YOUTH AND LIFE
BY
RANDOLPH S. BOURNE
[Illustration: Publisher mark]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1913
COPYRIGHT, 1911, 1912, AND 1913, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY RANDOLPH S. BOURNE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
_Published March 1913_
CONTENTS
I. YOUTH 1
II. THE TWO GENERATIONS 29
III. THE VIRTUES AND THE SEASONS OF LIFE 53
IV. THE LIFE OF IRONY 99
V. THE EXCITEMENT OF FRIENDSHIP 133
VI. THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE 153
VII. SOME THOUGHTS ON RELIGION 189
VIII. THE MYSTIC TURNED RADICAL 205
IX. SEEING, WE SEE NOT 215
X. THE EXPERIMENTAL LIFE 225
XI. THE DODGING OF PRESSURES 247
XII. FOR RADICALS 289
XIII. THE COLLEGE: AN INNER VIEW 311
XIV. A PHILOSOPHY OF HANDICAP 337
I
YOUTH
How shall I describe Youth, the time of contradictions and anomalies?
The fiercest radicalisms, the most dogged conservatisms, irrepressible
gayety, bitter melancholy,--all these moods are equally part of that
showery springtime of life. One thing, at least, it clearly is: a
great, rich rush and flood of energy. It is as if the store of life
had been accumulating through the slow, placid years of childhood,
and suddenly the dam had broken and the waters rushed out, furious
and uncontrolled, before settling down into the quieter channels of
middle life. The youth is suddenly seized with a poignant consciousness
of being alive, which is quite wanting to the naïve unquestioning
existence of the child. He finds himself overpoweringly urged toward
self-expression. Just as the baby, born into a “great, blooming,
buzzing confusion,” and attracted by every movement, every color, every
sound, kicks madly in response in all directions, and only gradually
gets his movements coördinated into the orderly and precise movements
of his elders,--so the youth suddenly born into a confusion of ideas
and appeals and traditions responds in the most chaotic way to this new
spiritual world, and only gradually learns to find his way about in it,
and get his thoughts and feelings into some kind of order.
Fortunate the young man who does not make his entrance into too wide
a world. And upon the width and depth of that new world will depend
very much whether his temperament is to be radical or conservative,
adventurous or conventional. For it is one of the surprising things
about youth that it can so easily be the most conservative of all
ages. Why do we suppose that youth is always radical? At no age are
social proprieties more strictly observed, and Church, State, law, and
order, more rigorously defended. But I like to think that youth is
conservative only when its spiritual force has been spent too early,
or when the new world it enters into is found, for some reason, to be
rather narrow and shallow. It is so often the urgent world of pleasure
that first catches the eye of youth; its flood of life is drawn off
in that direction; the boy may fritter away his precious birthright
in pure lightness of heart and animal spirits. And it is only too
true that this type of youth is transitory. Pleasure contrives to
burn itself out very quickly, and youth finds itself left prematurely
with the ashes of middle age. But if, in some way, the flood of life
is checked in the direction of pleasure, then it bursts forth in
another,--in the direction of ideals; then we say that the boy is
radical. Youth is always turbulent, but the momentous difference is
whether it shall be turbulent in passion or in enthusiasm. Nothing is
so pathetic as the young man who spends his spiritual force too early,
so that when the world of ideals is presented to him, his force being
spent, he can only grasp at second-hand ideals and mouldy formulas.
This is the great divergence which sets youth not only against old
age, but against youth itself: the undying spirit of youth that seems
to be fed by an unquenchable fire, that does not burn itself out but
seems to grow steadier and steadier as life goes on, against the
fragile, quickly tarnished type that passes relentlessly into middle
life. At twenty-five I find myself full of the wildest radicalisms,
and look with dismay at my childhood friends who are already settled
down, have achieved babies and responsibilities, and have somehow got
ten years beyond me in a day. And this divergence shows itself in a
thousand different ways. It may be a temptation to a world of pleasure,
it may be a sheltering from the stimulus of ideas, or even a sluggish
temperament, that separates traditional and adventurous youth, but
fundamentally it is a question of how youth takes the world. And here I
find that I can no longer drag the traditional youth along with me in
this paper. There are many of him, I know, but I do not like him, and
I know nothing about him. Let us rather look at the way radical youth
grows into and meets the world.
From the state of “the little child, to whom the sky is a roof of
blue, the world a screen of opaque and disconnected facts, the
home a thing eternal, and ‘being good’ just simple obedience to
unquestioned authority,” one steps suddenly into that “vast world of
adult perception, pierced deep by flaring search-lights of partial
understanding.”
