III
THE VIRTUES AND THE SEASONS OF LIFE
Each season of life has its proper virtues, as each season of the year has its own climate and temperature. If virtue is the excellent working of the soul, then youth, middle age, and old age, all have their peculiar ways of working excellently. When we speak of a virtuous life, we should mean, not a life that has shown one single thread of motive and attitude running through it, but rather one that has varied with the seasons, as spring grows gently into summer and summer into autumn, each season working excellently in respect to the tilling and harvest of the soul. If it is a virtue to be contented in old age, it is no virtue to be contented in youth; if it is a virtue for youth to be bold and venturesome, it is the virtue of middle life to take heed and begin to gather up the lines and nets so daringly cast by youth into the sea of life. A virtuous life means a life responsive to its powers and its opportunities, a life not of inhibitions, but of a straining up to the limit of its strength. It means doing every year what is fitting to be done at that year to enhance or conserve one’s own life or the happiness of those around one. Virtue is a word that abolishes duty. For duty has steadily fallen into worse and worse opprobrium; it has come to mean nothing but effort and stress. It implies something that is done rightly, but that cuts straight across the grain of all one’s inclinations and motive forces. It is following the lines of greatest resistance; it is the working of the moral machine with the utmost friction possible. Now there is no doubt that the moral life involves struggle and effort, but it should be the struggle of adequate choice, and not of painful inhibition. We are coming to see that the most effective things we do are those that have some idea of pleasure yoked up with them. In the interests of moral efficiency, the ideal must be the smooth and noiseless workings of the machine, and not the rough and grinding movements that we have come to associate with the word “duty.” For the emphasis on the negative duty we must substitute emphasis on the positive virtue. For virtue is excellence of working, and all excellence is pleasing. When we know what are the virtues appropriate to each age of life, we can view the moral life in a new light. It becomes not a claim upon us of painful obligation, but a stimulus to excellent spontaneity and summons to self-expression.
In childhood we acquire the spiritual goods that we shall take with us through life; in youth we test our acquisitions and our tools, selecting, criticizing, comparing; in old age, we put them away gently into the attic of oblivion or retire them honorably, full of years and service. Our ideas, however, of what those spiritual goods were that childhood acquired have been very much confused. We have imagined that we could give the child “the relish of right and wrong,” as Montaigne calls it. The attempt has usually been made to train up the child in the moral life, by telling him from his earliest years what was right and what was wrong. It was supposed that in this way he absorbed right principles that would be the guiding springs of his youthful and later life. The only difficulty, of course, with this theory is that the moral life hardly begins before the stresses and crises of youth at all. For really moral activity implies choice and it implies significant choice; and the choices of the child are few in number and seldom significant. You can tell a child that a certain thing is wrong, and he will believe it, but his belief will be a purely mechanical affair, an external idea, which is no more woven into the stuff of his life than is one of those curious “post-hypnotic suggestions,” that psychologists tell about, where the subject while hypnotized is told to do something at a certain time after he awakes. When the time comes he does it without any consciousness of the reason and without any immediate motive. Now most moral ideas in a child’s mind are exactly similar to these suggestions. They seem to operate with infallible accuracy, and we say,—“What a good child!” As a fact the poor child is as much under an alien spell as the subject of the hypnotist. Now all this sort of hypnotized morality the younger generation wants to have done with. It demands a morality that is glowing with self-consciousness, that is healthy with intelligence. It refuses to call the “good” child moral at all; it views him as a poor little trained animal, that is doomed for the rest of his life to go through mechanical motions and moral tricks at the crack of the whip of a moral code or religious authority. From home and Sunday-school, children of a slightly timid disposition get moral wounds, the scars of which never heal. They enter a bondage from which they can never free themselves; their moral judgment in youth is warped and blighted in a thousand ways, and they pass through life, seemingly the most moral of men and women, but actually having never known the zest of true morality, the relish of right and wrong. The best intentions of parents and teachers have turned their characters into unnatural channels from which they cannot break, and fixed unwittingly upon them senseless inhibitions and cautions which they find they cannot dissolve, even when reason and common sense convince them that they are living under an alien code. Looked upon from this light, childish goodness and childish conscientiousness is an unhealthy and even criminal forcing of the young plant, the hot-house bringing to maturity of a young soul whose sole business is to grow and learn. When moral instruction is given, a criminal advantage is taken of the child’s suggestibility, and all possibility of an individual moral life, growing naturally and spontaneously as the young soul meets the real emergencies and problems that life will present to it, is lost. If, as we are coming more and more to realize, the justification of knowledge is that it helps us to get along with and enjoy and grapple with the world, so the justification of virtue is that it enables us to get along with and enjoy and grapple with the spiritual world of ideals and feelings and qualities. We should be as careful about giving a child moral ideas that will be of no practical use to him as we are in giving him learning that will be of no use to him.
