Where Are You Going, My Pretty Maid?

CITIZENS of the United States must be weary, and more than weary, of hearing visitors from Europe describe the impressions of youth which they receive from that great country. They must, however, also be aware that in the last decade the accent of that comparison has changed. The faint superiority, the unuttered contempt, that lurked in it has gone and is replaced by something much nearer to envy. The European may still feel he is older and wiser, and in a sense more ‘civilized’; but he is no longer so sure that it is an advantage to be old, wise, or even ‘civilized.’ About ‘ civilization’ he is conscious of the most corroding doubt; for age he has not the audacity to put up any kind of defense. He looks at America as he looks at the young girl at home who makes him feel so awkward, timid, out of place, and ineffective, and his spontaneous condemnations die upon his lips. The girl, in either case, seems to him just a trifle vulgar; but he is no longer so sure as he used to be that vulgarity matters, while she overrides any such judgments by her apparent assurance as to where she is going, little as he can discern her purpose or direction. She interests him ever so much more than he interests her, and he knows the devastating reaction of that.

Of course youth has always obsessed its elders. To-day, however, for various reasons, the obsession has a special sharpness, a special discomfort. As, in 1914, the young men were summoned to ‘save us’ materially, so, after 1918, they and their sisters were called upon to save us morally from the results of the work we had put upon them. The first call blotted out a generation — that being what is meant in action by the ‘biological necessity of war.’ The results of the second are more obscure. In the main it seems to have blotted us out, and left the young generation of to-day as a great, accusing question mark.

‘Are Parents People? ’ asks the title of a film now running in London. It puts, with frank cruelty, the point of view of many of their children. Even the asking of the question, indeed, represents a compliment not too often paid nowadays by youth to middle age. Kindly, but complete, disregard is the characteristic attitude — and it hurts. For all practical purposes youth lives in a world of its own, confident that there is no other of any account. Once it fought its elders; now it leaves them out. Once it revolted; now it goes its own way. Revolt was a less painful, a more tolerable relation than this relegation to nonexistence. Revolt left the parent in the centre of the stage; now he is not so much as hovering in the wings. Most keenly does this inattention cut the parent who feels and, as years used to be counted, still is on the border line of youth; who feels and, he flatters himself, looks young or, at worst, middle-aged; and who makes desperate efforts to ‘keep up.’ It is precisely to these shadowy people of the middle distance — parents and relatives, friends and would-be companinns de voyage, in the late thirties and early forties — that the young man and woman of to-day extend the finest expression of a contemptuous tolerance.

The young fascinate their elders. Are they not as near as we can get to the future? They hold the secrets we can never know; will see a world shrouded from us. Once, the relation of interest between youth and middle age was to some degree reciprocal. Of that reciprocity little or nothing seems to be left. In what we might tell them about the past they show no concern; they ask no questions; to us they have no impulse to communicate.

This separation is not casual or superficial. It is a punishment, not an accident, and we shall not begin to understand the young until we face that disagreeable truth. We have failed them and they have passed judgment, complete and sweeping. To all intents and purposes, they have wiped us off. In what we have to say, to them or of them, they are not interested. Their attitude toward us is one of entire inattention. Useless for us to criticize them, though of course we do. We declaim against their crudity — as if youth were not, by definition, crude — and against their harsh lack of charm — as if they were out to charm us! They care nothing for us and they do charm one another. We regret the standardization which reduces them all to a mosaic in which we see little interest or beauty; it is a pity, we cry, that the young of both sexes should approximate so drearily to an outline as undistinguished as it is uniform; we are tired of the narrowly built, up-anddown youth and maiden whose closely cut heads, angular action, and pinkydrab coloring make a patterned world whose design bores by repetition. It shocks us to discover that the demand for sex equality, which we supported in the fond belief that the women would impose their chaster standard on the men, turns out in practice, and at the moment, to mean that women claim and exercise for themselves the freedoms they used to deprecate in the other sex. All our plaints and complaints resound on empty air; they go their way, with the smile of kindly contempt on their lips. And we have deserved that smile. That is why it hurts us.