The child has an utter sense of security; childhood is unconscious even
that it is alive. It has neither fears nor anxieties, because it is
incorrigibly poetical. It idealizes everything that it touches. It is
unfair, perhaps, to blame parents and teachers, as we sometimes do in
youth, for consciously biasing our child-minds in a falsely idealistic
direction; for the child will infallibly idealize even his poorest of
experiences. His broken glimpses and anticipations of his own future
show him everything that is orderly, happy, and beautifully fit. He
sees his grown-up life as old age, itself a sort of reversed childhood,
sees its youth. The passing of childhood into youth is, therefore,
like suddenly being turned from the cosy comfort of a warm fireside to
shift for one’s self in the world. Life becomes in a moment a process
of seeking and searching. It appears as a series of blind alleys, all
equally and magnificently alluring, all equally real and possible.
Youth’s thirst for experience is simply that it wants to be everything,
do everything and have everything that is presented to its imagination.
Youth has suddenly become conscious of life. It has eaten of the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil.
As the world breaks in on a boy with its crashing thunder, he has a
feeling of expansion, of sudden wisdom and sudden care. The atoms of
things seem to be disintegrating around him. Then come the tearings and
the grindings and the wrenchings, and in that conflict the radical or
the poet is made. If the youth takes the struggle easily, or if his
guardian angels have arranged things so that there is no struggle,
then he becomes of that conservative stripe that we have renounced
above. But if he takes it hard,--if his struggles are not only with
outward material conditions, but also with inner spiritual ones,--then
he is likely to achieve that gift of the gods, perpetual youth. The
great paradox is that it is the sleek and easy who are prematurely and
permanently old. Struggle brings youth rather than old age.
In this struggle, thus beset with problems and crises, all calling
for immediate solution, youth battles its way into a sort of
rationalization. Out of its inchoateness emerges a sort of order; the
disturbing currents of impulse are gradually resolved into a character.
But it is essential that that resolution be a natural and not a
forced one. I always have a suspicion of boys who talk of “planning
their lives.” I feel that they have won a precocious maturity in some
illegitimate way. For to most of us youth is so imperious that those
who can escape the hurly-burly and make a sudden leap into the prudent,
quiet waters of life seem to have missed youth altogether. And I do
not mean here the hurly-burly of passion so much as of ideals. It
seems so much better, as well as more natural, to expose one’s self to
the full fury of the spiritual elements, keeping only one purpose in
view,--to be strong and sincere,--than to pick one’s way cautiously
along.
The old saying is the truest philosophy of youth: “Seek ye first
the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you.”
How impossible for a youth who is really young to plan his life
consciously! This process that one sometimes sees of cautiously
becoming acquainted with various ideas and systems, and then choosing
deliberately those that will be best adapted to a concerted plan,
is almost uncanny. This confidence in one’s immunity to ideas that
would tend to disarrange the harmony of the scheme is mystifying and
irritating. Youth talks of “getting” or “accepting” ideas! But youth
does not get ideas,--ideas get him! He may try to keep himself in a
state of spiritual health, but that is the only immunity he can rely
upon. He cannot really tell what idea or appeal is going to seize upon
him next and make off with him.
We speak as if falling in love were a unique phase in the life of
youth. It is rather the pattern and symbol of a youth’s whole life.
This sudden, irresistible seizure of enthusiasm that he cannot explain,
that he does not want to explain, what is it but the aspect of all his
experience? The youth sees a pretty face, reads a noble book, hears a
stirring appeal for a cause, meets a charming friend, gets fired with
the concept of science, or of social progress, becomes attracted to
a profession,--the emotion that fixes his enthusiasm and lets out a
flood of emotion in that direction, and lifts him into another world,
is the same in every case. Youth glories in the sudden servitude,
is content to let the new master lead wherever he will; and is as
surprised as any one at the momentous and startling results. Youth is
vulnerable at every point. Prudence is really a hateful thing in youth.
A prudent youth is prematurely old. It is infinitely better, I repeat,
for a boy to start ahead in life in a spirit of moral adventure,
trusting for sustenance to what he may find by the wayside, than to
lay in laboriously, before starting, a stock of principles for life,
and burden himself so heavily for the journey that he dare not, and
indeed cannot, leave his pack unguarded by the roadside to survey the
fair prospects on either hand. Youth at its best is this constant
susceptibility to the new, this constant eagerness to try experiments.
It is here that youth’s quarrel with the elder generation comes in.
There is no scorn so fierce as that of youth for the inertia of
older men. The lack of adjustment to the ideas of youth’s elders and
betters, one of the permanent tragedies of life, is certainly the most
sensational aspect of youth. That the inertia of the older people is
wisdom, and not impotence, is a theory that you will never induce
youth to believe for an instant. The stupidity and cruelties of their
management of the world fill youth with an intolerant rage. In every
contact with its elders, youth finds them saying, in the words of
Kipling:--
“We shall not acknowledge that old stars fade and alien planets arise,
That the sere bush buds or the desert blooms or the ancient well-head
dries,
Or any new compass wherewith new men adventure ’neath new skies.”
