Youth and Life

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

The value of their experience to us is not that it teaches us to avoid their mistakes, for we must try all things for ourselves. The older generation, it is true, often flatters itself that its mistakes somehow make for our benefit, because we learn from their errors to avoid the pitfalls into which they came. But there is no making mistakes by the proxy of a former generation. The world has moved on in the mean time; the pitfalls are new, and we shall only entangle ourselves the more by adopting the methods of our ancestors in getting out of the difficulties. But the value of an old man’s experience is that he has preserved in it the living tradition and hands down to us old honesties, old sincerities, and old graces, that have been crushed in the rough-and-tumble of modern life. It is not tradition in itself that is dangerous, but only dead tradition that has no meaning for the present and is a mere weight on our progress. Such is the legal and economic tradition given to us by our raucous, middle-aged leaders of opinion, adopted by them through motives of present gain, and not through sincere love of the past.

But old men, looking back over the times in which they have lived, throw a poetic glamour over the past and make it live again. They see it idealized, but it is the real that they see idealized. An old man of personality and charm has the faculty of cutting away from the past the dead wood, and preserving for us the living tissue which we can graft profitably on our own growing present. Old men have much of the disinterestedness of youth; they have no ulterior motive in giving us the philosophy of their past. The wisest of them instinctively select what is vital for our present nourishment. It is not old men that youth has to fear, but the semi-old, who have lost touch with their youth, and have not lived long enough to get the disinterested vision of their idealized past. But old men who have lived this life of radical virtue are the best of teachers; they distill the perfume of the past, and bring it to us to sweeten our present. Such men grow old only in body. The radical spirit of youth has the power of abolishing considerations of age; the body changes, but the spirit remains the same. In this sense, it is the virtue of old age not to become old.

The besetting sin of this season of life is apathy. Old age should not be a mere waiting for death. The fact that we cannot reconcile death with life shows that they ought not to be discussed in the same terms. They belong to two different orders. Death has no part in life, and in life there can be no such thing as preparation for death. An old man lives to his appointed time, and then his life ends; but the life up to that ending, barring the loss of his faculties, has been all life and not a whit death. Old men do not fear death as much as do young men, and this calmness is not so much a result of disillusionment with life as a recognition that their life has been lived, their work finished, the cycle of their activity rounded off. One virtue of old age, then, is to live as fully at the height of one’s powers as strength will permit, passing out of life serene and unreluctant, with willingness to live and yet with willingness to die. To know an old man who has grown old slowly, taking the seasons as they came, conserving the spirit of his youthful virtues, mellowing his philosophy of life, acquiring a clearer, saner, and more beautiful outlook on human nature and all its spiritual values with each passing year, is an education in the virtues of life. The virtues which produce an old age such as this do not cut across the grain of life, but enhance and conserve the vital impulses and forces. Such an old age is the crowning evidence of the excellent working of the soul. A life needs no other proof than this that each season has known its proper virtue and healthful activity.

IV
THE LIFE OF IRONY

I could never, until recently, divest myself of the haunting feeling that being ironical had something to do with the entering of the iron into one’s soul. I thought I knew what irony was, and I admired it immensely. I could not believe that there was something metallic and bitter about it. Yet this sinister connotation of a clanging, rasping meanness of spirit, which I am sure it has still in many people’s minds, clung about it, until one happy day my dictionary told me that the iron had never entered into the soul at all, but the soul into the iron (St. Jerome had read the psalm wrong), and that irony was Greek, with all the free, happy play of the Greek spirit about it, letting in fresh air and light into others’ minds and our own. It was to the Greek an incomparable method of intercourse, the rub of mind against mind by the simple use of simulated ignorance and the adoption, without committing one’s self, of another’s point of view. Not until I read the Socrates of Plato did I fully appreciate that this irony,—this pleasant challenging of the world, this insistent judging of experience, this sense of vivid contrasts and incongruities, of comic juxtapositions, of flaring brilliancies, and no less heartbreaking impossibilities, of all the little parts of one’s world being constantly set off against each other, and made intelligible only by being translated into and defined in each others’ terms,—that this was a life, and a life of beauty, that one might suddenly discover one’s self living all unawares. And if one could judge one’s own feeble reflection, it was a life that had no room for iron within its soul.

