impervious to what we call spiritual influences. He lives in a world
hermetically sealed to our interests and concerns. Parents and teachers
make the most conscientious efforts to influence their children, but
they would better realize that they can influence them only in the
most indirect way. The best thing they can do for the children is to
feed their curiosity, and provide them with all the materials that will
stimulate their varied interests. They can then leave the “influence”
to take care of itself. The natural child seems to be impregnable to
any appeals of shame, honor, reverence, honesty, and even ridicule,--in
other words, to all those methods we have devised for getting a
clutch on other people’s souls, and influencing and controlling
them according to our desires. And this is not because the child is
immoral, but simply because, as I have tried to show, those social
values mean as yet nothing to him. He lives in a splendid isolation
from our conventional standards; the influences of his elders, however
well-directed and prayerful they may be, simply do not reach him. He
lives unconscious of our interests and motives. Only the “good” child
is susceptible, and he is either instinctively submissive, or is the
victim of the mechanical imposition of standards and moral ideas.
The child works out what little social morality he does obtain, not
under the influence of his elders, but among his playmates. And the
standards worked out there are not refined and moral at all, but
rough ones of emulation and group honor, and respect for prowess. Even
obedience, which we all like to think of as one of the indispensable
accomplishments of a well-trained child, seems to be obtained at the
cost of real moral growth. It might be more beneficial if it were not
too often merely a means for the spiritual edification of the parents
themselves. Too often it is the delight of ruling, of being made
obeisance to, that is the secret motive of imposing strict obedience,
and not our desire simply that they shall learn the excellent habits
that are our own. One difficulty with the child who has “learned to
mind” is that, if he learns too successfully, he runs the risk of
growing up to be a cowardly and servile youth. There is a theory that
since the child will be obliged in later life to do many things that
he does not want to do, he might as well learn how while he is young.
The difficulty here seems to be that learning to do one kind of a
thing that you do not want to do does not guarantee your readiness to
do other kinds of unpleasant things. That art cannot be taught. Each
situation of compulsion, unless the spirit is completely broken, will
have its own peculiar quality of bitterness, and no guarantee against
it can be inculcated. Life will present so many inevitable necessities
to the child when he gets out into the world that it seems premature to
burden his childhood with a training which will be largely useless. So
much of our energy is wasted, and so much friction created, because we
are unwilling to trust life. If life is the great demoralizer, it is
also the great moralizer. It whips us into shape, and saddles us with
responsibilities and the means of meeting them, with obligations and
the will to meet them, with burdens and a strength to bear them. It
creates in us a conscience and the love of duty, and endows us with a
morality that a mother and father with the power and the love of angels
working through all the years of our childhood could not have created
within us. Trust life and not your own feeble efforts to create the
soul in the child!
The virtue of childhood, then, is an exhaustless curiosity and interest
in the world in which the child finds himself. He is here to learn his
way around in it, to learn the names of things and their uses, how
to use his body and his capacities. This will be the most excellent
working of his soul. If his mind and body are active, he will be a
“good” child, in the best sense of the word. We can almost afford to
let him be insolent and irreverent and troublesome as long as he is
only curious. If he has a temper, it will not be cured by curbing, but
by either letting it burn out, or not giving it fuel to feed on. Food
for his body and facts for his mind are the sustenance he requires.
From the food will be built up his body, and from the facts and his
reactions to them will slowly evolve his world of values and ideals. We
cannot aid him by giving him our theories, or shorten the path for him
by presenting him with ready-made standards. In spite of all the moral
teachers, there is no short cut to the moral life of youth, any more
than there is a royal road to knowledge. Nor can we help him to grow
by transferring some of our superfluous moral flesh to his bones. The
child’s qualities which shock our sense of propriety are evidences not
of his immorality, but of his pre-morality. A morality that will mean
anything to him can only be built up out of a vast store of experience,
and only when his world has broadened out into a real society with
influences of every kind coming from every side. He cannot get the
relish of right and wrong until he has tasted life, and it is the
taste of life that the child does not have. That taste comes only with
youth, and then with a bewildering complexity and vividness.