The virtues of childhood, then, we shall not find in the moral realm. The “good” child is not cultivated so much to-day as he was by the former generation, whose one aim in education and religion was to bind the young fast in the fetters of a puritan code; but he is still, in well-brought-up families, an appalling phenomenon. The child, who at the age of five has a fairly complete knowledge of what God wants him and all around him to do and not to do, is an illustration of the results of the confusion of thought that would make childhood instead of youth the battle-ground of the moral life. We should not dismiss such a child as quaint, for in him have been sowed the seeds of a general obscurantism and conservatism that will spread like a palsy over his whole life. The acceptance of moral judgments that have no vital meaning to the young soul will mean in later life the acceptance of ideas and prejudices in political and religious and social matters that are uncriticized and unexamined. The “good” child grows up into the conventional bigoted man. The duties and tastes which are inculcated into him in childhood, far from aiding the “excellent workings of his soul,” clog and rust it, and prevent the fine free expression of its individuality and genius. For the child has not yet the material of experience that will enable him to get the sense of values which is at the bottom of what we call the spiritual life. And it is this sense that is so easily dulled, and that must be so carefully protected against blunting. That the child cannot form moral judgments for himself, however, does not mean that they must be formed for him by others; it means that we must patiently wait until he meets the world of vivid contrasts and shocks and emergencies that is youth. It is not repairing his lack of moral sensitiveness to get him to repeat parrot-like the clean-cut and easily learned taboos and permissions of the people around him. To get him to do this is exactly like training an animal to bolt any kind of food. The child, however, has too weak a stomach to digest very much of the moral pabulum that is fed him. The inevitable result is a moral indigestion, one form of which is the once fashionable sense of sin. The youth, crammed with uncriticized taboos delivered to him with the awful prestige of an Almighty God, at a certain age revolts, and all the healthy values of life turn sour within him. The cure for this spiritual dyspepsia is called conversion, but it is a question whether the cure is not often worse than the disease. For it usually means that the relish of right and wrong, which had suddenly become a very real thing, has been permanently perverted in a certain direction. By a spiritual operation, the soul has been forced to digest all this strange food, and acquires the ability to do so forever after. Those who do not suffer this operation pass through life with an uneasiness of spirit, the weight and burden of an imperfectly assimilated moral life. Few there are who are able to throw off the whole soddenness, and if they do they are fortunate if they are not left without any food at all. Religious teachers have always believed that all these processes were necessary for the soul’s health. They have believed that it was better to have mechanical morals than no morals at all. When the younger generation sees the damage such morals work, it would prefer to have none.
