Youth and Life

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

But this temperance does not mean quite the same thing as the rigid self-control that used to be preached. The new morality has a more positive ideal than the rigid mastery which self-control implies. We are to fix our attention more in giving our good impulses full play than in checking the bad. The theory is that if one is occupied with healthy ideas and activities, there will be no room or time for the expression of the unhealthy ones. Anything that implies an inhibition or struggle to repress is a draining away into a negative channel of energy that might make for positive constructive work in the character. The repressed desires and interests are not killed, but merely checked, and they persist, with unabated vigor, in struggling to get the upper hand again. They are little weakened by lying dormant, and lurk warily below, ready to swarm up again on deck, whenever there is the smallest lapse of vigilance. But if they are neglected they gradually cease from troubling, and are killed by oblivion where they could not have been hurt by forcible repression. The mortification of the flesh seems too often simply to strengthen its pride.

In the realm of emotion, the dangers of rigid self-control are particularly evident. There are fashions in emotion as well as in dress, and it seems to have become the fashion in certain circles of youth to inhibit any emotional expression of the sincere or the serious. There is a sort of reign of terrorism which prevents personal conversation from being carried on upon any plane except one of flippancy and insincerity. Frankness of expression in regard to personal feelings and likes and dislikes is tabooed. A strange new ethics of tact has grown up which makes candor so sacrilegious a thing that its appearance in a group or between two young people of the opposite sex creates general havoc and consternation. Young people who dare to give natural expression to their feelings about each other or about their ideals and outlook on life find themselves genuinely unpopular. When this peculiar ethics works at its worst, it gives a person a pride in concealing his or her feelings on any of the vital and sincere aspects of life, the interests and admirations and tastes. But this energy, dammed up thus from expression in its natural way, overflows in a hysterical admiration for the trivial, and an unhealthy interest in the mere externals, the “safe” things, of life. Such self-control dwarfs the spirit; it results only in misunderstandings and a tragic ignorance of life. It is one of the realest of the vices of youth, for it is the parent of a host of minor ailments of the soul. It seems to do little good even to repress hatred and malice. If repressed, they keep knocking at the door of consciousness, and poison the virtues that might develop if the soul could only get rid of its load of spleen. If the character is thickly sown with impersonal interests and the positive virtues are carefully cultivated, there will be no opportunity for these hateful weeds to reach the sun and air. Virtue should actually crowd out vice, and temperance is the tool that youth finds ready to its hand. Temperance means the happy harmonizing and coördinating of the expression of one’s personality; it means health, candor, sincerity, and wisdom,—knowledge of one’s self and the sympathetic understanding of comrades.

Justice is a virtue which, if it be not developed in youth, has little chance of ever being developed. It depends on a peculiarly sensitive reaction to good and evil, and it is only in youth that those reactions are keen and disinterested. Real justice is always a sign of great innocence; it cannot exist side by side with interested motives or a trace of self-seeking. And a sense of justice is hard to develop in this great industrial world where the relations of men are so out of joint and where such flaunting anomalies assail one at every turn. Yet in the midst of it all youth is still pure of heart, and it is only the pure of heart who can be just. For in youth we live in a world of clean disinterestedness. We have ambitions and desires, but not yet have we learned the devious way by which they may be realized. We have not learned how to achieve our ends by taking advantage of other people, and using them and their interests and necessities as means. We still believe in the possibility of every man’s realizing himself side by side with us. In early youth, therefore, we have an instinctive and almost unconscious sense of justice. Not yet have we learned the trick of exploiting our fellow men. If we are early assailed with the reality of social disorder, and have brought home to our hearts the maladjustments of our present order, that sense of justice is transformed into a passion. This passion for social justice is one of the most splendid of the ideals of youth. It has the power of keeping alive all the other virtues; it stimulates life and gives it a new meaning and tone. It furnishes the leit-motiv which is so sadly lacking in many lives. And youth must find a leit-motiv of some kind, or its spirit perishes. This social idealism acts like a tonic upon the whole life; it keeps youth alive even after one has grown older in years.

