Youth and Life

by Randolph Silliman Bourne

FOOTNOTES:

[2] The Atlantic Monthly, February, 1911.

III
THE VIRTUES AND THE SEASONS OF LIFE

Each season of life has its proper virtues, as each season of the year has its own climate and temperature. If virtue is the excellent working of the soul, then youth, middle age, and old age, all have their peculiar ways of working excellently. When we speak of a virtuous life, we should mean, not a life that has shown one single thread of motive and attitude running through it, but rather one that has varied with the seasons, as spring grows gently into summer and summer into autumn, each season working excellently in respect to the tilling and harvest of the soul. If it is a virtue to be contented in old age, it is no virtue to be contented in youth; if it is a virtue for youth to be bold and venturesome, it is the virtue of middle life to take heed and begin to gather up the lines and nets so daringly cast by youth into the sea of life. A virtuous life means a life responsive to its powers and its opportunities, a life not of inhibitions, but of a straining up to the limit of its strength. It means doing every year what is fitting to be done at that year to enhance or conserve one’s own life or the happiness of those around one. Virtue is a word that abolishes duty. For duty has steadily fallen into worse and worse opprobrium; it has come to mean nothing but effort and stress. It implies something that is done rightly, but that cuts straight across the grain of all one’s inclinations and motive forces. It is following the lines of greatest resistance; it is the working of the moral machine with the utmost friction possible. Now there is no doubt that the moral life involves struggle and effort, but it should be the struggle of adequate choice, and not of painful inhibition. We are coming to see that the most effective things we do are those that have some idea of pleasure yoked up with them. In the interests of moral efficiency, the ideal must be the smooth and noiseless workings of the machine, and not the rough and grinding movements that we have come to associate with the word “duty.” For the emphasis on the negative duty we must substitute emphasis on the positive virtue. For virtue is excellence of working, and all excellence is pleasing. When we know what are the virtues appropriate to each age of life, we can view the moral life in a new light. It becomes not a claim upon us of painful obligation, but a stimulus to excellent spontaneity and summons to self-expression.

In childhood we acquire the spiritual goods that we shall take with us through life; in youth we test our acquisitions and our tools, selecting, criticizing, comparing; in old age, we put them away gently into the attic of oblivion or retire them honorably, full of years and service. Our ideas, however, of what those spiritual goods were that childhood acquired have been very much confused. We have imagined that we could give the child “the relish of right and wrong,” as Montaigne calls it. The attempt has usually been made to train up the child in the moral life, by telling him from his earliest years what was right and what was wrong. It was supposed that in this way he absorbed right principles that would be the guiding springs of his youthful and later life. The only difficulty, of course, with this theory is that the moral life hardly begins before the stresses and crises of youth at all. For really moral activity implies choice and it implies significant choice; and the choices of the child are few in number and seldom significant. You can tell a child that a certain thing is wrong, and he will believe it, but his belief will be a purely mechanical affair, an external idea, which is no more woven into the stuff of his life than is one of those curious “post-hypnotic suggestions,” that psychologists tell about, where the subject while hypnotized is told to do something at a certain time after he awakes. When the time comes he does it without any consciousness of the reason and without any immediate motive. Now most moral ideas in a child’s mind are exactly similar to these suggestions. They seem to operate with infallible accuracy, and we say,—“What a good child!” As a fact the poor child is as much under an alien spell as the subject of the hypnotist. Now all this sort of hypnotized morality the younger generation wants to have done with. It demands a morality that is glowing with self-consciousness, that is healthy with intelligence. It refuses to call the “good” child moral at all; it views him as a poor little trained animal, that is doomed for the rest of his life to go through mechanical motions and moral tricks at the crack of the whip of a moral code or religious authority. From home and Sunday-school, children of a slightly timid disposition get moral wounds, the scars of which never heal. They enter a bondage from which they can never free themselves; their moral judgment in youth is warped and blighted in a thousand ways, and they pass through life, seemingly the most moral of men and women, but actually having never known the zest of true morality, the relish of right and wrong. The best intentions of parents and teachers have turned their characters into unnatural channels from which they cannot break, and fixed unwittingly upon them senseless inhibitions and cautions which they find they cannot dissolve, even when reason and common sense convince them that they are living under an alien code. Looked upon from this light, childish goodness and childish conscientiousness is an unhealthy and even criminal forcing of the young plant, the hot-house bringing to maturity of a young soul whose sole business is to grow and learn. When moral instruction is given, a criminal advantage is taken of the child’s suggestibility, and all possibility of an individual moral life, growing naturally and spontaneously as the young soul meets the real emergencies and problems that life will present to it, is lost. If, as we are coming more and more to realize, the justification of knowledge is that it helps us to get along with and enjoy and grapple with the world, so the justification of virtue is that it enables us to get along with and enjoy and grapple with the spiritual world of ideals and feelings and qualities. We should be as careful about giving a child moral ideas that will be of no practical use to him as we are in giving him learning that will be of no use to him.

