An Apology for Youth

I

NOTHING is more obnoxious to clever youth than the doctrine that whatever is, is right. The bitterness of the young toward any degree of contentment with things as they are is often an embarrassment and a bewilderment to their parents and older friends. Any attempt to defend the world as it is, any complacent or thoughtless remark which betrays the acknowledged tendency of older people not to chafe against wrongs that custom has established, ignites all the explosive intemperance, boldness of language, readiness for extreme conclusions, and unmanageable emotion which belong to intelligent immaturity.

Sensitive young people brood much over the enormities of the world. The vast and, as it often seems, insoluble problems which have come in the train of applied science and the Industrial Revolution, the brutalities to which labor is still subject, the starvation of all but whole peoples while food enough for the world entire is produced in favored lands, the prevalence of want and injustice even among prosperous nations — all these are very lively and present thoughts in the minds of the young, and excite them to blind rage against any semblance of toleration on the part of their elders. And it is well so. There is a kind of youth — early indoctrinated with the complacence of its parents — that goes through life contemptuous of revolt, smug with acceptance of the prevailing scheme of advancement and social approval, unstirred by any generous resentment, unmoved by fellow feeling for the oppressed, skeptical of every effort to right established wrong, faintly scornful of those who turn aside from the broad way of success to mitigate the world’s inequalities. There is something frankly disgusting about a young person of this kind. A man ought at some time in his life to burn with liberal ardor; there ought to be that in him that leaps out in denunciation of smugness, that welcomes every hope of progress, and that will not endure the thought of the wrongs ground out day by day in the perfunctory turning of the social mill. Amuth is the time for such generous impulses, if they cannot be sustained throughout life; youth despising them and adopting the dull rigidity of conservatism is a sorry sight. An acquaintance said to me once, with a smile of self-satisfaction, ‘I am a very conventional young man.’ Anything but a Bohemian myself, I wished at that moment that I could claim partnership with those who toil on the fringe of society and salt their bread with rebellion against the chilling sluggishness and unction of the elect.

Sensitive youth does not always stop with adopting and passionately defending some radical social programme, or with sharpening its wits upon notorious injustice. Its dissatisfactions may reach a profounder level. It casts its eye over history — as much of history as it knows — and asks when society has ever been organized on what might seem the rudimentary principle that all its members should be supplied with enough before any were maintained in luxury. It asks when the oppressed ever failed to outnumber the oppressors, when the sum of misery and want has ever failed to outweigh the sum of plenty and ease. Receiving a pious answer, it rends the religion of its elders with terrible logic as an unctuous defense of inequality and injustice. Precociously it learns that the rich and the fortunate suffer from disappointed ambition and private grief, that the gifted struggle against poverty and hostility, and that no man is secure by his station or his talents from despair. It has a keen eye for mockery and hollowness, and comes to suspect that what it has always been taught to think the lasting satisfactions of life may themselves be delusive and hollow. And seeing so many thousands of men who to the external eye must appear wretched, it does not hesitate to ask, ‘Why should they live?’ From this question it passes on to the profounder one, ‘Is life itself worth living?’ And so it comes to the most intimate of all, ‘Why should I live?’ It questions, as Samuel Butler did, the common assumption that parents confer a benefit on their children by be-getting and bearing them; it may even burst out with the wish that these acts had never occurred, to the no small shock of an unsuspecting parent. Youth is a keen taster of ironies, and can take a fine pleasure in a morbid epigram.

These are terrible questions and thoughts. It may seem alarming, pitiable, or merely comic that youth, often healthy and apparently happy youth, should be afflicted with them. But they are quite sincere; that is to say, they are actual and overwhelming at the moment when they are being felt. They do not make up the whole mind of youth, or occupy the whole of life. They do not interfere with a good game of tennis, with intense friendships, with eager respect for a beloved master or counselor, with riotous enjoyment of a dance or an escapade. But they make up a larger part of the life of young men (and I suppose young women) who are sensitive, thoughtful, and ambitious than those who observe them may suspect. And it is an important part of life that they fill, the intelligent and mentally restless as well as the emotional part, conscious of unfolding abilities and purposes, but panicky about their application, standing diffidently before the world and able to see it only through a mist of unasked and confusing feeling.

