A New Generation in Britain

I

HAS opinion in America realized that a new generation has grown to manhood and womanhood since the war? It is certain that we in England have not. It is four years since the Armistice, but we are still concerned, not merely with war’s effects, — they, alas! will be only too apparent in another twenty years, — but with immediate post-war problems. All around us are reminders that tend to make it seem of yesterday. The newspapers are still announcing the sale of war stocks. ‘Ex-officers wanting places’ is still the heading of a melancholy column of their advertisements. The atmosphere remains, staler and less healthy, as of a room in which cigars have been smoked overnight, which induces a feeling of nausea when entered in the morning, but which is, after all, that of the night before. The sashes of the windows are stiff, and we have not the strength or energy to open them and let in fresh air. So we have to continue breathing the old.

We talk now, as we talked in 1919, of the war generation — of those who returned from the battle and reëntered civil life — as the young, with the new battle of peace in front of them. The conception is, of course, by no means altogether false. Many who saw service are still in the early twenties, while most, whatever their age, have a tough battle to face. But the volunteers of 1914 are, at youngest, nearly thirty, many almost middle-aged. Many and many of those of whom we say that their battle of peace is to be fought have already gone down in the struggle. Some are dead, others have no fight left in them. We think, to take a single example, of men who are now soldiers as having fought in the war. Those who saw infantry battalions recently on parade, about to proceed to the East, noted that seventy or eighty per cent of the men were without war medals, and that the majority of the subaltern officers were in the same case.

If we turn to sport, to those sports which interest the greatest number of people and at the same time demand the greatest strength, agility, and endurance, — football played under its two rules, — we see, one by one, those whose names were famous before the war disappearing. Again, when we speak of ‘the discontent of the young,’ or of ‘the conflict between youth and age,’ it is always the returned soldiers whom we have in mind. But, in fact, there is a new discontent and the likelihood of a new conflict, far bitterer than any there may have been between their elders and ex-soldiers, who, in face of intolerable sufferings, remain the besttempered, the honestest, the staunchest, and the least-complaining class in the nation.

For there is a new generation, of persons now ‘of age,’ socially and politically, who took no part whatever in the war, with a vastly greater number who had a hand only in the concluding phases and so cannot realize the significance of its strain. There are already men commanding others in industry, writing articles in the press to influence or instruct others, who had not left school when the war ended. There are women married, and the mothers of children, who were themselves children of twelve or fourteen when it began. But those of the postwar generation who are thus, so to speak, established in life, are still comparatively few in numbers. The point which I desire to emphasize, which has certainly not yet struck the popular imagination, is that there is a great band of young men and women, who were merely observers of the war, who are now adults and eagerly claiming the inheritance of their generation. And I desire to suggest that those who talk of the war generation as bitter, cynical, materialistic, and boorish are under the influence of the not surprising fallacy which I have been examining — that the war ended yesterday instead of four years ago, and that its soldiers are still ‘the young’; and that they are confusing the voices of these men with those of their successors.

There is always a contrast between successive generations, and there are always the praisers of past time who lament the old and have naught but despair with which to greet the new. But, without the smallest study of the new race of young men and women in England, there is good ground for supposing that in its case the contrast would be far more violent than usual, and that it would be marked by characteristics still more regrettable in the eyes of its elders than those of previous generations. The last great series of wars which engaged most of the nations of Europe had remarkable effects upon the succeeding generation, above all in the country whose people had felt it most — France. Those effects can be traced in the work of the great writers who sprang up in a band so glorious after the First Empire. We see them in the poems of Hugo, a democrat, and in the novels of Balzac, a philosophical reactionary. Best of all, perhaps, are they expressed in the opening pages of La Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle, by Alfred de Musset, when he describes the sentiments of those feverish sons, who had seen their fathers perhaps three times in their lives, feverish themselves, broken with fatigue, but keyed to a pitch of tremendous nervous energy by the magnetic influence of the greatest personality the modern world has known. There, at least, is a difference now. The fathers of the last war brought back no burning memory of a Napoleon to inflame their sons. The upheaval, the social disturbance, of the late war takes the place that Napoleon took in the wars that bear his name.