With justice comes the virtue of democracy. We learn all too early in youth the undemocratic way of thinking, the divisions and discriminations which the society around us makes among people. But youth cannot be swept by love or fired by the passion for justice without feeling a wild disgust at everything that suggests artificial inequalities and distinctions. Democracy means a belief that people are worthy; it means trust in the good faith and the dignity of the average man. The chief reason why the average man is not now worthy of more trust, the democrat believes, is simply that he has not been trusted enough in the past. Democracy has little use for philanthropy, at least in the sense of a kindly caring for people, with the constant recognition that the person who is kind is superior to the person who is being done good to. The spirit of democracy is a much more robust humanity. It is rough and aggressive; it stands people up on their own feet, makes them take up their beds and walk. It prods them to move their own limbs and take care of themselves. It makes them strong by giving them something to do. It will have nothing more to do with the superstition of trusteeship which paralyzes now most of our institutional life. It does not believe for a minute that everybody needs guardians for most of the serious concerns of life. The great crime of the past has been that humankind has never been willing to trust itself, or men each other. We have tied ourselves up with laws and traditions, and devised a thousand ways to prevent men from being thrown on their own responsibility and cultivating their own powers. Our society has been constituted on the principle that men must be saved from themselves. We have surrounded ourselves with so many moral hedges, have imposed upon ourselves so many checks and balances, that life has been smothered. Our liberation has just begun. We are far from free, but the new spirit of democracy is the angel that will free us. No virtue is more potent for youth.

And the last of these virtues, redolent of the old Greek time, when men walked boldly, when the world was still young, and gods and nymphs not all dead, is wisdom. To be wise is simply to have blended and harmonized one’s experience, to have fused it together into a “philosophy of life.” Wisdom is a matter not of quantity, but of quality of experience. It means getting at the heart of it, and obtaining the same clear warm impression of its meaning that the artist does of the æsthetic idea that he is going to represent. Wisdom in youth or early middle life may be far truer than in later life. One’s courage may weaken under repeated failure, one’s sense of justice be dulled by contact with the wrong relations between men and classes, one’s belief in democracy destroyed by the seeming failure of experiments. But this gathering cynicism does not mean the acquiring of wisdom, but the losing of it. The usefulness and practicability of these virtues of youth are not really vitiated by the struggles they have in carrying themselves through into practice; what is exhibited is merely the toughness of the old forces of prejudice and tradition, and the “pig-headedness” of the old philosophy of timorousness and distrust. True wisdom is faith in love, in justice, in democracy; youth has this faith in largest measure; therefore youth is most wise.

Middle age steals upon a youth almost before he is aware. He will recognize it at first, perhaps, by a slight paling of his enthusiasms, or by a sudden consciousness that his early interests have been submerged in the flood of routine work and family cares. The later years of youth and the early years of middle life are in truth the dangerous age, for then may be lost the virtues that were acquired in youth. Or, if not lost, many will be felt to be superfluous. There is danger that the peculiar bias of the relish of right and wrong that the virtues of youth have given one may be weakened, and the soul spread itself too thin over life. Now one of the chief virtues of middle life is to conserve the values of youth, to practice in sober earnest the virtues that came so naturally in the enthusiasm of youth, but which take on a different hue when exposed to what seem to be the crass facts of the workaday world. But there is no reason why work, ambition, the raising of a family, should dull the essential spirit of youthful idealism. It may not be so irrepressible, so freakish, so intolerant, but it should not be different in quality and significance. The burdens of middle life are not a warrant for the releasing of the spiritual obligations of youth. They do not give one the right to look back with amused regret to the dear follies of the past. For as soon as the spirit of youth begins to leave the soul, that soul begins to die. Middle-aged people are too much inclined to speak of youth as a sort of spiritual play. They forget that youth feels that it itself has the serious business of life, the real crises to meet. To youth it is middle age that seems trivial and playful. It is after the serious work of love-making and establishing one’s self in economic independence is over that one can rest and play. Youth has little time for that sort of recreation. In middle age, most of the problems have been solved, the obstacles overcome. There is a slackening of the lines, a satisfied taking of one’s reward. And to youth this must always seem a tragedy, that the season of life when the powers are at their highest should be the season when they are oftener turned to material than to spiritual ends. Youth has the energy and ideals, but not the vantage-ground of prestige from which to fight for them. Middle age has the prestige and the power, but too seldom the will to use it for the furtherance of its ideals. Youth has the isolation, the independence, the disinterestedness so that it may attack any foe, but it has not the reserve force to carry that attack through. Middle age has all the reserve power necessary, but is handicapped by family obligations, by business and political ties, so that its power is rarely effective for social or individual progress.