Obviously this state of precocious despair must wear off; otherwise the world would be less densely populated. The author of the comédie humaine would have to be imagined as a cosmic Ibsen, and his puppets would always be stealing off-stage to shoot themselves. It is a truism that advancing age mitigates the tremors and uncertainties of youth. It is a truism — alas — that increasing years frequently transform the radical into a conservative, and the impatience of youth at manifest wrong into the passivity of age toward the established order. Youth, getting wind of nearly everything that is to be known about life, soon hears this ancient piece of worldly wisdom proclaimed; and nothing is more distasteful to its ears. Youth wants its questions answered; it does not want them to sink into mere sluggishness.

Ironically enough, every state of being seems to be precious to a man in some degree. He will gladly exchange a wretched condition for a better one; but if the wretched condition is the only one he knows, it will be dear to him because it is life and not death. And so with youth in the condition I have described. Its state may be wretched, but it is fresh, poignant, and intense. All its ferment may take place in a healthy frame, teased by vital impulses which create an appetite for life in despite of scruples. Logic may condemn the world, but a good walk in the mountains is a more powerful argument, while it lasts, than any logic. Not knowing what maturity may be like, and on good grounds suspecting the worst of it, youth has a right to regard the exchange with skepticism, and to look down its nose at the platitudes of Rabbi ben Ezra.

But what the young particularly resent is to be told that their profound trepidation and their earnest questions, extending even to the justification of life itself, will mysteriously become of no account as they grow older. Suppose this true: what sort of answer does it constitute to the logic which youth brings against the world? No answer at all. It is mere callousness, tacit ridicule, or patronizing stupidity. Are the wrongs denied against which the young mind revolts? They have convulsed nations with revolution, and troubled the consciences of the most serious and thoughtful men. Are its doubts of existence compounded with solid reasons? The greatest philosophers have confirmed them. Is its ardor condemned? So was the ardor of Shelley crushed and calumniated by the men of his time, and venerated since. Why, then, should those who are experienced seem to approve the change by which resentment of injustice becomes toleration of evil, profound questioning of existence turns into complacency of mind, and restless eagerness of spirit sinks into dull passivity? Are age and experience desirable because they promote this change? Is the defense of life to rest not on the ground that it possesses some intrinsic good, or even that its wrongs are remediable, but rather that after it has gone on for a certain number of years doubts of its value and indignation against its evil succumb to inertia?

So those counselors of youth might be answered who dismiss its criticisms of existence as a mere ferment of immaturity. If advancing years are of value only as they promote the habit of accepting the world without improving the reasons for it, then the youthful view is decidedly the more creditable, and age is a tragedy. Is there not a real measure of truth in this, and is it not so acknowledged by those who have grown old without losing the memory of their youthful fire? Youth’s case against the world is a good one. In the late teens and early twenties, a man’s capacities have largely matured, if not his application of them. He is prepared to give reasons, draw conclusions from data, and use his mind as an instrument as well then as at any later time in life. He is prepared to do so; this is not to say that he has done so. The crown of his achievement may await years of effort. Though his mind is a completed instrument, it is an untempered and untried one. He has had little experience of the complexity of things; he has met few practical rebuffs; he is largely unacquainted with the actual field in which his abilities must be put to proof. But his wits are quick and developed, his logic shrewd. If reflection — and youth is capable of prolonged and intense reflection — leads him to question whether life is defensible, he is entitled to ask reasons of those who urge a contrary view, and to be impatient with them when they answer that with the passage of years he will grow less revolutionary. The child who can ask a precocious question can bring precocious understanding to a candid reply.

II

If custom, or the ticking of the clock, or, worse still, the decline of natural powers, were the only means by which the questioning spirit could be reconciled to life, we might well disdain to be reconciled at all. But a more subtle transformation is involved. What youth lacks, of course, is experience. But experience is more than the mere passage of years; it is more than the formation of habits, or the rise and decay of natural capacities. It is much to be suspected that life cannot be very successfully defended by reason, and that if it is to put in a word for itself it must speak through the qualities of this mysterious agent we call experience.