To understand the results, we must try to form a picture of what the war was to boys and girls in their teens in England. For those of us who spent most of the period abroad, and saw life at home during short visits on leave only, this is not easy. We have to add to the evidence of these momentary glimpses that which we have read and the testimony of our womenkind, who were constant eyewitnesses.

One of the first aspects that strikes us is the difference — a difference far greater even than that of ordinary times — between the children of the ‘classes’ and those of the ‘masses.’ To distinguish these, the best dividing line is between those whose education is continued till they are eighteen, and, in a proportion of cases in normal times, till they are from three to five years older; and those whose education comes to an end at the age of fourteen. The latter represent about four fifths of the juvenile population.

It needs little imagination to see that, in a time such as that of the war, this dividing line becomes a real barrier. The smaller section was shut off from many of the war’s influences; the larger was out in midstream, to be touched, pushed, twisted, by every eddying curent.

The boys and girls at boardingschools in the years of war were the better off from the point of view of their moral welfare, but certainly the worse from that of their pleasure in life. From most of the noxious moral diseases abroad they were protected; but they were also denied participation in the excitements, not all of them dangerous or ignoble. School between 1914 and 1918 must have represented a curious existence, for boys above all. One gathers that most of them look back upon their schooldays with less pleasure than their elders profess for that reminiscence. In that period, for instance, the cadet-corps ideal, which year by year had grown in strength, received a blow which put back its clock fifteen years. The grind of that eternal training, purposeless, never to have a value, as it seemed to those who endured it, playing at fighting while others fought, not only bored them, but left to their successors the tradition of that boredom, so that the cadet corps is now, in many schools, no longer ‘the decent thing for a decent chap to be in’ that it was before the war.

There was another feature in their life that induced boredom. All the masters at public schools who were physically fit and of military age were at the war. None of them, had they desired to stay behind, had they found tribunals to grant them exemption, could have kept in hand for a single hour a class of boys in the temper then abroad in England. Now almost all the best influence that comes to boys at school comes from young masters, enthusiastic, unwearied, near to themselves in mind. Their absence was one of the severest handicaps to the publicschool boys of those years.

II

As the boys reached military age and left school, they passed, for the most part, through officers’ training corps into the army. A great proportion of them, who had been taught very inadequately how to live, proved that they knew at least how to die. The girls, who had been subjected to fewer handicaps, were eager also to embark on work connected with the war. That was not difficult. For those who lived in the neighborhood of London it was particularly easy. Government offices seem to have been created or expanded for the express purpose of employing hundreds of thousands, to save them from désœuvrement. That much of the work was urgent, or that it was admirably done, it would be foolish and unfair to deny. It was quite clear, on the other hand, that a vast amount of it could have been dispensed with, and that the proportion of staff and expenses to business carried out would have ruined any commercial firm in three months.

The author of that much-read novel, This Freedom, has touched the subject with his usual flair for the dramatic. The fate of the children who go to the bad has of course been grossly exaggerated by Mr. Hutchinson for the purposes of his story; but his picture of a girl of the upper-middle classes in a Government office, and her sentiments with regard to it, is excellent: —

She loves it. Of course she does n’t love the actual work. Who would? What she loves is the constant titillation of it. The titillation of getting down there of a morning and of the greetings and the meetings and the rapt resumptions of the past day’s fun; the titillation of watching the clock for lunch and of those lunches, here to-day, tomorrow there, and of the rush to get back not too late. The titillation of watching the clock for tea, and of tea, and then, most sharpest titillation of them all, watching the clock for — time! for — off! for out! away!

The positive evils of those vast state caravanserais of young women may have been exaggerated by novelists and journalists. None, at least, can pretend that they represented a good training for any department of life.

The state of the children of the ‘masses’ was far different. They entered the labor-market at fourteen, and lo! a wonder. It was at their feet. They were little kings. In the year 1918, a messenger-boy of fifteen could earn considerably more than his father, an artisan, had been able to gain four years earlier. The tyranny of these youths over their employers was one of the stock jokes of comic papers; but it had some foundation in fact, or it would not have been a good joke. One has heard of cases where boys changed their occupations ten times in a year, sometimes for a mild reprimand, sometimes for an extra half-crown a week, often for the sake of variety.

