“That is a false and vicious humility.”
“No, I assure you, very genuine, however vicious. It came over me in the spring several years ago in a vision. I happened one day to observe in my garden a large white cat stalking with soft experienced tread under the lilacs, on the lookout for young robins making their trial flight. Being of a somewhat analogical turn of mind, and having then a high conceit of the wisdom of our generation, I said to myself: ‘The garden is a symbol of the world. The wise cat is the old professor. The fledgling robin is the young student.’ As I murmured the last word, the white cat made a flying leap for the nestling. It proved to be, however, an adult wren, pert and elusive, which hopped just one spray higher and twittered derision. The cat walked off crestfallen, muttering: ‘Such wise birds! I have never known a season when birds were wise so young.’”
“Well?”
“Well, I really trust these ‘wise birds’ nowadays much further than you do.”
“Won’t you explain why?” said Cornelia.
“Let me tell you another story. At a neighborhood party recently, where there was dancing, and the very youngest generation was present, I was greatly flattered by receiving from Adelaide, a young lady of five years, marked attentions which on previous occasions had been directed to Bertram, a far more plausible person than I in all respects, and, moreover, only thrice the age of Adelaide. I said, ‘I thought you were devoted to Bertram.’ Instantly she replied: ‘I was. But I am not interested in Bertram any longer. I know all about him.’ At the age of five, don’t you see, she has already begun to ‘sip the foam of many lives.’ I happened to be, shall I say, the coca-cola of the evening. But I know that I shall be sipped and discarded. Already Adelaide has become critical, fastidious, wary; she will not for long be taken in.”
“Well?” again from Cornelia, with a hint of irritation.
“I mean to insist,” I explained cautiously, “that such sentimentalists as you and I seldom do justice to the hard, clear-eyed maturity—of a sort—which our young people have attained by pooh-poohing our sentimentality and subjectivity and adopting what Santayana calls a simple ‘animal faith’ in the material surfaces of things.”
“Just what do you mean?” Cornelia inquired,—sharply and scornfully,—“by ‘hard, clear-eyed maturity’? I have no such feeling about my own children. My own son and daughter are being brought up as I was brought up. Well-bred young people to-day differ in no essential respect from well-bred people twenty years ago. What some idiots try to make us believe is a change of standards is not a change of standards. It is merely a horrid confusion, due to the fact that a great many ill-bred people are expressing themselves.”
“That in itself,” I said, “implies a change in conditions, if not in standards. There is, as you say, a ‘horrid confusion.’ The confusion is due to the fact that the well-bred young people are now applauding the ill-bred old people. That is really significant. When the well-bred young people begin to desert, it is all up with the Old Guard. That indicates either a revolt or a revolution. You must remember, Cornelia, that one half of history is an account of the struggle made by your class to keep the rest out; and the other half of history is an account of how the rest are getting in. If you are now in the presence of a revolt by a weak body of outsiders, you may still effectively oppose it. But if it is a revolution including your own household, you had better prepare to support the best elements in the de facto government—in the literary no less than in the political republic.”