In the last analysis it seems as though we must live because we want to. Religions and philosophies do their best to obscure a fact so inimical to logic, but this primary impulse is what mans the pumps when reasons and metaphysical apologies, like rats, have deserted the foundering ship, concluding that she is fated to go down, while the captain grimly stays aboard and keeps his vessel afloat in the troughs. Surveying the troubled sea and the frail bark at its moorings, youth wonders why such a perplexed and fanatical voyage should ever be undertaken, and what mysterious value resides in it. But once the hawsers are cast off, and it begins to be plain that the vessel is seaworthy, the excitement of the gale rallies his spirits, and experience reveals what reason had only obscured.

The step that confronts youth is the step into experience. Perhaps if some illumination could be shed on this crucial transition, it would be possible to show why so many who began in rebellion against the world have ended, even if a little sadly, on good terms with it, and why so many who began by wondering how the wrongs of existence could be tolerated have ended by populating further the society from which these wrongs are inseparable.

The only way of making up a defect of experience in advance is by borrowing from the experience of others, and this youth proceeds to do with lively imagination. But it is easier to borrow large generalized views of experience, which are necessarily specious, than the living current of individual life, so full of casual but absorbing particulars, which each of us lives in himself; and it is easier to appropriate vicariously the violent and tragic emotions than the tranquil and cheerful ones. The imaginative mind is deeply susceptible to a broad view of the world’s misery. Human life to the sensitive spirit seems to parody itself continually with grotesque, unconscious distortions. It looks a simple thing to be open, frank, kind, tolerant; it seems incredible that men should spend their days tracking and baiting society’s victims, immuring prisoners in filthy cells, grasping for advantage, mocking and snorting at visionary good. That the instruments of the law, the very means intended to incorporate justice among men, should compound the felon’s crime and lock the innocent man in jail, that a Negro should be lynched, that among remote tribes of savages human life should be of such small account that the women suckle pigs instead of their own children, are not isolated facts to a mind jealous for life’s good report; they darken the whole universe, and call existence itself in question.

A man whose business lies with writing and the imagination may never lose the overwhelming impress of such facts. Gulliver’s Travels must have been written from just such bitter revulsion against man’s wrongs viewed in the general, from the fundamental disgust with life which is apt to be aroused by bringing its enormities before the mind in their terrifying mass. But even Swift was forced to confess that while he hated mankind, the abstraction, he loved men, loved Pope and Arbuthnot while hating Lilliputians and Yahoos. Yet Pope and Arbuthnot were embraced in the same genus as the Yahoos, an irony on which Swift must have reflected, although he kept it from his book.

It is no credit to a man to lose the sense of life’s general wrongs. Not all men can be incensed against them all the time, or the business of life would never get done, and no one’s household would be in order. But while the sense of the world’s vast amiss must sometimes be in abeyance, it should never die; it should not even sleep. And we see it sleeping and dead on every side much more than we see it vigilant and keen. We see the torpor and callousness of the great unleavened mass of society supporting the shrill self-interest of the demagogue and thrusting its dull, contemptuous weight against the forward movement of intelligence and compassion. Toward this vast sluggishness and imperviousness of society a man should ever keep his defenses bright, and pure. But he may do so, and yet find that the facts and impressions of which I have been speaking, without losing their reality or their enormity, take their places by degrees in a less tragic perspective of the world, to the extent at least that those who question existence itself on a preliminary view become reconciled to it as they become acquainted with it. Perhaps this reconciliation is not altogether creditable. Moral glory may shine brighter in the rebel who condemns life to the last. Yet while the most odious people in the world are those who are smugly unaware that anything is wrong with it, the man who admits us to the sweetness and savor of human nature at its best is the man who intimately knows and has suffered the world’s wrongs yet remains patient with life and tolerant of its creatures.