Youth sees with almost a passionate despair its plans and dreams and
enthusiasms, that it knows so well to be right and true and noble,
brushed calmly aside, not because of any sincere searching into their
practicability, but because of the timidity and laziness of the old,
who sit in the saddle and ride mankind. And nothing torments youth so
much as to have this inertia justified on the ground of experience.
For youth thinks that it sees through this sophism of “experience.”
It sees in it an all-inclusive attempt to give the world a character,
and excuse the older generation for the mistakes and failures which it
has made. What is this experience, youth asks, but a slow accretion of
inhibitions, a learning, at its best, not to do again something which
ought not to have been done in the first place?
Old men cherish a fond delusion that there is something mystically
valuable in mere quantity of experience. Now the fact is, of course,
that it is the young people who have all the really valuable
experience. It is they who have constantly to face new situations, to
react constantly to new aspects of life, who are getting the whole
beauty and terror and cruelty of the world in its fresh and undiluted
purity. It is only the interpretation of this first collision with life
that is worth anything. For the weakness of experience is that it so
soon gets stereotyped; without new situations and crises it becomes so
conventional as to be practically unconscious. Very few people get any
really new experience after they are twenty-five, unless there is a
real change of environment. Most older men live only in the experience
of their youthful years.
If we get few ideas after we are twenty-five, we get few ideals after
we are twenty. A man’s spiritual fabric is woven by that time, and
his “experience,” if he keeps true to himself, consists simply in
broadening and enriching it, but not in adding to it in arithmetical
proportion as the years roll on, in the way that the wise teachers of
youth would have us believe.
But few men remain quite true to themselves. As their youthful ideals
come into contact with the harshnesses of life, the brightest succumb
and go to the wall. And the hardy ones that survive contain all that
is vital in the future experience of the man,--so that the ideas of
older men seem often the curious parodies or even burlesques of what
must have been the cleaner and more potent ideas of their youth.
Older people seem often to be resting on their oars, drifting on the
spiritual current that youth has set going in life, or “coasting” on
the momentum that the strong push of youth has given them.
There is no great gulf between youth and middle age, as there is
between childhood and youth. Adults are little more than grown-up
children. This is what makes their arrogance so insulting,--the
assumption that they have acquired any impartiality or objectivity of
outlook, and have any better standards for judging life. Their ideas
are wrong, and grow progressively more wrong as they become older.
Youth, therefore, has no right to be humble. The ideals it forms will
be the highest it will ever have, the insight the clearest, the ideas
the most stimulating. The best that it can hope to do is to conserve
those resources, and keep its flame of imagination and daring bright.
Therefore, it is perhaps unfair to say that the older generation rules
the world. Youth rules the world, but only when it is no longer young.
It is a tarnished, travestied youth that is in the saddle in the person
of middle age. Old age lives in the delusion that it has improved and
rationalized its youthful ideas by experience and stored-up wisdom,
when all it has done is to damage them more or less--usually more. And
the tragedy of life is that the world is run by these damaged ideals.
That is why our ideas are always a generation behind our actual social
conditions. Press, pulpit, and bar teem with the radicalisms of
thirty years ago. The dead hand of opinions formed in their college
days clutches our leaders and directs their activities in this new and
strangely altered physical and spiritual environment. Hence grievous
friction, maladjustment, social war. And the faster society moves, the
more terrific is the divergence between what is actually going on and
what public opinion thinks is actually going on. It is only the young
who are actually contemporaneous; they interpret what they see freshly
and without prejudice; their vision is always the truest, and their
interpretation always the justest.
Youth does not simply repeat the errors and delusions of the past, as
the elder generation with a tolerant cynicism likes to think; it is
ever laying the foundations for the future. What it thinks so wildly
now will be orthodox gospel thirty years hence. The ideas of the young
are the living, the potential ideas; those of the old, the dying, or
the already dead. This is why it behooves youth to be not less radical,
but even more radical, than it would naturally be. It must be not
simply contemporaneous, but a generation ahead of the times, so that
when it comes into control of the world, it will be precisely right
and coincident with the conditions of the world as it finds them. If
the youth of to-day could really achieve this miracle, they would have
found the secret of “perpetual youth.”
* * * * *
In this conflict between youth and its elders, youth is the incarnation
of reason pitted against the rigidity of tradition. Youth puts the
remorseless questions to everything that is old and established,--Why?
What is this thing good for? And when it gets the mumbled, evasive
answers of the defenders, it applies its own fresh, clean spirit of
reason to institutions, customs, and ideas, and, finding them stupid,
inane, or poisonous, turns instinctively to overthrow them and build in
their place the things with which its visions teem.