But between childhood and youth there comes a trying period when the
child has become well cognizant of the practical world, but has as yet
no hint of the gorgeous colors of youth. At thirteen, for instance, one
has the world pretty well charted, but not yet has the slow chemistry
of time transmuted this experience into meanings and values. There is
a crassness and materiality about the following three or four years
that have no counterpart until youth is over and the sleek years of the
forties have begun. How cocksure and familiar with the world is the boy
or girl at this age! They have no doubts, but they have no glow. At no
time in life is one so unspiritual, so merely animal, so much of the
earth, earthy. How different is it to be a few years later! How shaken
and adventurous will the world appear then! For this waiting period
of life, the virtues are harder to discover. Curiosity has lapsed,
for there do not seem to be many things left to be curious about. The
child is beautifully unconscious of his own ignorance. Similarly has
the play activity diminished; the boy has put away his Indian costumes,
and the girl her dolls. At this season of life the virtue would seem
to consist in the acquirement of some skill in some art or handicraft
or technique. This is the time to search for the budding talents and
the strong native bents and inclinations. To be interesting is one of
the best of virtues, and few things make a person more interesting than
skill or talent. From a selfish point of view, too, all who have grown
up with unskillful hands will realize the solid virtue of knowing how
to do something with the hands, and avoid that vague restlessness and
desire to get at grips with something that haunts the professional
man who has neglected in youth to cultivate this virtue of technique.
And it is a virtue which, if not acquired at that time, can never be
acquired. The deftness of hand, alertness of mind, are soon lost if
they are not taken advantage of, and the child grows up helpless and
unskillful, with a restless void where a talent and interest should be.
It is with youth, then, that the moral life begins, the true relish of
right and wrong. Out of the crucible of passion and enthusiasm emerge
the virtues of life, virtues that will have been tested and tried in
the furnace of youth’s poignant reactions to the world of possibilities
and ideals that has been suddenly opened up to it. Those young people
who have been the victims of childish morality will not feel this new
world so clearly or keenly, or, if there did lurk underneath the crust
of imposed priggishness some latent touch of genius, they will feel
the new life with a terrible searing pain that maddens them and may
permanently distort their whole vision of life. To those without the
spark, the new life will come stained by prejudice. Their reactions
will be dulled; they will not see clearly; and will either stagger at
the shock, or go stupidly ahead oblivious of the spiritual wonders
on every side. Only those who have been allowed to grow freely like
young plants, with the sun and air above their heads, will get the
full beauty and benefit of youth. Only those whose eyes have been kept
wide open ceaselessly learning the facts of the material and practical
world will truly appreciate the values of the moral world, and be able
to acquire virtue. Only with this fund of practical knowledge will
the youth be able to balance and contrast and compare the bits of his
experience, see them in the light of their total meaning, and learn to
prefer rightly one bit to another. It is as if silent forces had been
at work in the soul during the last years of childhood, organizing the
knowledge and nascent sentiments of the child into forms of power ready
for the free expression of youth.
Youth expresses itself by falling in love. Whether it be art, a girl,
socialism, religion, the sentiment is the same; the youth is swept
away by a flood of love. He has learned to value, and how superlative
and magnificent are his values! The little child hardly seems to love;
indeed, his indifference to grown people, even to his own parents,
is often amazing. He has the simple affection of a young animal, but
how different his cool regard from the passionate flame of youth!