III

Reconciliation with the world must take place by some means or other if the majority of men are to preserve their sanity — and we can hardly desire the opposite. Perhaps the simple and familiar explanation is the sufficient one: youth grows older and wiser. It may not be worth while trying to refine upon this piece of worldly judgment. But perhaps more can usefully be said. A part of this growing older and wiser is apt to mean growing merely duller in sensibility and more settled in habit. As a man’s business grows upon him, he has less time to think of social or metaphysical qualms about existence. But the case is more subtle than this. There are many opposite ways of falling into error, and two are applicable here. A man can become so sunk in his private ambition, happiness, or, for that matter, unhappiness (which people are sometimes very loath to part with when they have taken it to their bosoms and married it), that the generous youthful sense of universal wrongs quite deserts him. On the opposite side, it is a distorted view of the world that mistakes the imaginary sum of human misery for the actual substance of life. To other fallacies might be added the pessimistic fallacy, which is just this substitution of mankind for men, of the world’s misery as a general concept for the life that each one of us leads in his own person.

If it were possible to go about among men who to the external eye must inevitably appear wretched, perhaps even so wretched that we wonder why they should wish to live, and dip into the actual stream of their separate thoughts and the thousand particulars of existence that confront them hour by hour, the situation would appear very different. Satisfactions are often trivial and unobtrusive: a quiet half hour for tea or beer, a small triumph or recognition, a piece of business well carried off, a word of friendship. The trials of actual life, in the daily experience of real persons, are correspondingly different from those solemn major burdens which the imagination of youth conceives. Truth to tell, neither the satisfactions nor the sorrows of common life would make a great showing in the eye of reason; but life is not lived for reason. It is lived, in the last analysis, and when all else has been stripped away, to gratify certain appetites and emotions. Its vital framework is constructed of feeling, and the only object for which, ultimately, life can possibly be lived is the satisfaction of one or another set of feelings. Some type of gratification every one of us seeks — and finds, in circumstances trivial enough, it may be, and by standards that a too glorified or romantic view might consider lamentably meagre and contemptible. But the growth in experience is a growth of the concrete in place of the abstract and the romantic. It fills in the broad sweep of untutored thought and feeling with manifold knowledge of the small decisions, responsibilities, expectations, and achievements on which mature life is built up.

In a wide view of the miseries of the earth, a large part is true and valuable; but some part is deceptive. If the world’s wretchedness were as universal and black as it seems to the sensitive eye of youth, then indeed the race might long since have tired of living, and might have renounced existence as vain. But if we reckon up the balance by each individual life in turn, the case may not appear a great deal nobler, but certainly it is very different. Satisfactions may not often be exalted, but at least they are more frequent than a pessimistic view suspects; and what looked at in the mass may seem universal groaning and lamentation breaks up, when we consider the innumerable separate lives of which the world is formed, into varied fragmentary colors of pleasure, hope, dismay, drabness, responsibility, delight, intermingled in ceaseless profusion. Even grief is not all unwelcome to a living man, for it is not death, and it too is interfused with appetite for existence and with ultimate, radical interest in even the trivialities of being.

If more important incentives to live were lacking, I can imagine that a man who proposed to shoot himself might wait to see whether a fly on the ceiling would cross the crack that lay in its path or turn aside from it. This may be an irony of which the cynic could make his own use; but is it not a testimony to the nature of the bonds that really hold us to existence? It is easy to imagine that we value life for some transcendental or sublime principle; but when religions and social programmes and romantic philosophies have been swept away, the simple and primary appetite for the world’s continual small happenings is left. ‘Come, let’s away to prison,’ says Lear to Cordelia when fortune has brought them to the last pass.

This vital interest in trivialities is often disdained as an ignoble defense of life, or rather no defense at all, but a cheat. It is dignifying mere gossip. Worse than this, if it is true, it shows how little command reason has over mere animal instinct, and how blind is our love of life that will shut its eyes to the travail of the whole earth to dote like a country lout on some trivial stupidity. Of course this is true. We are all bound to existence by cords that have no foundation in logic and do not ask the leave of reason. The scales are loaded in advance in favor of any state of being rather than annihilation, and pure animal instinct makes men prefer misery to death. But there is a more favorable way of regarding the matter. Even a transcendental principle or a religious revelation, whatever high sound of duty or abnegation there is about it, is cherished because it ministers to emotional satisfaction of some kind. No defense of life could be imagined — life being what it is — that did not address itself to the gratification of some desire, perhaps the desire for order, peace, restraint, perhaps for high daring and the grand passions. The very subjection of the emotions in favor of pure contemplation or Stoic austerity is but another state of emotion. Let us begin with this primary, naked fact that as human beings we are interested in existence, even in its trivialities, and that this interest will survive terrible shocks and disasters. If this fact is tragic and ironic, it also has a dignity of its own, and deserves to weigh in the reckoning of things. It is tragic that the universe seems able to support conscious life only at the cost of infinite pain; but it is not tragic that the only beings who can explore themselves and nature, who feel sentience flooding through their bodies, who have eyes with which to see the light and ears to hear sounds and harmonies, have also a radical and all but unconquerable interest in the spectacle and struggle of which they are a part.