“This constant return to purely logical activity with each generation
keeps the world supplied with visionaries and reformers, that is
to say, with saviors and leaders. New movements are born in young
minds, and lack of experience enables youth eternally to recall
civilization to sound bases. The passing generation smiles and
cracks its weather-worn jokes about youthful effusions: but this
new, ever-hopeful, ever-daring, ever-doing, youthful enthusiasm,
ever returning to the logical bases of religion, ethics, politics,
business, art, and social life,--this is the salvation of the
world.”[1]
This was the youthful radicalism of Jesus, and his words sound across
the ages “calling civilization ever back to sound bases.” With him,
youth eternally reproaches the ruling generation,--“O ye of little
faith!” There is so much to be done in the world; so much could be done
if you would only dare! You seem to be doing so little to cure the
waste and the muddle and the lethargy all around you. Don’t you really
care, or are you only faint-hearted? If you do not care, it must be
because you do not know; let us point out to you the shockingness of
exploitation, and the crass waste of human personality all around you
in this modern world. And if you are faint-hearted, we will supply the
needed daring and courage, and lead you straight to the attack.
These are the questions and challenges that the youth puts to his
elders, and it is their shifty evasions and quibblings that confound
and dishearten him. He becomes intolerant, and can see all classes in
no other light than that of accomplices in a great crime. If they only
knew! Swept along himself in an irrationality of energy, he does not
see the small part that reason plays in the intricate social life, and
only gradually does he come to view life as a “various and splendid
disorder of forces,” and exonerate weak human nature from some of its
heavy responsibility. But this insight brings him to appreciate and
almost to reverence the forces of science and conscious social progress
that are grappling with that disorder, and seeking to tame it.
Youth is the leaven that keeps all these questioning, testing attitudes
fermenting in the world. If it were not for this troublesome activity
of youth, with its hatred of sophisms and glosses, its insistence on
things as they are, society would die from sheer decay. It is the
policy of the older generation as it gets adjusted to the world to
hide away the unpleasant things where it can, or preserve a conspiracy
of silence and an elaborate pretense that they do not exist. But
meanwhile the sores go on festering just the same. Youth is the drastic
antiseptic. It will not let its elders cry peace, where there is no
peace. Its fierce sarcasms keep issues alive in the world until they
are settled right. It drags skeletons from closets and insists that
they be explained. No wonder the older generation fears and distrusts
the younger. Youth is the avenging Nemesis on its trail. “It is young
men who provide the logic, decision, and enthusiasm necessary to
relieve society of the crushing burden that each generation seeks to
roll upon the shoulders of the next.”
Our elders are always optimistic in their views of the present,
pessimistic in their views of the future; youth is pessimistic toward
the present and gloriously hopeful for the future. And it is this
hope which is the lever of progress,--one might say, the only lever
of progress. The lack of confidence which the ruling generation feels
in the future leads to that distrust of the machinery of social
reform and social organization, or the use of means for ends, which
is so characteristic of it to-day. Youth is disgusted with such
sentimentality. It can never understand that curious paralysis which
seizes upon its elders in the face of urgent social innovations; that
refusal to make use of a perfectly definite programme or administrative
scheme which has worked elsewhere. Youth concludes that its elders
discountenance the machinery, the means, because they do not really
believe in the end, and adds another count to the indictment.
Youth’s attitude is really the scientific attitude. Do not be afraid
to make experiments, it says. You cannot tell how anything will work
until you have tried it. Suppose science confined its interests to
those things that have been tried and tested in the world, how far
should we get? It is possible indeed that your experiments may produce
by accident a social explosion, but we do not give up chemistry because
occasionally a wrong mixture of chemicals blows up a scientist in a
laboratory, or medical research because an investigator contracts the
disease he is fighting. The whole philosophy of youth is summed up in
the word, Dare! Take chances and you will attain! The world has nothing
to lose but its chains--and its own soul to gain!
* * * * *
I have dwelt too long on the conflicts of youth. For it has also its
still places, where it becomes introspective and thinks about its
destiny and the meaning of its life. In our artificial civilization
many young people at twenty-five are still on the threshold of
activity. As one looks back, then, over eight or nine years, one sees
a panorama of seemingly formidable length. So many crises, so many
startling surprises, so many vivid joys and harrowing humiliations and
disappointments, that one feels startlingly old; one wonders if one
will ever feel so old again. And in a sense, youth at twenty-five is
older than it will ever be again. For if time is simply a succession
of incidents in our memory, we seem to have an eternity behind us.
Middle-aged people feel no such appalling stretch of time behind them.
The years fade out one by one; often the pressure of life leaves
nothing of reality or value but the present moment. Some of youth’s
elders seem to enjoy almost a new babyhood, while youth has constantly
with it in all its vividness and multifariousness that specious wealth
of abrupt changes, climaxes and disillusions that have crowded the
short space of its life.