We want, or say we want, to understand them, little as they care to understand us. If we mean what we say we must interrogate their detachment and see its cause, unpleasant as the process is bound to be for us. It involves the substitution for the casual condemnation of the young that passes current so easily in middle-aged circles to-day, all over the world, of a painful condemnation of ourselves. Light-heartedly we all endorse the view that it is good to see ourselves as others see us; here is our chance to see ourselves as the young do, and as history is only too likely to do also.

How do they see us? The answer can be put in a word: as frauds. They see us as standing in public for ideas and ideals which in private mean nothing to us whatever; as snuffling moralities in talk upon which we trample in action ; as teaching them notions by which we neither live nor attempt to live; as saying one thing and doing another all the time. Mr. J. A. Hobson stated the other day that ‘ psychology has almost wiped out hypocrisy.’ He was talking of the psychology by which the young live, not of that of their elders as seen by them. True, the experience of disappointment and disillusionment is the experience of every young person since the beginning of time; we have been through it ourselves. In Trotter’s Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, a book which is still far less widely read than it deserves to be, a sufficient outline of its features is given: —

The child receives from the herd the doctrines, let us say, that truthfulness is the most valuable of all the virtues, that honesty is the best policy, that to the religious man death has no terrors, and that there is in store a future life of perfect happiness and delight. And yet experience tells him with persistence that truthfulness as often as not brings him punishment, that his dishonest playfellow has as good if not a better time than he, that the religious man shrinks from death with as great a terror as the unbeliever, is as broken-hearted by bereavement, and as determined to continue his hold on this imperfect life rather than trust himself to what he declares to be the certainty of future bliss. . . . The mental unrest which we, with a certain cynicism, regard as normal to adolescence is evidence of the heavy handicap we lay on the developing mind in forcing it to attempt to assimilate with experience the dicta of herd suggestion.

For the present generation of young men and women, this general experience, with its suffering and loss, has been exaggerated and sharpened by the war. Growing up, as they did, during the years not of the early glow of false idealism but of the visible exposure of that idealism by the facts, these young people view the elders who accepted, gave currency to, and to a large extent were sacrificed to, its shams as the feeblest kind of frauds — those who are found out. They saw the Settlement corresponding to the Secret Treaties rather than to the Fourteen Points; they apply the bitter corollary of that demonstration to any and every moral precept or ideal offered for their enthusiasm. Those who were taken in were fools or hypocrites; to us they offer that agreeable dilemma and condemn us unsparingly, on whichever horn we elect to be impaled. If we in our turn find them wearisomely ‘clever,’ we have ourselves to thank. We ate the sour grapes; their teeth are on edge.

I know that the war, from every point of view, happened to Europe rather than to America; that the wounds it has left, and the whole searing experience, cut deeper into the old continent than into the young. Yet, if the policies which manured it belonged to us, the soil out of which it grew was the same in America and in Europe; it was a phenomenon of a common ‘civilization.’ Mid if America has not, to the same degree as has Europe, paid the price in the obliteration of a generation, there is less difference, so far as moral and mental effects go, than perhaps there ought to have been. Getting, in the nature of the case, less of the fact, the United States got a disproportionate share of the psychological repercussion. Distance from the scene exaggerated the impact of disintegrating moral reaction. A young country inevitably illustrates, with special clearness, the point of view of youth; and into the point of view of youth as we have it to-day the war has entered as the main coloring and characterizing element. Internationalism, moreover, is a force to be counted with. The very events that appeared to deny it in action have only proved it the more potent in effect.

‘Growing up’ being at any time a process, normally, of doubt and disillusionment, it is not surprising that the attitude of the young man and the young woman to-day is mainly negative. They meet any commands and prohibitions handed across to them by their elders with a smilingly skeptical ‘No.’ So far as what we have got to give them goes, then, the attitude of the young is almost entirely negative. They do not accept or endorse our prohibitions. The other day, in the chapel of a great Eastern American university, I heard an eloquent and effective preacher address a gathering of students. His text was ‘temptation.’