I do not see that this interest is to be condemned because it does not wait for the sanction of logic, or because it is a product of animal predisposition and not of independent thought. It does not constitute a defense of life in the realm of reason. No logic on earth can show that life is worth living, for logic does not belong to the realm of primary feeling in which the desire to live arises, and in which we find the satisfactions which living creatures irrationally crave and seek. Indeed reason usually meets with a good deal of success when it sets out to show that life is not worth living. Logic bears pretty hard on existence. The argument is the easier because its terms are not quite true. The miseries which we throw in the balance, the wrongs by which we condemn life, are specious, and not actually those we suffer in our real experience of the world. Actual grief and disaster do not usually destroy the appetite for life, as in logic they should. They, as well as happiness, contain that element of radical interest and expectancy which sustains the daily round of living. It is rather true that when we are suffering from that tœdium vitœ which, no less than the love of life, has a real station in the experience of sentient creatures, we marshal our griefs and disasters, together with the griefs of the world, and use them as reasons against existence; and so they acquire their compelling status in logic. But here, too, feeling and the tides of animal appetite are the governing force; and in normal beings the balance is soon swinging again in life’s favor.

IV

We rage justifiably against the smugness of ‘whatever is, is right,’ against the pragmatic piety of ‘all things work together for good to them that love God.’ These phrases make their peace too easily with the wrongs and injustices of life. But let us consider another and a grander sentence: ‘For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.’ These are tragic words, yet they do not disparage life. Their very grandeur testifies to some satisfaction which we feel even in a creation that groans together, some dignity and nobility of life even in distress.

Youth, with its wits matured but its experience defective, condemns life by reason and fails to understand why advancing years should reconcile it to a world the wrongs of which are great and slow to diminish. Experience removes this bewilderment in many ways. It turns some of the ferment of self-examination and diffidence into responsible action. It supplants the imaginative picture of things which a sensitive mind forms with the things themselves, which, whether they turn out to be better or worse, are at least so different that only experience could have revealed their qualities. Youth looks on the world from a detached height, in which only its broad aspects appear. And from this height the conspicuous feature is the want of organization and control in the interests of reason. There is a vast groaning of unnecessary friction and conflict; it seems as though a little competent social engineering should set things right. The plunge into experience reveals the world in a different aspect, as an innumerable collection of individuals, each necessarily pursuing his own way, protecting his own brood, striving to establish his own household. Out of these numberless separate lives rises all the groaning and the turmoil, out of the clash of these myriad individual interests rises all the cruelty. And if the cruelty is not mitigated in an absolute sense, if its sum remains as great and its nature the same as when youth surveyed it from the anticipatory height, it seems to me that relatively it is mitigated very greatly. What the individual contending for his own household has to bear is not what youth imagines the whole great mass of men to be bearing. It is neither so vast a burden nor so unadulterated. It is a life of many moods and daily transformations, in which defeat is not often an ultimate tragedy occurring once, but a moment’s or a year’s reverse occurring many times; in which grief is not irreparable, and in which achievements, pleasures, friendships, and delights have their part in the many-threaded tapestry of existence.