We often envy the sunny noon of the thirties and forties. These elders
of ours change so little that they seem to enjoy an endless summer
of immortality. They are so placid, so robust, so solidly placed in
life, seemingly so much further from dissolution than we. Youth seems
curiously fragile. Perhaps it is because all beauty has something
of the precarious and fleeting about it. A beautiful girl seems too
delicate and fine to weather a long life; she must be burning away
too fast. This wistfulness and haunting pathos of life is very real
to youth. It feels the rush of time past it. Only youth can sing of
the passing glory of life, and then only in its full tide. The older
people’s lament for the vanished days of youth may be orthodox, but it
rings hollow. For our greatest fears are those of presentiment, and
youth is haunted not only by the feeling of past change, but by the
presentiment of future change.
Middle age has passed the waters; it has become static and placid.
Its wistfulness for youth is unreal, and a forced sentimentality.
In the same breath that it cries for its youth it mocks at youth’s
preoccupation with the thought of death. The lugubrious harmonies of
young poets are a favorite joke. But the feeling of the precariousness
of life gives the young man an intimate sense of its preciousness;
nothing shocks him quite so much as that it should be ruthlessly and
instantly snatched away. Middle age has acclimated itself to the
earth, has settled down familiarly in it, and is easily be fooled into
thinking that it will live here forever, just as, when we are settled
comfortably in a house, we cannot conceive ourselves as ever being
dislodged. But youth takes a long time to get acclimated. It has seen
so many mysteries and dangers about it, that the presence of the
Greatest Mystery and the Greatest Danger must be the most portentous of
things to it.
It is this sense of the preciousness of his life, perhaps, that makes
a youth so impatient of discipline. Youth can never think of itself
as anything but master of things. Its visions are a curious blend of
devotion and egotism. Its enthusiasm for a noble cause is apt to be all
mixed up with a picture of itself leading the cohorts to victory. The
youth never sees himself as a soldier in the ranks, but as the leader,
bringing in some long-awaited change by a brilliant _coup d’état_,
or writing and speaking words of fire that win a million hearts at a
stroke. And he fights shy of discipline in smaller matters. He does not
submit willingly to a course of work that is not immediately appealing,
even for the sake of the glorious final achievement. Fortunate it is
for the young man, perhaps, that there are so many organs of coercion
all ready in the world for him,--economic need, tradition, and subtle
influence of family ambition,--to seize him and nail him fast to some
profession or trade or activity, before he is aware, or has time to
protest or draw back!
It is another paradox of youth that, with all its fine enthusiasm, it
should accomplish so little. But this seeming aimlessness of purpose
is the natural result of that deadly fear of having one’s wings clipped
by discipline. Infinitely finer, it seems to youth, is it to soar
freely in the air, than to run on a track along the ground! And perhaps
youth is right. In his intellectual life, the young man’s scorn for the
pedantic and conventional amounts almost to an obsession. It is only
the men of imagination and inspiration that he will follow at all. But
most of these professors, these lawyers, these preachers,--what has
been their training and education, he says, but a gradual losing of
the grip of life, a slow withdrawing into an ideal world of phrases
and concepts and artificial attitudes? Their thought seems like the
endless spinning out of a spider’s web, or like the camel living upon
the fat of his own hump. The youth fears this sophistication of thought
as he would fear losing his soul. And this seeming perversity toward
discipline is often simply his refusal to let a system submerge his own
real and direct reactions to his observation and experience.
And yet as he studies more and more, and acquires a richer material
for thought, a familiarity with words, and a skill in handling them,
he can see the insidious temptation that comes to thinking men to
move all their spiritual baggage over into that fascinating unreal
world. And he admires almost with reverence the men who have been able
to break through the terrible crust, and have got their thinking into
close touch with life again; or, best of all, those who have kept
their thinking constantly checked up with life, and are occupied with
interpreting what they see about them. Youth will never be able to see
that this is not the only true and right business of thought.
It is the glory of the present age that in it one can be young.
Our times give no check to the radical tendencies of youth. On the
contrary, they give the directest stimulation. A muddle of a world and
a wide outlook combine to inspire us to the bravest of radicalisms.
Great issues have been born in the last century, and are now loose
in the world. There is a radical philosophy that illuminates our
environment, gives us terms in which to express what we see, and
coördinates our otherwise aimless reactions.
In this country, it is true, where a certain modicum of free
institutions, and a certain specious enfranchisement of the human
spirit have been achieved, youth may be blinded and drugged into an
acquiescence in conditions, and its enthusiasm may easily run into a
glorification of the present. In the face of the more urgent ideals
that are with us, it may be inspired by vague ideas of “liberty,” or
“the rights of man,” and fancy it is truly radical when it is but
living on the radicalisms of the past. Our political thought moves so
slowly here that even our radicalism is traditional. We breathe in with
the air about us the belief that we have attained perfection, and we do
not examine things with our own eyes.
