Part 2
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.