Sweet and wild, if you like, the first airs of spring, sweeter than
anything in later days; but when we make an analogy between spring and
youth and believe that the enchantment of one is the enchantment of the
other, are we not dreaming a dream?
Youth, like spring, taunts the person who is not a poet. Just because it
is formative and fugitive it evokes imagination; it has a bloom too
momentary to be self-conscious, vanished almost as soon as it is seen.
In boys as well as girls this beauty discloses itself. It is a delicacy
as tender as the first green leaf, an innocence like the shimmering
dawn, "brightness of azure, clouds of fragrance, a tinkle of falling
water and singing birds." People feel this when they accept youth as
immaculate and heed its mute expectancies. The mother whose boy is at
twenty has every right to feel he is idyllic, to think that youth has
the air of spring about it, that spring is the morning of the gods.
Youth is so often handsome and straight and fearless; it has its
mysterious silences--its beings are beings of clear fire in high spaces,
kin with the naked stars. Yet there is in it something not less fiery
which is far more human. Youth is also a Columbus with mutineers on
board.
As one grows older one is less impatient of the supposition that
innocence actually exists. It exists, even though mothers may not
properly interpret it for boys. Its sudden shattering is a barbarism
which time may not easily heal. But in reality youth is neither
innocence nor experience. It is a duel between innocence and experience,
with the attainments of experience guarded from older gaze. Human beings
take their contemporaries for granted, no one else: and neither teachers
nor superiors nor even parents find it easy to penetrate the veil that
innocence and ignorance are supposed to draw around youth.
If youth has borrowed the suppositions about its own innocence, the
coming of experience is all the more painful. The process of change is
seldom serene, especially if there is eagerness or originality. The
impressionable and histrionic youth has incessant disappointment in
trying misfit spiritual garments. The undisciplined faculty of
make-believe, which is the rudiment of imagination, can go far to
torture youthfulness until a few chevrons have been earned and
self-acceptance begun.
Do mature people try to help this? Do they remember their own
uncertainty and frustration? One of the high points in Mr. Trotter's
keen psychological study, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War,
indicates adult jealousy of the young. Mr. Trotter goes beyond Samuel
Butler and Edmund Gosse in generalizing their kind of youthful
experience. He shows the forces at work behind the patronizing and
victimizing of the young.
The tendency to guard children from sexual knowledge and
experience seems to be truly universal in civilized man and to
surpass all differences of morals, discipline, or taste....
Herd instinct, invariably siding with the majority and the
ruling powers, has always added its influence to the side of age
and given a very distinctly perceptible bias to history,
proverbial wisdom, and folklore against youth and confidence and
enterprise and in favor of age and caution, the immemorial
wisdom of the past, and even the toothless mumbling of senile
decay.
The day will come when our present barbaric attitude toward youth will
be altered. Before it can be altered, however, we must completely revise
our conventions of innocence. Youth is no more certainly innocent than
it is certainly happy, and the conspiracy of silence that surrounds
youth is not to be justified on any ground of over-impressionableness.
Innocence, besides, can last too long. Every one has pitied stale
innocence. If a New York child of ten becomes delirious, his ravings may
quite easily be shocking to older people. Already, without any
particular viciousness or precocity, he has accumulated a huge number of
undesirable impressions, and shoved them under the surface of his mind.
What, then, to do? The air of spring that is about him need not mislead
his guardians. They may as well accept him as a ripe candidate for a
naughty world. Repression, in other words, is only one agent of
innocence, and not the most successful. Certainly not the most
successful for domesticating youth in the sphere that men and women
consider fit to be occupied. If youth is invited to remain innocent long
after it recognizes the example and feels the impulses of its elders,
the invitation will go unaccepted. Youth cannot read the newspapers or
see the moving pictures without realizing a discrepancy between conduct
and precept, which is one hint to precept to take off its bib.
This knowingness is not quite what it seems to be. Youth is never so
young as when experienced. But those who must deal with it cannot lose
by making it more articulate, by saving it from the silly adult
exclusions of jealousy and pride. For this jealousy and pride
continually operates against youth in the name of dignity and
discipline. And so the fiction of happy youth is favored, the fiction
that portrays youth as the spring time of the spirit; that pipes a song
about a lamb, and leads the lamb to slaughter.