Elder, Not Better

DURING the last year or two, the public has been abundantly supplied with discussions and controversies, spoken or printed, on the subject of the Rising versus the Risen Generation, defenders for each side — according to the age of the special pleader — taking the floor by turns. Like the weather, this has proved a subject in which everyone is interested, because everyone is involved; for those of us who are neither rising nor risen may be said to be setting, and interest in that phenomenon is not confined to hens, or the sun, when it concerns one’s own decline and fall.

Antagonism between generations seems to be inevitable, and may as well be recognized and dealt with, not denied and smoothed over, just because we wish that it did not exist. The old and the young are as far apart in point of view, code, and standard, as if they belonged to different races. An Englishman and a Frenchman are not more unlike than an old man and a young man; and it is as impossible to interpret one to the other. A different language is spoken in both cases; the morality is different; the temperaments are divided by a channel as wide as the Straits of Dover; the ideals are not the same; the sense of humor, the sense of taste, and the scale of values are totally dissimilar.

Those who belong either to the Anglo-Saxon or to the Latin race would naturally have a prejudice in favor of their own people; and the same thing applies to age and youth. Those who belong to neither of the two races may yet have an inborn predilection either for the Englishman or for the Frenchman, just as those who are on the borderland between age and youth — who stand nicely balanced in the middle of the see-saw on which the two extremes are perpetually tilting — may have a temperamental sympathy either with the standards of a day that is dying or with those of a day in its infancy. It is just as futile to argue about the relative merits of age and youth as it is to discuss the respective virtues of two totally dissimilar nations.

Let us frankly — if regretfully — accept as a premise that the two generations are natural enemies, suspicious of each other, critical, distrustful, unsympathetic, and hostile. It is extremely probable that, as long as life endures, these two great opposing armies will occupy the field and will occupy it exclusively. The grandparents and grandchildren count only as a sort of stage mob that murmurs approval or scorn; the real combatants are fathers and mothers versus sons and daughters.

Of course there are countless individual exceptions to this rule of general hostility, just as there are innumerable instances of warm friendship and mutual admiration between nations temperamentally opposed; but such exceptions do not affect the fact that a state of war, or, at best, of armed neutrality, exists between the old and the young.

I am not pleading for ‘a better understanding,’ nor do I dare to hope for a real entente cordiale: but I do believe in the practical advantages of a social alliance between these natural enemies.

There are many unseen forces drawn up against the two opposing armies, — forces potent, though invisible, — which are hostile to both generations, and which are recognized by old and young alike as being menaces to civilization and to life itself. Is it intelligent for soldiers to begin to fight each other when the only hope of the survival of either army depends on annihilating the unseen enemies of which both sides are equally conscious? What does it matter whether the invisible foes are called by different names by their opposing forces? ‘The Enemy’ and ‘L’ennemi’ mean the same thing to each army; so perhaps do ‘Sinner’ and ‘Fake’ to each generation. Age may incline toward a rather grandiloquent battle cry. It may like to advance to the trumpet call of ‘Down with Corruption! Forward with the Standard of Truth!’ while Youth merely sets its grim jaw and mutters, ‘To hell with shams!’ (murmuring under its breath, ‘and to the same place with the old hypocrites who preach about what they don’t understand!’)

What does it matter if, as an incentive to the imagination of the old, one banner bears the device ‘ Idealism,’ and the other the stark word ‘Realism’? To noncombatants, too feeble for fighting, by reason either of extreme age or extreme youth, the word on the wind-tossed banners looks much the same from a distance.

Of what consequence is it that one army chooses to employ bayonets and the other poisonous gases? Let each use the weapon it prefers — Age the traditional, Youth the experimental. Let the band of one side play hymns and the other jazz: each speaks to the generation that understands the tune. Perhaps Age advances into the strife with heart uplifted by prayer, while Youth flings out a curse from its cynical lips; yet Youth goes forward no less manfully. There even come moments when, through some strange mirage of the spirit, the fighting generations seem — each to the other — to be retreating.

‘Stop praying and advance!’ cry the young men; ‘can’t you old crabs see that you are going backwards?’

‘O foolish, misguided youths!’ moan the elders in despair; ‘can you not realize that your blasphemies and your ribald songs are leading you back into barbarism?’

When there was a world war, the Englishman and the Frenchman forgot their differences and fought side by side, each contributing to the defeat of a common foe qualities which the other nation could not bring. If they had stopped to analyze and discuss, to compare and criticize, as the two generations are doing to-day, the result of the great cataclysm would have been even more disastrous than it is at present. The two nations — temporary allies — were just as different during the war as before and after it, but they had sufficient intelligence to see that as allies they could gain something which as opponents they would lose.

So, in the name of common sense, is it not time for Age to stop shaking its palsied head at the irreverence of the collegian and the frivolity of the flapper; and for Youth to cease scoffing at the archaic standards of fast-fossilizing fogies? Is it not the part of expediency for the young iconoclast and the hard-shelled conservative to form an alliance based on differences, rather than to continue the fight without an end, or to attempt to create a fictitious friendship based on nothing at all?

When the war against all the evils of civilization ceases, the old and the young can take arms against each other once more; but, meanwhile, let us favor disarmament to the extent of scrapping the cutting remarks with which the antagonists seek to wound one another, and quietly remove inflammable material stored in magazines.

Perhaps crabbed Age and Youth could live together if Youth would refrain from hurling that insulting adjective at Age; and if Age, in its turn, would — like Cassius — modestly proclaim itself an elder soldier, not a better.

Cannot extremes meet in alliance, though not in friendship?