He was, I thought, wise and liberal in his suggestions to them as to how temptation ought to be dealt with, and, above all, in the technique of positive substitution he put before them. But he made one assumption which I fear invalidated nearly everything that he said. He assumed that when he spoke of ‘temptation’ the word had some sort of definite meaning for his hearers, and raised before their eyes a series, possibly an attractive series, of things that they knew they ought neither to do nor to want to do. But for the young people he was speaking to there is no such series. They know, of course, that there are certain things, even certain classes of things, labeled ‘wrong’ by their elders, which they have at one stage or another been told by them not to do. But for themselves they dismiss the whole of that with an amiable shrug. They do not take any of it seriously. They do not conceive that their elders mean it. They know that they do not act upon it. We bluff. Once and for all, they have called our bluff.

This rejection carries a long way. On examination the ‘system’ by which we thought we lived proves to be no system at all. It is gone; nothing has taken its place. To-day, as novelists, newspapers, preachers, and sociologists are ready to tell us, there is no valid moral code, none that our young people accept. ‘In personal conduct,’ so Professor Graham Wallas writes in his latest book, ‘young men and women find that new knowledge has shaken traditional sexual and family morality; but that there is as yet no sign that a period of ethical reconstruction is at hand.’

When people talk about ‘morals’ they nearly always mean one limited department thereof — that governing the relations of the sexes. Women used to be supposed to be the guardians of this morality. No one could see the typical young girl of to-day in any such light. The taste of many young people of either sex revolts against promiscuity; it does not attract them; but they hardly condemn it in others and, in any event, would refuse to take any more definite stand than that of a purely personal æsthetic. ‘Wrong? No — rather messy.’ That is about all one can get. The mother of a large family told me the other day that, when she meekly remonstrated with a daughter who was setting forth on a holiday of a conspicuously free kind, with a married man, the girl laughed aloud at her timid suggestion of possible consequences and remarked, ‘Oh, you have forgotten. I know how to take care of myself.’ There, so far as she was concerned, was an end of it; and her mother, recovering from her stupefaction, had to admit that she simply did not know how to make her feel that there was something wrong in her conduct, and would have been hard put to it to explain wherein it precisely consisted.

Of our confusion of values the young are, to a tragic extent, the victims. Are there any signs that they are finding, or even seeking, a way out of the fog for themselves? I think there are, and that it is by attending to them that we shall get as near as the difference in generation allows to the mind of these mysterious young fellow citizens of ours.

In a more or less dormant capacity, I was present, recently, when a group of young persons — in that dim hour on Sunday evening when conversation, on some irresistible, inherited impulse, turns on to ‘serious’ lines — fell to discussing, with entire frankness, whether there were any groups or classes of action that could be called wrong; or whether one had to assess actions entirely on one’s knowledge of the individual and the special circumstances of each particular case. Instances of murder, adultery, and theft, were examined, in connection with acquaintances of reputable social standing. There emerged a general inclination to think that to take the life of another was wrong, especially when done on a large, public scale as in war, where, too, the killing is motiveless. On the other hand there were persons who were much better dead; what kept one from killing them was not any principle, but a predilection in favor of continuing to exist one’s self. In other words, as one charming young girl put it, sheer cowardice. Of the involuntary transfer of property there was no disapproval, or of the voluntary transfer of partners.

‘These old words are mostly only counters,’ said another young thing. ‘People used them because it saved the trouble of thinking — and they wanted to be condemning other folk; it made them feel good.’

‘And we feel good without, so we don’t need them,’ laughed another.

‘Yes,’ said a third, ‘but that does n’t carry us very far. Do we really know, any better than they did, why we do things?’

‘Surely that doesn’t matter. So long as we can find enough things we want to do.’

For a moment they thought over this. Then the girl who had raised the question ‘Why?’ took up the word again.

