The roving critic

John Fiske perceived that human history has been greatly affected by the fact that man has a longer infancy than the other animals. A creature which grows to its full stature and faculties in a few hours or weeks or months or even years has not the same opportunity to travel far in knowledge or to build its intelligence upon observations and conclusions as has the creature which normally matures through at least a score of years. There still remains to be studied the effect upon mankind of the deliberate prolongation of infancy which, particularly in Europe and America, has been going on for something over a century. Perhaps it should be called less a prolongation of infancy than a discovery that infancy actually lasts longer than had been realized. The social effect is much the same. In the eighteenth century the unproductive and acquisitive period of infancy for boys rarely lasted beyond twenty years, even for those who were trained at the colleges and universities. For the same class in the twentieth century—a class now proportionately larger than then—a period of twenty-five years is nearer the average. The shift is even more marked as regards girls, who a hundred years ago were likely to be married at seventeen or eighteen but who now are quite likely to remain unmarried till twenty-five, and very many, of course, till later. What has become of those years of human life thus lost to adult society, or at least diverted to new purposes?

It will not do to answer that such years of youth have been offset by the years added at the end of life through the advance of hygiene and medicine. Even if the total number were the same—and there are no figures to prove or to disprove it—there would still be an incalculable difference in quality. Consider the matter in a simple biological aspect. The postponement of marriage has reduced the number of children born, and has therefore released for other functions a vast amount of human energy once devoted by very young women to gestation and lactation. Anyone who has had occasion to observe a group of girls in the schools and colleges of this generation knows how tremendous is the store of surplus energy for which there is no biological outlet and which too often fails to be sublimated as it might well be into other forms of service. The quantity of such energy which the war showed to be in reserve should not have been a surprise to the teachers or observers of youth. No more should it have been a surprise that those who were thought of as mere boys should have suddenly and successfully taken up heavier labours and larger responsibilities than they had known before. The energy had been all the time in existence, though it had been spent on study or sports or dissipation. Thousands and thousands of years had instructed the race to give about so many years and about so much energy to youth, and the arbitrary customs of a century could not accomplish anything but the most superficial changes. The war, which wasted and worse than wasted human riches, almost certainly threw away a larger treasury of youth than any previous generation could have done, for the reason that there was more youth to throw away.

Surely the splendour of modern life, its variety and glitter and colour and movement, capable even of blinding men now and then to the drabness of its machine-processes, must have been due in part to the prolongation of infancy. There have been longer hours for play and more ways of playing: new games, new dances, new contests of speed and strength and dexterity, and in America especially an increasing return to the mimic wild life of the summer camp. What, among other things, peace must be made to give back is that abundance of youth. We need no increase of the birth-rate to absorb the energy of the girls; we need no new wars to waste the energy of the boys. We need instead to recognize this precious asset and to employ it. The first step should be to distribute the fulness of life among more boys and girls than had it before the war, when it belonged to a too narrow privileged class. The next should be to civilize it, not by cramping and restraining its activities but by associating them with thought and passion and beauty. In how many quarters of the world have athletics, the natural expression of the release of youth, been viewed as sheer rowdyism or at best as squandered power! But, viewed more largely, athletics must appear the physical symbol of the energy which the race has latterly been hoarding. Not athletics merely but the thing thereby symbolized must be drawn into the general current of existence. It means the enlargement of youth’s pleasure, the evocation of its deeper thought and passion, the development of its capacities. And of course whatever enriches youth in time enriches all society.

YOUTH IS ALWAYS RIGHT

The keenest intelligence in the British Isles has recently uttered what is perhaps its keenest observation. The intelligence is, of course, Bernard Shaw’s. The observation is that if a great teacher of his age has done all he ought to do he must expect, and he should desire, to come in time to seem outmoded, superfluous, even something of a nuisance. Thinking, Mr. Shaw perceives, is in this respect like walking: once the habit has been acquired the learner has to practise it alone. As he cannot be precisely the same person his teacher was, he must go by different paths to different goals. Indeed, the measure of the valuable teacher of thinking is his power to show his pupils how they may reach conclusions he himself never could reach. After Socrates, Plato; after Plato, Aristotle. It calls, indeed, for an almost inhuman degree of magnanimity to rejoice when we see ourselves distanced by those whom we first set upon their feet; Mr. Shaw’s attitude of willingness, even of eagerness, is a sign of that capacity for elevated vision which has lent wings to his words and barbs to his truth. But his prompt admission of a thing which his mind lets him see is only what he has taught his followers, and his age, to expect of him. No matter if it does not flatter his pride. He does not have the kind of pride by the exercise of which a man would rather be president than be right. He knows that the life of thought depends not upon the fidelity with which it continues in one direction but upon the vitality with which it stirs successive generations.

For thinking is part of the human process no less than play or work or love or aspiration. Its roots are in the protoplasm and its nourishment comes from living growth. To look back over the long and jagged history of opinion is to discover that opinions rise and fall but that only the making and testing of opinion go on for ever; and it is to discover that opinion has always prospered most when it was most nearly allied with the creative forces of youth. Perhaps one should hardly call it opinion at all when those who cherish it are following it in full pursuit. Perhaps then it is instinct and little more. But the instincts of youth are precious as nothing else is precious. Youth, viewed broadly, is always right.

Viewed thus broadly, conservatism is the element of death and radicalism is the element of life. The human tribe, straggling through the wilderness of the world, perpetuates itself by begetting and bearing its young, who, at first protected by bosom and counsel, eventually detach themselves and move toward the front while their parents gradually slip toward the rear and are left behind. The process is cruel but it is real; and it is irresistible. What other course, after all, is there to take? Who knows where we come from or where we are going to? If youth has now and then plunged blindly along blind roads, so has age wrought incalculable evil by inquisitions and oppressions aimed to check the march of mankind in its natural advance. Experience grows cynical and lags heavily back, scorning the impulse to create. Youth staggers under the burden of freeing itself, as if it were not enough to perform the hard tasks and fight the bitter battles which the old men of the tribe “wish” upon it. No wonder high hearts falter under their fate when they do not rebel; no wonder they grow old so soon and take up the immemorial complaint; no wonder the youth of any particular generation always does so little. It is right but it is in the minority.

Fortunately years alone are not the final evidence of youth or age. Always there are wise men who, like Socrates or Goethe in their days, or like Bernard Shaw or Anatole France in ours, refuse to grow old as the seasons increase upon them. They put forth new leaves, they unfold new blossoms, with a continuous rejuvenescence. They are the links between young and old. Through their intercession youth grows conscious of the meaning of its urges, as it is already conscious of its essential rightness. Through their interpretation age is reminded of what, left alone, it would always forget: the generous intentions and the authentic power of youth. They are the true spiritual parents of the race. Yet what they do is no more than what all parents do who are not jealous of their children. They watch them at their wild games with joy that they are so strong. They offer advice which, they hope, may save them the experience of unnecessary pain and may help them to realize their potentialities, but they do not feel too much chagrin when the advice is slighted, knowing that wisdom is incommunicable and must be learned over again in person by each new apprentice to life. Alas that there are so few good or wise parents! It is the fault of the bad and the unwise if they find youth wilful, heedless, insolent. They have fixed their eyes upon individuals who go astray and not upon the larger drift in which life is perpetually renewed. Is life itself good or bad? There are, it is true, divergent answers to the question, but few are better than that of E. W. Howe, who says: “We have it, and must make the best of it. And as long as we do not blow our brains out, we have decided life is worth living.” At least life is best where it is most vivid—in the heart and ways of youth.