But more and more of the clear-sighted youth are coming to see the
appalling array of things that still need to be done. The radical young
man of to-day has no excuse for veering round to the conservative
standpoint. Cynicism cannot touch him. For it is the beauty of the
modern radical philosophy that the worse the world treats a man, the
more it convinces him of the truth of his radical interpretation of
it. Disillusion comes, not through hard blows, but by the insidious
sappings of worldly success. And there never was a time when there
were so many radical young people who cared little about that worldly
success.
The secret of life is then that this fine youthful spirit should
never be lost. Out of the turbulence of youth should come this fine
precipitate--a sane, strong, aggressive spirit of daring and doing. It
must be a flexible, growing spirit, with a hospitality to new ideas,
and a keen insight into experience. To keep one’s reactions warm and
true, is to have found the secret of perpetual youth, and perpetual
youth is salvation.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Earl Barnes.
II
THE TWO GENERATIONS
It is always interesting to see ourselves through the eyes of others,
even though that view may be most unflattering. The recent “Letter to
the Rising Generation,”[2] if I may judge from the well-thumbed and
underscored copy of the “Atlantic” which I picked up in the College
Library, has been read with keen interest by many of my fellows, and
doubtless, too, with a more emphatic approval, by our elders. The
indictment of an entire generation must at its best be a difficult
task, but the author of the article has performed it with considerable
circumspection, skirting warily the vague and the abstract, and passing
from the judge’s bench to the pulpit with a facility that indicates
that justice is to be tempered with mercy. The rather appalling picture
which she draws of past generations holding their breath to see what
my contemporaries will make of themselves suggests, too, that we are
still on probation, and so, before final judgment is passed, it may be
pertinent to attempt, if not, from the hopeless nature of the case, a
defense, at least an extenuation of ourselves.
The writer’s charge is pretty definite. It is to the effect that the
rising generation, in its reaction upon life and the splendid world
which has been handed down to it, shows a distinct softening of human
fibre, spiritual, intellectual, and physical, in comparison with the
generations which have preceded it. The most obvious retort to this
is, of course, that the world in which we find ourselves is in no way
of our own making, so that if our reactions to it are unsatisfactory,
or our rebellious attitude toward it distressing, it is at least a
plausible assumption that the world itself, despite the responsible
care which the passing generation bestowed upon it, may be partly to
blame.
But this, after all, is only begging the question. The author herself
admits that we are the victims of educational experiments, and, in any
event, each generation is equally guiltless of its world. We recognize
with her that the complexity of the world we face only makes more
necessary our bracing up for the fray. Her charge that we are not doing
this overlooks, however, certain aspects of the situation which go far
to explain our seemingly deplorable qualities.
The most obvious fact which presents itself in this connection is
that the rising generation has practically brought itself up. School
discipline, since the abolition of corporal punishment, has become
almost nominal; church discipline practically nil; and even home
discipline, although retaining the forms, is but an empty shell.
The modern child from the age of ten is almost his own master. The
helplessness of the modern parent face to face with these conditions is
amusing. What generation but the one to which our critic belongs could
have conceived of “mothers’ clubs” conducted by the public schools,
in order to teach mothers how to bring up their children! The modern
parent has become a sort of _parlement_ registering the decrees of a
Grand Monarque, and occasionally protesting, though usually without
effect, against a particularly drastic edict.
I do not use this assertion as a text for an indictment of the
preceding generation; I am concerned, like our critic, only with
results. These are a peculiarly headstrong and individualistic
character among the young people, and a complete bewilderment on the
part of the parents. The latter frankly do not understand their
children, and their lack of understanding and of control over them
means a lack of the moral guidance which, it has always been assumed,
young people need until they are safely launched in the world. The two
generations misunderstand each other as they never did before. This
fact is a basal one to any comprehension of the situation.
Now let us see how the rising generation brings itself up. It is
perfectly true that the present-day secondary education, that curious
fragmentary relic of a vitally humanistic age, does not appeal to them.
They will tell you frankly that they do not see any use in it. Having
brought themselves up, they judge utility by their own standards, and
not by those of others. Might not the fact that past generations went
with avidity to their multiplication table, their Latin Grammar, and
their English Bible, whereas the rising generation does not, imply that
the former found some intellectual sustenance in those things which the
latter fails to find? The appearance of industrial education on the
field, and the desperate attempts of educational theory to make the old
things palatable which fifty years ago were gulped down raw, argues,
too, that there may be a grain of truth in our feeling. Only after a
serious examination of our intellectual and spiritual viands should
our rejection of them be attributed to a disordered condition of our
stomachs.