Meanwhile they saw the ugliest side of the war at home. It was always the ugliest side that was most apparent. To take a single example, who took much note of the soldier on leave who arrived at one London station and departed forthwith from another to his home? Yet that was the case with ninety-nine in a hundred. Our youth, in all probability, hardly ever saw him. But, as he returned from his work, he did see, outside Waterloo Station, the other who had fallen into the hands of drabs on his arrival, was now in a state of drunkenness, and would presently be robbed of the money he had brought home with him. He did not see in their homes the people who were living the lives befitting such a time, but he did see those who were flaunting their vulgarity in public places. He had no conception of the hardships that many families uncomplainingly endured, but he did catch glimpses of how the easily got wealth of those days came to others, and how it was expended. In a word, he, and not he only, but every casual observer, saw the worst.

As a consequence, many young people formed indifferent ideals and took indifferent models. Sacrifice was a word. They did not believe in it. The contrast between the fortunes of those who stayed at home and those who had gone to fight was too glaring. The dupes were in Flanders trenches, or Flanders graves; the smart fellows were in their automobiles, or journeying up and down from Brighton in the Pullman, so that their night’s rest should not be disturbed by air-raids. At the worst, those of the class that works with its hands were drawing from four to seven pounds a week against the seven shillings of the infantryman. The soldier, if he had not acquired a ‘soft job’ — for the army had its embusqués, also — began to appear rather like what is called on the east of the Atlantic a ‘mug’ and on the west a ‘ boob.’ Not for an instant do I pretend that such an attitude was universal. National enthusiasm and generosity remained, or national virtues would have been at very low ebb indeed.

III

Has the atmosphere grown sweeter since? People would answer that question in different senses, but I imagine the weight of opinion would be for the negative. Three causes, political, economic, and moral, which have not the same roots but react one upon the other, have contributed to befoul it. The two first affect the young no more than the rest of the community, but they affect them closely.

There can be little need to insist to American readers upon the discouragement that the spectacle of the Old World to-day breeds in the breast of the onlooker. To them it is so discouraging that many have made up their minds to keep away from it at all hazards. Whether they can do so is not here the question. We certainly cannot. For good or ill we are in it, of it: of this melodrama of successive crises, in this Hades of disappointed hopes. How can we be sane when all is mad? How can we hope when all is hopeless? Such, in effect, is the cry so often heard. That despair is groundless, but there is none to proclaim the fact. A minor ill is that no one interests himself in home politics. In fact, there are no home politics. Their suppression is a serious loss to idealism and thought generally. The clash of party, in the main a sign of health, has ceased. This, it may be argued, is unimportant. It is at least a factor in the growth of pessimism and cynicism.

The economic factor is, it need scarce be said, of infinitely greater menace. And, of course, its weight is largely on the shoulders of the poor. One does not expect young people to be at their best when they are hungry and without work. A high proportion of the boys who earned those wonderful wages during the war are to-day subsisting upon a state dole. If they started ill in the former period, they are unlikely to make improvement in the present.

With the children of the upper and middle classes the case is subtler. They are not in want, and it may be said that by comparison they have small cause to grumble. But a small irritant often produces as much grumbling as a great one. Many young men and women are at this moment thrown off their balance by the simple fact that the sovereign is now worth no more than ten shillings. Their homes are changed. They look back on the manner in which those homes were ordered, before the war, when they were children, and it seems to them that they have come out of Eden. There were no people in the world who led pleasanter lives than those English families which had an income of from a thousand pounds upward, before the war. There was certainly no existence in which young men and women, who were content without extravagant pleasures if they might have a certain tradition of comeliness, of happy social intercourse, could be more contented. Such a life was not a luxurious machine, but it was one built on graceful, easy lines, to run smoothly.

The drop in the value of money, the leap in taxation, have swept away thousands of such homes. It is not always even that they have changed masters. They have simply disappeared. We have an acute housing shortage in London, but you may go round certain residential squares and terraces, where the houses are big, old-fashioned, but very agreeable, and you will find two out of three of them empty. The people who lived in them before the war simply cannot afford to live in them now. Their children are growing up in homes very different from these, which they remember. They have lost more than large rooms, good service, well-cooked dinners, in honor of which one put on a dinner-jacket and a white shirt. There was something intangible, which was made up of all these, yet in itself surpassed and was apart from the sum of them. It was a sort of gold that gilded the mediocrity. That golden mediocrity was a feature of the life of a large class in England.