Discarding the “good” child, then, we will find the virtues of childhood in that restless, pushing, growing curiosity that is the characteristic of every healthy little boy or girl. The child’s life is spent in learning his way around the world; in learning the ropes of things, the handles and names of whatever comes within the range of his experience. He is busy acquiring that complex bundle of common-sense knowledge that underlies all our grown-up acts, and which has become so automatic with us that it hardly seems possible to us that we have slowly acquired it all. We do not realize that thousands of facts and habits, which have become stereotyped and practically unconscious in our minds, are the fresh and vital experiences of the mind of the little child. We cannot put ourselves back into that world where the absorbing business is to give things a position and a name and to learn all the little obvious facts about the things in the house and the yard and the village, and in that far land of mystery beyond. What sort of sympathy can we have with these little people,—we, to whom all this naïve world of place and nomenclature is so familiar as to seem intuitive? We should have to go back to a world where every passing railroad train was a marvel and a delight, where a walk to the village meant casting ourselves adrift into an adventurous country where anything was likely to happen and where all calculations of direction or return were upset. It takes children a long time to get accustomed to the world. This common workaday knowledge of ours seems intuitive to us only because we had so many years during which it was reiterated to us, and not because we were unusually sensitive to impressions. Children often seem almost as stupid as any young animal, and to require long practice before they know their way around in the world, although, once obtained, this common sense is never forgotten. That child is virtuous who acquires all he can of it.
This curiosity of childhood makes children the first scientists. They begin, as soon as their eyes are open, dissolving this confused mystery of the world, distinguishing and classifying its parts according to their interests and needs. They push on and on, ever widening the circle, and ever bringing more and more of their experience under the subjugation of their understanding. They begin the process that the scientist completes. As children, after several years we came to know our house and yard, although the attic and cellar were perhaps still dim and fearsome places. Inside the household things were pretty well tabulated and rationalized. It was only when we went outside the gate that we might expect adventures to happen. We should have been very much shocked to see the fire leap from the stove and the bread from the table, as they did in the “Blue Bird,” but in walking down to the village we should not have been surprised to see a giant or a fairy sitting on the green. When we became familiar with the village, the fairies were, of course, banished to remoter regions, until they finally vanished altogether. But it is not so long ago that I lost the last vague vestige of a feeling that there were fairies in England.
The facility, one might almost say skill, which children show in getting lost, is the keynote of childhood’s world. For they have no bearings among the unfamiliar, no principles for the solution of the unknown. In their accustomed realm they are as wise and canny and free from superstition as we are in ours. We, as grown-ups, have not acquired any magical release from fantasy. The only difference is that we are accustomed to make larger hazards of faith that things will repeat themselves, and that we have a wider experience to check off our novelties by. We have charted most of our world; we unfortunately have no longer any world to get lost in. To be sure, we have opened up perhaps an intangible world of philosophy and speculation, which childhood does not dream of, and heaven knows we can get lost there! But the thing is different. The adventure of childhood is to get lost here in this everyday world of common sense which is so familiar to us. To become really as little children we should have to get lost again here. The best substitute we can give ourselves is to keep exploring the new spiritual world in which we may find ourselves in youth and middle life, pushing out ever, as the child does, our fringe of mystery. And we can gain the gift of wonder, something that the child does not have. He is too busy drinking in the facts to wonder about them, or to wonder about what is beyond them. We may count ourselves fortunate, however, that we are able to retain the child’s virtue of curiosity, and transmute it into the beauty of spiritual wonder.
It is facts and not theories that the child is curious about, and rightly. He cannot assimilate moral theories, nor can he assimilate any other kind of theories. It is his virtue to learn how the world runs; youth will be time enough to philosophize about that running. It is the immediate and the present that interest children, and they are omnivorous with regard to any facts about either. What they hear about the world they accept without question. We often think when we are telling them fairy stories or animal stories that we are exercising their poetic imagination; but from their point of view we are telling them sober facts about the world they live in. We are often surprised, too, at the apathy they show in the midst of wonders that we point out to them. They are wonders to us because we appreciate the labor or the genius that has produced them. In other words, we have added a value to them. But it is just this value which the child-mind does not get and can never get. To the child they are not surprising, but simply some more information about his world. All is grist that comes to the child’s mill. Everything serves to plot and track for him a new realm of things as they are.