The charge that the rising generation betrays an extraordinary love
of pleasure is also true. The four years’ period of high-school life
among the children of the comfortable classes is, instead of being a
preparation for life, literally one round of social gayety. But it is
not likely that this is because former generations were less eager
for pleasure, but rather because they were more rigidly repressed
by parents and custom, while their energy was directed into other
channels, religious, for instance. But now, with every barrier removed,
we have the unique spectacle of a youthful society where there is
perfectly free intercourse, an unforced social life of equals, in
which there are bound to develop educative influences of profound
significance. Social virtues will be learned better in such a society
than they can ever be from moral precepts. An important result of this
camaraderie is that the boy’s and the girl’s attitude toward life,
their spiritual outlook, has come to be the same. The line between the
two “spheres” has long disappeared in the industrial classes; it is
now beginning to fade among the comfortable classes.
Our critic has not seen that this avidity for pleasure is a natural
ebullition which, flaring up naturally, within a few years as naturally
subsides. It goes, too, without that ennui of over-stimulation; and
the fact that it has been will relieve us of the rising generation
from feeling that envy which invariably creeps into the tone of the
passing generation when they say, “We did not go such a pace when we
were young.” After this period of pleasure has begun to subside, there
ensues for those who have not been prematurely forced into industry, a
strange longing for independence. This feeling is most striking among
the girls of the rising generation, and crops up in the most unexpected
places, in families in the easiest circumstances, where to the
preceding generation the idea of caring to do anything except stay at
home and get married, if possible, would have been inconceivable. They
want somehow to feel that they are standing on their own feet. Like
their brothers, they begin to chafe under the tutelage, nominal though
it is, of the home. As a result, these daughters of the comfortable
classes go into trained nursing, an occupation which twenty years ago
was deemed hardly respectable; or study music, or do settlement work,
or even public-school teaching. Of course, girls who have had to earn
their own living have long done these things; the significant point is
that the late rapid increase in these professions comes from those who
have a comfortable niche in society all prepared for them. I do not
argue that this proves any superior quality of character on the part of
this generation, but it does at least fail to suggest a desire to lead
lives of ignoble sloth.
The undergraduate feels this spirit, too. He often finds himself
vaguely dissatisfied with what he has acquired, and yet does not
quite know what else would have been better for him. He stands on the
threshold of a career, with a feeling of boundless possibility, and yet
often without a decided bent toward any particular thing. One could do
almost anything were one given the opportunity, and yet, after all,
just what shall one do? Our critics have some very hard things to say
about this attitude. They attribute it to an egotistic philosophy,
imperfectly absorbed. But may it not rather be the result of that
absence of repression in our bringing-up, of that rigid moulding which
made our grandfathers what they were?
It must be remembered that we of the rising generation have to work
this problem out alone. Pastors, teachers, and parents flutter
aimlessly about with their ready-made formulas, but somehow these
are less efficacious than they used to be. I doubt if any generation
was ever thrown quite so completely on its own resources as ours
is. Through it all, the youth as well as the girl feels that he
wants to count for something in life. His attitude, which seems so
egotistical to his elders, is the result of this and of a certain
expansive outlook, rather than of any love of vain-glory. He has never
known what it was to be moulded, and he shrinks a little perhaps
from going through that process. The traditional professions have
lost some of their automatic appeal. They do conventionalize, and
furthermore, the youth, looking at many of their representatives,
the men who “count” in the world to-day, may be pardoned if he feels
sometimes as if he did not want to count in just that way. The youth
“who would not take special training because it would interfere with
his sacred individuality” is an unfair caricature of this weighing,
testing attitude toward the professions. The elder generation should
remember that life is no longer the charted sea that it was to
our grandfathers, and be accordingly lenient with us of the rising
generation.
Business, to the youth standing on the threshold of life, presents a
similar dilemma. Too often it seems like a choice between the routine
of a mammoth impersonal corporation and chicanery of one kind or
another, or the living by one’s wits within the pale of honesty. The
predatory individualist, the “hard-as-nails” specimen, does exist, of
course, but we are justified in ignoring him here; for, however much
his tribe may increase, it is certain that it will not be his kind, but
the more spiritually sensitive, the amorphous ones of the generation,
who will impress some definite character upon the age, and ultimately
count for good or evil, as a social force. With these latter, it should
be noted that, although this is regarded as a mercenary age, the
question of gain, to an increasingly large number, has little to do
with the final decision.
The economic situation in which we find ourselves, and to which not
only the free, of whom we have been speaking, but also the unfree of
the rising generation are obliged to react, is perhaps the biggest
factor in explaining our character. In this reaction the rising
generation has a very real feeling of coming straight up against a
wall of diminishing opportunity. I do not see how it can be denied
that practical opportunity is less for this generation than it has
been for those preceding it. The man of fifty years ago, if he was
intellectually inclined, was able to get his professional training
at small expense, and usually under the personal guidance of his
elders; if commercially inclined, he could go into a small, settled,
self-respecting business house, practically a profession in itself
and a real school of character. If he had a broader outlook, there
was the developing West for him, or the growing industrialism of the
East. It looks, at least from this distance, as if opportunity were
easy for that generation. They had the double advantage of being
more circumscribed in their outlook, and of possessing more ready
opportunity at hand.
