§5
Most people speak of their early youth, its joys and sorrows, with a slightly condescending smile, as if they wished to say, like the affected lady in Griboyédov’s play, “How childish!” Children, when a few years are past, are ashamed of their toys, and this is right enough: they want to be men and women, they grow so fast and change so much, as they see by their jackets and the pages of their lesson-books. But adults might surely realise that childhood and the two or three years of youth are the fullest part of life, the fairest, and the most truly our own; and indeed they are possibly the most important part, because they fix all that follows, though we are not aware of it.
So long as a man moves modestly forwards, never stopping and never reflecting, and until he comes to the edge of a precipice or breaks his neck, he continues to believe that his life lies ahead of him; and therefore he looks down upon his past and is unable to appreciate the present. But when experience has laid low the flowers of spring and chilled the glow of summer—when he discovers that life is practically over, and all that remains a mere continuance of the past, then he feels differently towards the brightness and warmth and beauty of early recollections.
Nature deceives us all with her endless tricks and devices: she makes us a gift of youth, and then, when we are grown up, asserts her mastery and snares us in a web of relations, domestic and public, most of which we are powerless to control; and, though we impart our personal character to our actions, we do not possess our souls in the same degree; the lyric element of personality is weaker, and, with it, our feelings and capacity for enjoyment—all, indeed, is weaker, except intelligence and will.