Love is youth’s virtue, and it is wide as well as deep. There is no
tragic antithesis between a youth’s devotion to a cause and his love
for a girl. They are not mutually exclusive, as romanticists often
love to think, but beautifully compatible. They tend to fuse, and they
stimulate and ennoble each other. The first love of youth for anything
is pure and ethereal and disinterested. It is only when thwarted that
love turns sensual, only when mocked that enthusiasm becomes fanatical
or mercenary. Worldly opinion seems to care much more for personal
love than for the love of ideals. Perhaps it is instinctively more
interested in the perpetuation of the race than in its progress. It
gives its suffrage and approval to the love of a youth for a girl, but
it mocks and discredits the enthusiast. It just grudgingly permits
the artist to live, but it piles almost insurmountable obstacles in
the path of the young radical. The course of true love may never run
smooth, but what of the course of true idealism?
The springs that feed this love are found, of course, in hero-worship.
Sexual love is objectified in some charming and appealing girl, love
for ideals in some teacher or seer or the inspiring personality of
a friend. It is in youth that we can speak of real influence. Then
is the soul responsive to currents and ideas. The embargo which kept
the child’s mind immune to theory and opinion and tastes is suddenly
lifted. In childhood, our imitation is confined to the external; we
copy ways of acting, but we are insensitive to the finer nuances of
personality. But in youth we become sensitive to every passing tone
and voice. Youth is the season when, through this sensitiveness, the
deadly pressures get their purchase on the soul; it is also the season
for the most momentous and potent influences for good. In youth, if
there is the possibility that the soul be permanently warped out of
shape, there is also the possibility that it receive the nourishment
that enables it to develop its own robust beauty. It is by hero-worship
that we copy not the externals of personality, as in childhood, but
the inner spirit. We feel ourselves somehow merged with the admired
persons, and we draw from them a new stimulating grace. We find
ourselves in them. It is not yielding to a pressure that would force us
to a type, but a drawing up of ourselves to a higher level, through the
aid of one who possesses all those qualities which have been all along,
we feel, our vague and hitherto unexpressed ideal. We do not feel that
our individualities are being lost, but that they are for the first
time being found. We have discovered in another personality all those
best things for which our hearts have been hungering, and we are simply
helping ourselves to that which is in reality our own. Our hero gives
of himself inexhaustibly, and we take freely and gladly what we need.
It is thus that we stock up with our first store of spiritual values.
It is from the treasury of a great and good personality that we receive
the first confirmation of ourselves. In the hero-personality, we see
our own dim, baby ideals objectified. Their splendor encourages us,
and nerves us for the struggle to make them thoroughly our own.
There is a certain pathos in the fact that parents are so seldom
the heroes from whom the children derive this revelation of their
own personality. It is more often some teacher or older friend or
even a poet or reformer whom the youth has never seen and knows only
through his words and writings. But for this the parents are partly
responsible. They are sufficiently careful about the influences which
play upon their young children. They give care and prayers and tears
to their bringing-up in the years when the children are almost immune
to any except the more obvious mechanical influences, and learn of
ideals and values only in a parrot-like fashion. But when the child
approaches youth, the parent is apt to relax vigilance and, with a cry
of thanksgiving and self-congratulation that the child has been brought
safely through so many perils to the desired haven, to surrender him
to his own devices. Just at the time when he becomes really sensitive
for the first time to spiritual influences, he is deprived of this
closest and warmest influence of the home. But he has not been brought
into a haven, but launched into a heaving and troubled sea. This is
the time when his character lies at stake, and the possibility of his
being a radical, individual force in the world hangs in the balance.
Whether he will become this force depends on the pressures that he is
able to dodge, and on the positive ideals he is able to secure. And
they will depend largely on the heroes he worships, upon his finding
the personalities that seem to contain all the best for which he
yearns. Hero-worship is the best preservative against cheapness of
soul, that besetting sin of modern youth. It directs our attention away
from the light and frothy things of the world, which are wont to claim
so much of youth’s interest, to qualities that are richer and more
satisfying. Yet hero-worship is no mere imitation. We do not simply
adopt new qualities and a new character. We rather impregnate our
hitherto sterile ideals with the creative power of a tested and assured
personality, and give birth to a new reliance and a new faith. Our
heroes anticipate and provide for our doubts and fears, and fortify us
against the sternest assaults of the world. We love our heroes because
they have first loved us.