‘I’m not satisfied with that; as a matter of fact, I’m getting to the end of the things I want to do. I’ve done all the things I’ve been told not to — and they are n’t so amusing as they looked. There’s a screw loose somewhere. I am beginning to be bored — and that’s ghastly.’ She looked round, and her companions admitted that it was a sensation not unknown to them too. ‘Seems to me,’ she went on, ‘as if there might be some sense in this right and wrong business. If we could get it on to a real footing, that might get us out of this tired feeling. Suppose we were to pick out somebody who is decent, and find out what it is about him. Lots of these old men we’ve been talking about seem to me to be ugly. But I am not clear as to why, and I’m not sure, even, that I know what I mean by it. There’s such a lot of things one says, without any actual meaning attached to them. Anyhow, it’s too easy, just wiping them off the slate; we have got to put something on it — and what? I don’t know.’

No one was at once able to help her there; though evidently some responsive chord was struck in the company by the case as thus put to it. Silence descended on them, for quite a considerable time. The bright cleverness that had marked the early stages of talk had worn itself out; under cover of the gathering dusk each appeared to be following out unfamiliar and yet not totally new thoughts.

In the pause, I puzzled over them. None of these young persons was over five and twenty. In the interchange between them it would have been impossible to separate a masculine or feminine note or attitude; they handed out ideas and pleasantries on an entirely equal footing, and the ideas showed no sex bias. Though not solemn, they were certainly serious enough. Of the honesty of their expressions, so far as they went, I have no doubt. That, however, did not carry me very far. Honesty, after all, is no simple, easy virtue; the fine flower of cultivated intellectual rectitude, it requires a disinterested experience as well as disinterested thinking. They had all had their experiences, these boys and girls, but for experience they were inadequately equipped. For that they have to thank the selfishly soft education we have given them. More and more, the hard elements, the disciplinary and unattractive processes, have been cut out of the curriculum. School is to be ‘pleasant,’ though life, we know, is not; education has been made into a form of play, although nothing worth while is got without drudgery, and the one lesson worth learning is the acceptance of difficulty as the price of achievement. Parents who combine this ‘kindly’ practice with the proclamation of the fallacy that youth is a time of happiness have small right to complain when their children emerge at once hard and superficial. Inevitably girl and boy look at life from the standpoint of what it is going to give her and him. In the vast majority of cases it is not going to give very much to her or to him and what it does give has to be paid for.

At last a bright-eyed girl, who, as I thought, had not before spoken, came up to the surface.

‘You can’t act as if you were alone in the world,’ she murmured with naÏve profundity.

Another girl pounced on this pearl.

‘No,’ she exclaimed eagerly. ‘Indeed, thinking over the decent people I know, that may be the key. They remember other people and behave in such a way that if everybody behaved like them the whole thing would be bearable.’

‘And as it is, they get “put upon” by everyone they know. I know the sort of person you mean. It’s all right for the others, that sort of thing, but pretty thin for you.’

‘Yes, so long as the others don’t act in the same way; but supposing they did?’

‘But, look here,’ cried another, ‘that’s Christianity.’ Her tone was horror-struck.

‘Well, if it is,’ cried the other, with fine courage, ‘are we to be afraid of a word ? ’

Plainly, however, they were; and the supper bell was hailed with patent relief, as if delivering them from a great danger. All the same, they will come back to it; all the time their minds are hovering about it. Not, perhaps, in these terms; but in the end in terms that, save for words, come very near to it. Throughout, I was forcibly reminded of those strangely moving lines of Robert Bridges: —

They were in the dark, and very unwilling to embark on the sea of moral speculation. Yet it drew them, it is drawing them; they cannot but face it. Moreover — and this, I think, is the point — they are not alone. The young people — and the young women, I believe, are, however unwilling and unconscious, the leaders in this — are setting out together on the search for standards of right and wrong that may be valid for them. Their hope and strength are that they are doing it together and that they are looking for positive, not negative, rules. They hardly know that they are doing it; you certainly will not get from them an admission that this is their enterprise; but, impelled by a dim sense of responsibility born of our failure, they are doing it. That we cannot help them is our tragedy; but at least we need not hinder. Useless to ask them where they are going. They cannot tell us — and would not if they could. They do not know. They would deny, indignantly, that their eyes are on the stars. We shall do them a great injustice if we assume that they are on the mud.