The virtues of childhood, then, we shall not find in the moral realm. The “good” child is not cultivated so much to-day as he was by the former generation, whose one aim in education and religion was to bind the young fast in the fetters of a puritan code; but he is still, in well-brought-up families, an appalling phenomenon. The child, who at the age of five has a fairly complete knowledge of what God wants him and all around him to do and not to do, is an illustration of the results of the confusion of thought that would make childhood instead of youth the battle-ground of the moral life. We should not dismiss such a child as quaint, for in him have been sowed the seeds of a general obscurantism and conservatism that will spread like a palsy over his whole life. The acceptance of moral judgments that have no vital meaning to the young soul will mean in later life the acceptance of ideas and prejudices in political and religious and social matters that are uncriticized and unexamined. The “good” child grows up into the conventional bigoted man. The duties and tastes which are inculcated into him in childhood, far from aiding the “excellent workings of his soul,” clog and rust it, and prevent the fine free expression of its individuality and genius. For the child has not yet the material of experience that will enable him to get the sense of values which is at the bottom of what we call the spiritual life. And it is this sense that is so easily dulled, and that must be so carefully protected against blunting. That the child cannot form moral judgments for himself, however, does not mean that they must be formed for him by others; it means that we must patiently wait until he meets the world of vivid contrasts and shocks and emergencies that is youth. It is not repairing his lack of moral sensitiveness to get him to repeat parrot-like the clean-cut and easily learned taboos and permissions of the people around him. To get him to do this is exactly like training an animal to bolt any kind of food. The child, however, has too weak a stomach to digest very much of the moral pabulum that is fed him. The inevitable result is a moral indigestion, one form of which is the once fashionable sense of sin. The youth, crammed with uncriticized taboos delivered to him with the awful prestige of an Almighty God, at a certain age revolts, and all the healthy values of life turn sour within him. The cure for this spiritual dyspepsia is called conversion, but it is a question whether the cure is not often worse than the disease. For it usually means that the relish of right and wrong, which had suddenly become a very real thing, has been permanently perverted in a certain direction. By a spiritual operation, the soul has been forced to digest all this strange food, and acquires the ability to do so forever after. Those who do not suffer this operation pass through life with an uneasiness of spirit, the weight and burden of an imperfectly assimilated moral life. Few there are who are able to throw off the whole soddenness, and if they do they are fortunate if they are not left without any food at all. Religious teachers have always believed that all these processes were necessary for the soul’s health. They have believed that it was better to have mechanical morals than no morals at all. When the younger generation sees the damage such morals work, it would prefer to have none.