Out of this virtue of love and the clashing of its clear spirit with
the hard matter of established things come the sterner virtues. From
that conflict, courage is struck off as youth feels the need of
keeping his flame steady and holding to his own course, regardless
of obstacles or consequences. Youth needs courage, that salt of
the virtues, for if youth has its false hopes, it has its false
depressions. That strange melancholy, when things seem to lose their
substance and the world becomes an empty shell, is the reverse shield
of the elation of youth. To face and overcome it is a real test of the
courage of youth. The dash and audacity, the daring and self-confidence
of youth, are less fine than this simple courage of optimism. Youth
needs courage, too, when its desires do not come true, when it meets
suspicion or neglect, and when its growth seems inexorably checked by
circumstance. In these emergencies, the youth usually plays the stoic.
He feels a savage pride in the thought that circumstance can never rob
him of his integrity, or bring his best self to be dependent on mere
change of fortune. Such a courage is a guarantor of youth. It forms a
protecting crust over life and lessens the shock of many contingencies.
The only danger is that it may become too perfect a shell and harden
the character. It is not well for youth to shun the battle. Courage
demands exposure to assault.
And besides courage, youth needs temperance. The sins and excesses
of hot-blooded youth are a byword; youth would not seem to be youth
without its carnality and extravagance. It is fortunate that youth is
able to expend that extravagance partly in idealism. Love is always
the antidote to sensuality. And we can always, if we set ourselves
resolutely to the task, transmute the lower values into higher.
This, indeed, is the crucial virtue of youth, and temperance is the
seal and evidence of the transmutation. Temperance in things of the
flesh is ordained not through sentimental reasons, but on the best of
physiological and psychological motives. Temperance is a virtue because
of the evil consequences to one’s self and others which follow excess
of indulgence in appetite.
But this temperance does not mean quite the same thing as the rigid
self-control that used to be preached. The new morality has a more
positive ideal than the rigid mastery which self-control implies. We
are to fix our attention more in giving our good impulses full play
than in checking the bad. The theory is that if one is occupied with
healthy ideas and activities, there will be no room or time for the
expression of the unhealthy ones. Anything that implies an inhibition
or struggle to repress is a draining away into a negative channel of
energy that might make for positive constructive work in the character.
The repressed desires and interests are not killed, but merely checked,
and they persist, with unabated vigor, in struggling to get the upper
hand again. They are little weakened by lying dormant, and lurk warily
below, ready to swarm up again on deck, whenever there is the smallest
lapse of vigilance. But if they are neglected they gradually cease from
troubling, and are killed by oblivion where they could not have been
hurt by forcible repression. The mortification of the flesh seems too
often simply to strengthen its pride.
In the realm of emotion, the dangers of rigid self-control are
particularly evident. There are fashions in emotion as well as in
dress, and it seems to have become the fashion in certain circles
of youth to inhibit any emotional expression of the sincere or
the serious. There is a sort of reign of terrorism which prevents
personal conversation from being carried on upon any plane except one
of flippancy and insincerity. Frankness of expression in regard to
personal feelings and likes and dislikes is tabooed. A strange new
ethics of tact has grown up which makes candor so sacrilegious a
thing that its appearance in a group or between two young people of
the opposite sex creates general havoc and consternation. Young people
who dare to give natural expression to their feelings about each other
or about their ideals and outlook on life find themselves genuinely
unpopular. When this peculiar ethics works at its worst, it gives a
person a pride in concealing his or her feelings on any of the vital
and sincere aspects of life, the interests and admirations and tastes.
