Youth and Life

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

The child’s mind, so suggestible to facts, seems to be almost 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.