Discarding the “good” child, then, we will find the virtues of childhood in that restless, pushing, growing curiosity that is the characteristic of every healthy little boy or girl. The child’s life is spent in learning his way around the world; in learning the ropes of things, the handles and names of whatever comes within the range of his experience. He is busy acquiring that complex bundle of common-sense knowledge that underlies all our grown-up acts, and which has become so automatic with us that it hardly seems possible to us that we have slowly acquired it all. We do not realize that thousands of facts and habits, which have become stereotyped and practically unconscious in our minds, are the fresh and vital experiences of the mind of the little child. We cannot put ourselves back into that world where the absorbing business is to give things a position and a name and to learn all the little obvious facts about the things in the house and the yard and the village, and in that far land of mystery beyond. What sort of sympathy can we have with these little people,—we, to whom all this naïve world of place and nomenclature is so familiar as to seem intuitive? We should have to go back to a world where every passing railroad train was a marvel and a delight, where a walk to the village meant casting ourselves adrift into an adventurous country where anything was likely to happen and where all calculations of direction or return were upset. It takes children a long time to get accustomed to the world. This common workaday knowledge of ours seems intuitive to us only because we had so many years during which it was reiterated to us, and not because we were unusually sensitive to impressions. Children often seem almost as stupid as any young animal, and to require long practice before they know their way around in the world, although, once obtained, this common sense is never forgotten. That child is virtuous who acquires all he can of it.

This curiosity of childhood makes children the first scientists. They begin, as soon as their eyes are open, dissolving this confused mystery of the world, distinguishing and classifying its parts according to their interests and needs. They push on and on, ever widening the circle, and ever bringing more and more of their experience under the subjugation of their understanding. They begin the process that the scientist completes. As children, after several years we came to know our house and yard, although the attic and cellar were perhaps still dim and fearsome places. Inside the household things were pretty well tabulated and rationalized. It was only when we went outside the gate that we might expect adventures to happen. We should have been very much shocked to see the fire leap from the stove and the bread from the table, as they did in the “Blue Bird,” but in walking down to the village we should not have been surprised to see a giant or a fairy sitting on the green. When we became familiar with the village, the fairies were, of course, banished to remoter regions, until they finally vanished altogether. But it is not so long ago that I lost the last vague vestige of a feeling that there were fairies in England.

The facility, one might almost say skill, which children show in getting lost, is the keynote of childhood’s world. For they have no bearings among the unfamiliar, no principles for the solution of the unknown. In their accustomed realm they are as wise and canny and free from superstition as we are in ours. We, as grown-ups, have not acquired any magical release from fantasy. The only difference is that we are accustomed to make larger hazards of faith that things will repeat themselves, and that we have a wider experience to check off our novelties by. We have charted most of our world; we unfortunately have no longer any world to get lost in. To be sure, we have opened up perhaps an intangible world of philosophy and speculation, which childhood does not dream of, and heaven knows we can get lost there! But the thing is different. The adventure of childhood is to get lost here in this everyday world of common sense which is so familiar to us. To become really as little children we should have to get lost again here. The best substitute we can give ourselves is to keep exploring the new spiritual world in which we may find ourselves in youth and middle life, pushing out ever, as the child does, our fringe of mystery. And we can gain the gift of wonder, something that the child does not have. He is too busy drinking in the facts to wonder about them, or to wonder about what is beyond them. We may count ourselves fortunate, however, that we are able to retain the child’s virtue of curiosity, and transmute it into the beauty of spiritual wonder.

It is facts and not theories that the child is curious about, and rightly. He cannot assimilate moral theories, nor can he assimilate any other kind of theories. It is his virtue to learn how the world runs; youth will be time enough to philosophize about that running. It is the immediate and the present that interest children, and they are omnivorous with regard to any facts about either. What they hear about the world they accept without question. We often think when we are telling them fairy stories or animal stories that we are exercising their poetic imagination; but from their point of view we are telling them sober facts about the world they live in. We are often surprised, too, at the apathy they show in the midst of wonders that we point out to them. They are wonders to us because we appreciate the labor or the genius that has produced them. In other words, we have added a value to them. But it is just this value which the child-mind does not get and can never get. To the child they are not surprising, but simply some more information about his world. All is grist that comes to the child’s mill. Everything serves to plot and track for him a new realm of things as they are.