is the habit of the poets, and of many who are poets neither in vision
nor in faculty, to speak of youth as if it were a period of unshadowed
gaiety and pleasure, with no consciousness of responsibility and no sense
of care. The freshness of feeling, the delight in experience, the joy of
discovery, the unspent vitality which welcomes every morning as a
challenge to one's strength, invest youth with a charm which art is always
striving to preserve, and which men who have parted from it remember with
a sense of pathos; for the morning of life comes but once, and when it
fades something goes which never returns. There are ample compensations,
there are higher joys and deeper insights and relationships; but a magical
charm which touches all things and turns them to gold, vanishes with the
morning. In reaching its perfection of beauty the flower must part with
the dewy promise of its earliest growth.
All this is true of youth, which in many ways symbolises the immortal part
of man's nature, and must be, therefore, always beautiful and sacred to
him. But it is untrue that the sky of youth has no clouds and the spirit
of youth no cares; on the contrary, no period of life is in many ways more
painful. The finer the organisation and the greater the ability, the more
difficult and trying the experiences through which the youth passes.
George Eliot has pointed out a striking peculiarity of childish grief in
the statement that the child has no background of other griefs against
which the magnitude of its present sorrow may be measured. While that
sorrow lasts it is complete, absolute, and hopeless, because the child has
no memory of other trials endured, of other sorrows survived. In this fact
about the earliest griefs lies the source also of the pains of youth. The
young man is an undeveloped power; he is largely ignorant of his own
capacity, often without inward guidance towards his vocation; he is
unadjusted to the society in which he must find a place for himself. He is
full of energy and aspiration, but he does not know how to expend the one
or realise the other. His soul has wings, but he cannot fly, because, like
the eagle, he must have space on the ground before he rises in the air. If
his imagination is active he has moments of rapture, days of exaltation,
when the world seems to lie before him clear from horizon to horizon. His
hours of study overflow with the passion for knowledge, and his hours of
play are haunted by beautiful or noble dreams. The world is full of wonder
and mystery, and the young explorer is impatient to be on his journey. No
plan is then too great to be accomplished, no moral height too difficult
to be attained. After all that has been said, the rapture of youth, when
youth means opportunity, remains unexpressed. No poet will ever entirely
compass it, as no poet will ever quite ensnare in speech the measureless
joy of those festival mornings in June when Nature seems on the point of
speaking in human language.
But this rapture is inward; it has its source in the earliest perception
of the richness of life and man's capacity to appropriate it. It is the
rapture of discovery, not of possession; the rapture of promise, not of
achievement. It is without the verification of experience or the
corroborative evidence of performance. Youth is possibility; that is its
charm, its joy, and its power; but it is also its limitation. There lies
before it the real crisis through which every man of parts and power
passes: the development of the inward force and the adjustment of the
personality to the order of life. The shadow of that crisis is never quite
absent from those radiant skies which the poets love to recall; the
uncertainty of that supreme issue in experience is never quite out of
mind. Siegfried must meet the dragon before he can climb those heights on
which, encircled by fire, his ideal is to take the form and substance of
reality; and the prelusive notes of that fateful struggle are heard long
before the sword is forged or the hour of destiny has come.
There is no test of character more severe or difficult to bear than the
suspense of waiting. The man who can act eases his soul under the greatest
calamities; but he who is compelled to wait, unless he be of hardy fibre,
eats his heart out in a futile despair. Troops will endure losses when
they are caught up in the stir of a charge which would demoralise and
scatter them if they were compelled to halt under the relentless guns of
masked batteries. Now, the characteristic trial of youth is this
experience of waiting at a moment when the whole nature craves expression
and the satisfaction of action. The greater the volume of energy in the
man who has yet to find his vocation and place, the more trying the
ordeal. There are moments in the life of the young imagination when the
very splendour of its dreams fills the soul with despair, because there
seems no hope of giving them outward reality; and the clearer the
consciousness of the possession of power, the more poignant the feeling
that it may find no channel through which to add itself to the impulsion
which drives forward the work of society.
The reality of this crisis in spiritual experience--the adjustment between
the personality and the physical, social, and industrial order in which it
must find its place and task--is the measure of its possible painfulness.
It is due, perhaps, to the charm which invests youth, as one looks back
upon it from maturity or age, that its pain is forgotten and that sympathy
withheld which youth craves often without knowing why it craves. A helpful
comprehension of the phase of experience through which he is passing is
often the supreme need of the ardent young spirit. His pain has its roots
in his ignorance of his own powers and of the world. He strives again and
again to put himself in touch with organised work; he takes up one task
after another in a fruitless endeavour to succeed. He does not know what
he is fitted to do, and he turns helplessly from one form of work for
which he has no faculty to another for which he has less. His friends
begin to think of him as a ne'er-do-weel; and, more pathetic still, the
shadow of failure begins to darken his own spirit. And yet it may be that
in this halting, stumbling, ineffective human soul, vainly striving to put
its hand to its task, there is some rare gift, some splendid talent,
waiting for the ripe hour and the real opportunity! In such a crisis
sympathetic comprehension is invaluable, but it is rarely given, and the
youth works out his problem in isolation. If he is courageous and
persistent he finds his place at last; and work brings peace, strength,
self-comprehension.