Not very serious, such a loss, when others have lost so much more? Well, it counts. But there are more concrete deprivations. The promises made by fathers to children in such homes have become impossible of fulfillment. Perhaps it was one of the old universities, which is now barred; perhaps a year of travel; perhaps the cherished prospect of a particular career. Not seldom, instead of starting where their fathers left off, they have to begin far behind the point at which their fathers struck out into life. In default of the old, they find themselves thrown into cheaper pleasures, which are often far more florid and outwardly attractive, if less innocent. It is, for example, less expensive in London to-day to dine in restaurants and be a member of a night club than to give dinners and dances to one’s friends in one’s own house.

The third of the causes I have enumerated is the moral one. And this I regard as little short of a crime on the part of a section of the elders against the young. The war once at an end, the great effort over, there has been the most amazing blast of literary pessimism in this country. We are, whatever observers may think, an easygoing and diffident people. If enough loud-mouthed folk tell us that we have more cause for shame than for pride, we cease to deny it. It is out of mode to say that the aggression of Germany brought about the war, that we entered into it with high motives. Oh no, it was international finance that made the war. It is out of mode to say that our military leaders, if not great strategists, inherited those traditions of character, tenacity, and method which shone in a William of Orange, an Abercrombie, a Kitchener. Oh no, they were thickheaded and slow, they forgot nothing and learned nothing. It is out of mode to declare that our sacrifices were glorious. Oh no, we were driven to the slaughter by politicians and profiteers.

If a novelist to-day touches upon the war, it is ten chances to one that his ‘hero’ was dragged into it protestingly, or that he was illtreated in the army, or that he saw naught but stupidity there. The case of the normal man, who looked upon it as a disagreeable necessity, who went into it whole-heartedly, and returned, if he had the luck to return, with spirit unbroken, content that he had done his part to the best of his ability, is hardly ever put. Yet he is in the vast majority, and represents the real spirit of the country.

The men who are in the forefront of this pessimistic onslaught bear a deep responsibility toward the youth of the age, whose enthusiasm they dash, whose faiths they undermine, whose candor they turn to cynicism.

And so to-day we see a great mass of young people in a curious plight. They are worse educated than their fathers, but they are more sophisticated. They have little joy in life, but they are addicted to pleasure. They are contemptuous of the older ideals, but they have been unable to form new ones of their own. They assume very often an air of arrogance, which is no more than the bravado of unhappiness. Above all, they are in uncertainty, without definite goal. The past seems to them madness, the future a blank. The present is bad enough; but it is here, and there may be nothing better to take its place. So far as they speculate at all, they probably see society plunging deeper and deeper down the slope. Some have been won to the belief that to hasten its course, or to split it as the Communists desire, would be better than striving to check it or patch it up.

The tendency among a larger section, which has no thought for such matters, is to seek from the present all that it can be made to yield. The well-to-do, at least, can draw from it something thrilling, though for the poor there is scarcely even that hollow satisfaction. Of them it may indeed now be said that they have one mine of pleasure only. If anyone in the world is forming their ideas and ministering to their excitement it is you in America. Their one escape from realities is to the fantastic world of ‘the pictures.’ The influence of these is extraordinary. Only when one hears young cockneys, who have never been more than a few miles from the street in which they were born, repeating Bowery slang which they have learned from the ‘captions,’ does one realize how great it is.

But, whether in the cinema or elsewhere, what is sought is excitement. Excitement demands high colors, high spices in life. There must be heroes of some sort, who live a life of vivid action, to replace a figure such as that of Marshal Foch in 1918. So the cult of professional players of games has increased enormously, and is now far above what it was before the war. They share the throne with the kings and queens of the cinema world. Excitement is stimulated by gambling; and so betting on races, which has spread very much in the nation at large, has a peculiar hold on youths. I do not know whether the police are less alert in the matter than they were, or if it is that the intelligence system of the opposition is too smart for them, but I do know that, if one walks down certain London streets in the afternoon, one sees a bookmaker calmly sitting on the steps of a house, a satchel slung over his shoulder and a betting book in his hand. And it is not boys only who are bitten by the craze. A friend of mine, walking recently down Bond Street, the very home of splendor and decorum, on the afternoon that a big handicap was being run, saw a little cloud of work-girls, some of them with hair in pigtails, rush out of one of the maisons de modes as soon as the first newsboy had yelled his ‘Three o’clock winner!’ down the street, and precipitate themselves upon the second arrival.