The supreme virtue of middle age will be, then, to make this difficult fusion,—to combine devotion to one’s family, to one’s chosen work, with devotion to the finer idealism and impersonal aims that formed one’s philosophy of youth. To keep alive through all the twistings and turnings of life’s road the sense of a larger humanity that needs spiritual and material succor, of the individual spiritual life of ideal interests, is a task of virtue that will tax the resources of any man or woman. Yet here lies the true virtue of middle age,—to use its splendid powers to enhance the social and individual life round one, to radiate influence that transforms and elevates. The secret of such a radiant personality seems to be that one, while mingling freely in the stress of everyday life, sees all its details in the light of larger principles, against the background of their social meaning. In other words, it is a virtue of middle life to be socially self-conscious. And this spirit is the best protector against the ravages of the tough material world. Only by this social consciousness can that toughness be softened. The image of the world the way it ought to be must never be lost sight of in the picture of the world the way it is.

This conservation of the spirit is even more necessary for the woman than for the man. The active life of the latter makes it fairly certain that he, while he may become hard and callous, will at least retain some sort of grip on the world’s bigger movements. There is no such certainty for the mother. Indeed, she seems often to take a real pleasure in voluntarily offering up in sacrifice at the time of marriage what few ideal interests and tastes she has. The spectacle of the young mother devoting all her time and strength to her children and husband, and surrendering all other interests to the interests of the home, is usually considered inspiring and attractive, especially by the men. Not so attractive is she thirty years later, when, her family cares having lapsed and her children scattered, she is left high and dry in the world. If she then takes a well-earned rest, it seems a pity that that rest should be so generally futile and uninteresting. Without interests and tastes, and with no longer any useful function in society, she is relegated to the most trivial amusements and pursuits. Idle and vapid, she finds nothing to do but fritter away her time. The result is a really appalling waste of economic and social energy in middle age. Now it is the virtue of this season of life to avoid all this. The woman as well as the man must realize that her home is not bounded by the walls of the house, that it has wider implications, leading out into all the interests of the community and the state. That women of this age have not yet learned to be good mothers and good citizens at the same time, does not show that it is impossible, but that it is a virtue that requires more resolution than our morality has been willing to exhibit. The relish of right and wrong must be a relish of social right and wrong as well as of individual.

As middle age passes on into old age, however, one earns a certain right of relaxation. If there is no right to let go the sympathy for the virtues of youth and the conservation of its spirit, there comes the right to give over some of the aggressive activity. To youth belongs the practical action. At no other age is there the same impulse and daring. The virtue of later middle age is to encourage and support, rather than actively engage. It is true we have never learned this lesson. We still surrender to semi-old men the authority to govern us, think for us, act for us. We endow them with spiritual as well as practical leadership, and allow them to strip youth of its opportunities and powers. We permit them to rule not only their own but all the generations. If we could be sure that their rule meant progress, we could trust them to guide us. But, in these times at least, it seems to mean nothing so much as a last fight for a discredited undemocratic philosophy that modern youth are completely through with. From this point of view one of the virtues of this middle season of life will be the imaginative understanding of youth’s purposes and radical ideals. At that age, one no longer needs the same courage to face the battles of life; they are already most of them irrevocably won or lost. There is not the same claim of temperance; the passions and ambitions are relaxed. The sense of justice and democracy will have become a habit or else they will have been forever lost. Only the need of wisdom remains,—that unworldly wisdom which mellowing years can bring, which sees through the disturbance and failure of life the truth and efficacy of youth’s ideal vision.

Old age is such a triumph that it may almost be justly relieved of any burden of virtues or duties; it is so unique and beautiful that the old should be given the perfect freedom of the moral city. So splendid a victory is old age over the malign forces of disease and weakness and death that one is tempted to say that its virtue lies simply in being old. Those virtues of youth which grew out of the crises and temptations, physical and spiritual, of early life, are no longer relevant. There may come instead the quieter virtues of contentment and renunciation. Old people have few crises and few temptations; they live in the past and not in the future, as youth does. They cannot be required, therefore, to have that scorn for tradition which is the virtue of youth. They can keep alive for us the tradition that is vital, and from them we can learn many things.