But these times have passed forever. Nowadays, professional training is
lengthy and expensive; independent business requires big capital for
success; and there is no more West. It is still as true as ever that
the exceptional man will always “get there,” but now it is likely to be
only the exceptional man, whereas formerly all the able “got there,”
too. The only choice for the vast majority of the young men of to-day
is between being swallowed up in the routine of a big corporation, and
experiencing the vicissitudes of a small business, which is now an
uncertain, rickety affair, usually living by its wits, in the hands
of men who are forced to subordinate everything to self-preservation,
and in which the employee’s livelihood is in constant jeopardy. The
growing consciousness of this situation explains many of the peculiar
characteristics of our generation.
It has a direct bearing on the question of responsibility. Is it
not sound doctrine that one becomes responsible only by being made
responsible for something? Now, what incentive to responsibility is
produced by the industrial life of to-day? In the small business there
is the frank struggle for gain between employer and employee, a contest
of profits vs. wages, each trying to get the utmost possible out of the
other. The only kind of responsibility that this can possibly breed
is the responsibility for one’s own subsistence. In the big business,
the employee is simply a small part of a big machine; his work
counts for so little that he can rarely be made to feel any intimate
responsibility for it.
Then, too, our haphazard industrial system offers such magnificent
opportunities to a young man to get into the wrong place. He is forced
by necessity to go early, without the least training or interest, into
the first work that offers itself. The dull, specialized routine of
the modern shop or office, so different from the varied work and the
personal touch which created interest in the past, is the last thing
on earth that will mould character or produce responsibility. When the
situation with an incentive appears, however, we are as ready as any
generation, I believe, to meet it.
I have seen too many young men, of the usual futile bringing-up and
negligible training, drift idly about from one “job” to another,
without apparent ambition, until something happened to be presented
to them which had a spark of individuality about it, whereupon they
faced about and threw themselves into the task with an energy that
brought success and honor,--I have seen too much of this not to wonder,
somewhat impiously perhaps, whether this boasted character of our
fathers was not rather the result of their coming into contact with
the proper stimulus at the proper time, than of any tougher, grittier
strain in their spiritual fibre. Those among our elders, who, deploring
Socialism, insist so strenuously on the imperfections of human nature,
ought not to find fault with the theory that frail humanity is under
the necessity of receiving the proper stimulus before developing a good
character or becoming responsible.
Nor is the rising generation any the less capable of effort when
conditions call it forth. I wonder how our critic accounts for the
correspondence schools which have sprung up so abundantly within the
past fifteen years. They are patronized by large numbers of young men
and women who have had little academic training and have gone early
into industry. It is true that the students do not spend their time on
the Latin grammar; they devote themselves to some kind of technical
course which they have been led to believe will qualify them for a
better position. But the fact that they are thus willing to devote
their spare time to study certainly does not indicate a lack of effort.
Rather, it is the hardest kind of effort, for it is directed toward no
immediate end, and, more than that, it is superimposed on the ordinary
work, which is usually quite arduous enough to fatigue the youth.
Young apprentices in any branch where there is some kind of technical
or artistic appeal, such as mechanics or architecture, show an almost
incredible capacity of effort, often spending, as I have seen them
do, whole days over problems. I know too a young man who, appointed
very young to political office, found that the law would be useful
to him, and travels every evening to a near-by city to take courses.
His previous career had been most inglorious, well calculated by its
aimlessness to ruin any “character”; but the incentive was applied, and
he proved quite capable of putting forth a surprising amount of steady
effort.
Our critics are perhaps misled by the fact that these young men do
not announce with a blare of trumpets that they are about to follow
in the footsteps of an Edison or a Webster. It must be admitted that
even such men as I have cited do still contrive to work into their
time a surprising amount of pleasure. But the whole situation shows
conclusively, I think, that our author has missed the point when she
says that the rising generation shows a real softening of the human
fibre. It is rather that we have the same reserves of ability and
effort, but that from the complex nature of the economic situation
these reserves are not unlocked so early or so automatically as with
former generations.
The fact that our fathers did not need correspondence schools or night
schools, or such things, implies either that they were not so anxious
as we to count in the world, or that success was an easier matter
in their day, either of which conclusions furnishes a pretty good
extenuation of our apparent incapacity. We cannot but believe that our
difficulties are greater in this generation; it is hard to see that the
effort we put forth to overcome these difficulties is not proportional
to that increase. I am aware that to blame your surroundings when the
fault lies in your own character is the one impiety which rouses the
horror of present-day moral teachers. Can it not count to us for good,
then, that most of us, while coming theoretically to believe that this
economic situation explains so much of our trouble, yet continue to act
as if our deficiencies were all our own fault?