We should speak not of the Socratic method but of the Socratic life. For irony is a life rather than a method. A life cannot be taken off and put on again at will; a method can. To be sure, some people talk of life exactly as if it were some portable commodity, or some exchangeable garment. We must live, they cry, as if we were about to begin. And perhaps they are. Only some of us would rather die than live that puny life that they can adopt and cover themselves with. Irony is too rich and precious a thing to be capable of such transmission. The ironist is born and not made. This critical attitude towards life, this delicious sense of contrasts that we call irony, is not a pose or an amusement. It is something that colors every idea and every feeling of the man who is so happy as to be endowed with it.

Most people will tell you, I suppose, that the religious conviction of salvation is the only permanently satisfying coloring of life. In the splendid ironists, however, one sees a sweeter, more flexible and human principle of life, adequate, without the buttress of supernatural belief, to nourish and fortify the spirit. In the classic ironist of all time, irony shows an inherent nobility, a nobility that all ages have compared favorably with the Christian ideal. Lacking the spur of religious emotion, the sweetness of irony may be more difficult to maintain than the mood of belief. But may it not for that very reason be judged superior, for is it not written, He that endureth unto the end shall be saved?

It is not easy to explain the quality of that richest and most satisfying background of life. It lies, I think, in a vivid and intense feeling of aliveness which it gives. Experience comes to the ironist in little darts or spurts, with the added sense of contrast. Most men, I am afraid, see each bit of personal experience as a unit, strung more or less loosely on a string of other mildly related bits. But the man with the ironical temperament is forced constantly to compare and contrast his experience with what was, or what might be, or with what ought to be, and it is the shocks of these comparisons and contrasts that make up his inner life. He thinks he leads a richer life, because he feels not only the individual bits but the contrasts besides in all their various shadings and tints. To this sense of impingement of facts upon life is due a large part of this vividness of irony; and the rest is due to the alertness of the ironical mind. The ironist is always critically awake. He is always judging, and watching with inexhaustible interest, in order that he may judge. Now irony in its best sense is an exquisite sense of proportion, a sort of spiritual tact in judging the values and significances of experience. This sense of being spiritually alive which ceaseless criticism of the world we live in gives us, combined with the sense of power which free and untrammeled judging produces in us, is the background of irony. And it should be a means to the truest goodness.

Socrates made one mistake,—knowledge is not goodness. But it is a step towards judging, and good judgment is the true goodness. For it is on judgment impelled by desire that we act. The clearer and cleaner our judgments then, the more definite and correlated our actions. And the great value of these judgments of irony is that they are not artificial but spring naturally out of life. Irony, the science of comparative experience, compares things not with an established standard but with each other, and the values that slowly emerge from the process, values that emerge from one’s own vivid reactions, are constantly revised, corrected, and refined by that same sense of contrast. The ironic life is a life keenly alert, keenly sensitive, reacting promptly with feelings of liking or dislike to each bit of experience, letting none of it pass without interpretation and assimilation, a life full and satisfying,—indeed a rival of the religious life.

The life of irony has the virtues of the religious life without its defects. It expresses the aggressive virtues without the quiescence of resignation. For the ironist has the courageous spirit, the sympathetic heart and the understanding mind, and can give them full play, unhampered by the searching introspection of the religious mind that often weakens rather than ennobles and fortifies. He is at one with the religious man in that he hates apathy and stagnation, for they mean death. But he is superior in that he attacks apathy of intellect and personality as well as apathy of emotion. He has a great conviction of the significance of all life, the lack of which conviction is the most saddening feature of the religious temperament. The religious man pretends that every aspect of life has meaning for him, but in practice he constantly minimizes the noisier and vivider elements. He is essentially an aristocrat in his interpretation of values, while the ironist is incorrigibly a democrat. Religion gives a man an intimacy with a few selected and rarified virtues and moods, while irony makes him a friend of the poor and lowly among spiritual things. When the religious man is healing and helping, it is at the expense of his spiritual comfort; he must tear himself away from his companions and go out grimly and sacrificingly into the struggle. The ironist, living his days among the humbler things, feels no such severe call to service. And yet the ironist, since he has no citadel of truth to defend, is really the more adventurous. Life, not fixed in predestined formulas or measurable by fixed, immutable standards, is fluid, rich and exciting. To the ironist it is both discovery and creation. His courage seeks out the obscure places of human personality, and his sympathy and understanding create new interests and enthusiasms in the other minds upon which they play. And these new interests in turn react upon his own life, discovering unexpected vistas there, and creating new insight into the world that he lives in. That democratic, sympathetic outlook upon the feelings and thoughts and actions of men and women is the life of irony.