IV

To minds in such a state work becomes monotonous. I believe that this restless excitement, as much as real laziness, accounts for the disinclination to work that has been so much deplored and has so much assisted the upward jump of prices. I believe that the same feverishness has been responsible for the slackening of sexual morality among the young which has so startled older people. It is at the root also of a certain petty dishonesty, noted with dismay, which is confined to the youth of no single class, nor, indeed, to youth alone.

We are told that a wave of immorality, in its widest sense, has passed over the youth of the country generally. Undoubtedly there was a sort of orgy just after the war. But so history tells us there has been after every great upheaval of that nature. The war ended; but the passions did not. Doctors tell us that when a man’s foot is amputated the nerves at his ankle stretch out, seeking for those parts of themselves from which they have been severed. It is that action which causes so much subsequent pain. It is that blind chase of our passions which has caused our pain and unrest. It may be objected that in a healthy state energies would be transferred to the new problems presenting themselves. So, very largely, they were. The reorganization of effort, of industry, in this country was swift and remarkable. It was due to circumstances beyond our control, the hopeless state of the world’s markets and exchanges, that so much of that energy was rendered unavailing. But it was inevitable that some of the excitement should run to waste. It was inevitable that there should be a swift reaction to pleasure, a sudden loosening of ties. People, and young people especially, rushed to form new excitements to replace those that were past. The soldiers wanted to enjoy themselves after their miseries. The younger, whose state I have described, could not realize that their good days — for to the majority of them they were good days, make no doubt of that — had come to an end.

To-day there seem to be signs of a subsidence. One sees it in every direction. For example, the gaudy revues that filled our theatres appear to be no longer a paying proposition. The late trains run by the London Underground Railways, in the expectation that a large population desired to take its pleasures by night, have carried passengers by tens rather than by the hundreds anticipated, and are being, in some cases, taken off. That people do not work as they worked before the war is, unhappily, still the case. Here, even, we are told there is an improvement. The lessons of the past two years have been bitter. There are numbers of young people, who were slack two years ago, who are prepared now to work hard if they can find work.

If they can find it! That, all said and done, is the great stumblingblock to a return to the normal. While the present economic conditions endure we cannot hope for it. If they can be improved all else will be possible.

But — of this I am convinced — next to the economic recovery, the attainment whereof is only partially in our own hands, we need to be revivified by spiritual and moral guidance. And this, to be effective, must not consist of a mere panegyric of the abstract rights of man or of the abstract beauties of human nature. On idealism of this sort British youth has never thrived. We want a national idealism as well, because we are a nation, because our greatness and our use to the world has been bred in the womb of our national consciousness. We want, indeed, to learn how to be good citizens of the world; but we want also to learn how to be good citizens of the British Empire, and to take pride that we are such. We want an Edmund Burke rather than a Jean Jacques Rousseau. Burke desired that we should be good citizens of the world. His attitude to the demands of those colonies which are now the United States of America, his view of our Eastern responsibilities, are proof of that. But he taught us also that we are links in a chain, which was begun to be forged fifteen hundred years ago, which has passed down, century by century, through the strong hands of good and careful workmen. We cannot, if we would, escape from their toil. We cannot, if we should desire it, sever those hard-forged links. We should be fools to do so if we could. Upon what stanchion are we to fasten our new chain that will be as sound and strong as the endless length of the old?

I have said that we are afraid of being laughed at by our intellectuals if we express sentiments that are not part of their fashionable creed. I do not know that I am wholly exempt from that fear. Yet I venture to quote a poet whose name always excites their merriment, and to quote him in this connection because he was the spiritual descendant of Burke. Tennyson wrote to ‘One who ran down the English’ these lines, which remain the fittest answer to our pessimists of to-day, the fittest exhortation to them to help instead of hindering: —