But this energy, dammed up thus from expression in its natural way,
overflows in a hysterical admiration for the trivial, and an unhealthy
interest in the mere externals, the “safe” things, of life. Such
self-control dwarfs the spirit; it results only in misunderstandings
and a tragic ignorance of life. It is one of the realest of the vices
of youth, for it is the parent of a host of minor ailments of the
soul. It seems to do little good even to repress hatred and malice.
If repressed, they keep knocking at the door of consciousness, and
poison the virtues that might develop if the soul could only get rid of
its load of spleen. If the character is thickly sown with impersonal
interests and the positive virtues are carefully cultivated, there will
be no opportunity for these hateful weeds to reach the sun and air.
Virtue should actually crowd out vice, and temperance is the tool that
youth finds ready to its hand. Temperance means the happy harmonizing
and coördinating of the expression of one’s personality; it means
health, candor, sincerity, and wisdom,--knowledge of one’s self and the
sympathetic understanding of comrades.
Justice is a virtue which, if it be not developed in youth, has little
chance of ever being developed. It depends on a peculiarly sensitive
reaction to good and evil, and it is only in youth that those reactions
are keen and disinterested. Real justice is always a sign of great
innocence; it cannot exist side by side with interested motives or a
trace of self-seeking. And a sense of justice is hard to develop in
this great industrial world where the relations of men are so out of
joint and where such flaunting anomalies assail one at every turn. Yet
in the midst of it all youth is still pure of heart, and it is only
the pure of heart who can be just. For in youth we live in a world
of clean disinterestedness. We have ambitions and desires, but not
yet have we learned the devious way by which they may be realized.
We have not learned how to achieve our ends by taking advantage of
other people, and using them and their interests and necessities as
means. We still believe in the possibility of every man’s realizing
himself side by side with us. In early youth, therefore, we have an
instinctive and almost unconscious sense of justice. Not yet have
we learned the trick of exploiting our fellow men. If we are early
assailed with the reality of social disorder, and have brought home
to our hearts the maladjustments of our present order, that sense of
justice is transformed into a passion. This passion for social justice
is one of the most splendid of the ideals of youth. It has the power of
keeping alive all the other virtues; it stimulates life and gives it a
new meaning and tone. It furnishes the _leit-motiv_ which is so sadly
lacking in many lives. And youth must find a _leit-motiv_ of some kind,
or its spirit perishes. This social idealism acts like a tonic upon
the whole life; it keeps youth alive even after one has grown older in
years.
With justice comes the virtue of democracy. We learn all too early
in youth the undemocratic way of thinking, the divisions and
discriminations which the society around us makes among people. But
youth cannot be swept by love or fired by the passion for justice
without feeling a wild disgust at everything that suggests artificial
inequalities and distinctions. Democracy means a belief that people
are worthy; it means trust in the good faith and the dignity of the
average man. The chief reason why the average man is not now worthy
of more trust, the democrat believes, is simply that he has not been
trusted enough in the past. Democracy has little use for philanthropy,
at least in the sense of a kindly caring for people, with the constant
recognition that the person who is kind is superior to the person
who is being done good to. The spirit of democracy is a much more
robust humanity. It is rough and aggressive; it stands people up on
their own feet, makes them take up their beds and walk. It prods them
to move their own limbs and take care of themselves. It makes them
strong by giving them something to do. It will have nothing more to do
with the superstition of trusteeship which paralyzes now most of our
institutional life. It does not believe for a minute that everybody
needs guardians for most of the serious concerns of life. The great
crime of the past has been that humankind has never been willing to
trust itself, or men each other. We have tied ourselves up with laws
and traditions, and devised a thousand ways to prevent men from being
thrown on their own responsibility and cultivating their own powers.
Our society has been constituted on the principle that men must be
saved from themselves. We have surrounded ourselves with so many moral
hedges, have imposed upon ourselves so many checks and balances, that
life has been smothered. Our liberation has just begun. We are far from
free, but the new spirit of democracy is the angel that will free us.
No virtue is more potent for youth.