As I write this essay I am myself at a point not far from midway between youth and full experience. I am — I thank God for it — still well clear of middle age; but I have had at least some acquaintance with responsible toil, I have a wife and son, and while my life has been fortunate, the common pains and reverses of the world have fallen on those near me, and have not left me untouched. I write primarily for my own satisfaction; this is the principal reason, aside from the hope of success and reward, for writing anything. I have been intensely interested to watch the process of experience in myself and to try to understand it. If I am preaching in these pages, I am preaching, as a good priest ought, to myself. If anyone wishes to overhear the sermon, I am flattered. If anyone profits by it, I am humbled. I should of course be gratified to think that I had illuminated the path that other young people must travel, or had made clear to those more distant from youth the questions that may trouble the minds of their own children. It is not easy to speak an enlightening word to a young man who may be sincerely asking himself whether it is justifiable to bring children into a world where human life is subject to so many disasters. For one thing, the question is too well founded. But experience will provide an answer beyond the scope of reason. The same young man will find himself incurring children despite his scruples; and watching them through their first novel encounters with the world, he will come to perceive why it is that men would rather expose themselves and others to the hazards of existence than allow either their own lives or the long experience of the race to vanish from the earth and sink into outer darkness. He will find himself hoping that his own children may live to feel what he has felt, not excluding a portion of his doubt and trepidation, since these too belong to the full life of the spirit.

Have I been drawing round insensibly to the view that ‘whatever is, is right’? I hope not. Certainly I shall never be caught saying that whatever is done is right. Man’s cruelty to man is the most tragic fact of existence. Against it, and against the vast insensibility of men in the mass, I hope that I shall ever burn with youthful ardor. It is true that I feel a skepticism — some of my friends would call it a paralyzing and unworthy skepticism — of reforming the world merely by reorganizing its economic or social structure. It is true that beneath all remediable evil I believe that there is intrinsic pain too deeply stationed in natural circumstance ever to be dislodged. This fact has its reflection in the highest passages of tragic literature. But I doubt if we can wish the world wholly other than it is, for then we should be wishing it something other than human, and the human is all that can know or judge, the source even of our longing for some transcendent satisfaction and fulfillment such as never has entered our experience. There are many circumstances of my life which I could wish different. There are many acts for which I suffer acutely with chagrin when I think of them. But I cannot wish myself altogether different from what I am, for how shall I know or judge the creature I should then be? What I desire is the purification of the faculties I possess, the improvement of the sort of man I seem inherently to be. Perhaps if the race could speak for itself, it would say something of the same kind of its whole sum of experience. We desire the improvement and the purification of the sort of experience with which man is familiar, and not the substitution for it of some unimaginably different experience. Probably, if the truth were known, we do not desire the complete suppression of any representative element in it. We wish cruelty mitigated and pain diminished; we do not wish experience to be deprived of all its tragic quality, without which, I suppose, it would lack the fundamental seriousness necessary to continued interest. It is a striking thing that when we are aroused by some public injustice, or threatened by some private loss, life itself is enhanced, raised above the humdrum, given importance and meaning. Here too is an irony of which the cynic can make use. But, taking a more favorable view, may we not say that it shows the craving of our faculties for large and serious employment, and the nobility they are ready to assume when we give them an opportunity?

Let us say, then, not that whatever is, is right, but that ultimately what is right cannot be established apart from the nature and constitution of human life, and the elements that go to make up the sum of experience. It will be a hard task to show that among these elements the tragic is one which can be wholly and finally rooted out.

This is read with a smile. But there are disasters, both of public and of private fortune, which make us wonder how the human frame can endure. There are lives which we can only dismiss with such words as those that were pronounced above the dying Lear: —

There are wrongs so final and so vast that they restore in all its force the question whether life is justifiable, and leave us without an answer. Such a wrong was the World War. Such wrongs (in the view of many) are the social injustices consequent on the present organization of society — unless men can be united to redress them. There is enough groaning in the whole creation always to pose the great question of life’s worth. Answers given in reason or theology are mere logical figments or pious apologies, unworthy of the best in human nature. Rather let the question go unanswered on this plane. For sentience is a gift that men always seem likely to prefer to oblivion, even if it must be accepted at the price of some irreducible travail and injustice in the constitution of things. Perhaps it is life’s profoundest credit that the preference is established not by thought but by experience. We need not try to stifle the ultimate question when it arises, nor regret that it continues to trouble the profoundest impulses of sensitive minds. For out of minds so troubled have sometimes come the highest utterances of human fortitude and reflection.