The child’s mind, so suggestible to facts, seems to be almost impervious to what we call spiritual influences. He lives in a world hermetically sealed to our interests and concerns. Parents and teachers make the most conscientious efforts to influence their children, but they would better realize that they can influence them only in the most indirect way. The best thing they can do for the children is to feed their curiosity, and provide them with all the materials that will stimulate their varied interests. They can then leave the “influence” to take care of itself. The natural child seems to be impregnable to any appeals of shame, honor, reverence, honesty, and even ridicule,—in other words, to all those methods we have devised for getting a clutch on other people’s souls, and influencing and controlling them according to our desires. And this is not because the child is immoral, but simply because, as I have tried to show, those social values mean as yet nothing to him. He lives in a splendid isolation from our conventional standards; the influences of his elders, however well-directed and prayerful they may be, simply do not reach him. He lives unconscious of our interests and motives. Only the “good” child is susceptible, and he is either instinctively submissive, or is the victim of the mechanical imposition of standards and moral ideas.
The child works out what little social morality he does obtain, not under the influence of his elders, but among his playmates. And the standards worked out there are not refined and moral at all, but rough ones of emulation and group honor, and respect for prowess. Even obedience, which we all like to think of as one of the indispensable accomplishments of a well-trained child, seems to be obtained at the cost of real moral growth. It might be more beneficial if it were not too often merely a means for the spiritual edification of the parents themselves. Too often it is the delight of ruling, of being made obeisance to, that is the secret motive of imposing strict obedience, and not our desire simply that they shall learn the excellent habits that are our own. One difficulty with the child who has “learned to mind” is that, if he learns too successfully, he runs the risk of growing up to be a cowardly and servile youth. There is a theory that since the child will be obliged in later life to do many things that he does not want to do, he might as well learn how while he is young. The difficulty here seems to be that learning to do one kind of a thing that you do not want to do does not guarantee your readiness to do other kinds of unpleasant things. That art cannot be taught. Each situation of compulsion, unless the spirit is completely broken, will have its own peculiar quality of bitterness, and no guarantee against it can be inculcated. Life will present so many inevitable necessities to the child when he gets out into the world that it seems premature to burden his childhood with a training which will be largely useless. So much of our energy is wasted, and so much friction created, because we are unwilling to trust life. If life is the great demoralizer, it is also the great moralizer. It whips us into shape, and saddles us with responsibilities and the means of meeting them, with obligations and the will to meet them, with burdens and a strength to bear them. It creates in us a conscience and the love of duty, and endows us with a morality that a mother and father with the power and the love of angels working through all the years of our childhood could not have created within us. Trust life and not your own feeble efforts to create the soul in the child!
The virtue of childhood, then, is an exhaustless curiosity and interest in the world in which the child finds himself. He is here to learn his way around in it, to learn the names of things and their uses, how to use his body and his capacities. This will be the most excellent working of his soul. If his mind and body are active, he will be a “good” child, in the best sense of the word. We can almost afford to let him be insolent and irreverent and troublesome as long as he is only curious. If he has a temper, it will not be cured by curbing, but by either letting it burn out, or not giving it fuel to feed on. Food for his body and facts for his mind are the sustenance he requires. From the food will be built up his body, and from the facts and his reactions to them will slowly evolve his world of values and ideals. We cannot aid him by giving him our theories, or shorten the path for him by presenting him with ready-made standards. In spite of all the moral teachers, there is no short cut to the moral life of youth, any more than there is a royal road to knowledge. Nor can we help him to grow by transferring some of our superfluous moral flesh to his bones. The child’s qualities which shock our sense of propriety are evidences not of his immorality, but of his pre-morality. A morality that will mean anything to him can only be built up out of a vast store of experience, and only when his world has broadened out into a real society with influences of every kind coming from every side. He cannot get the relish of right and wrong until he has tasted life, and it is the taste of life that the child does not have. That taste comes only with youth, and then with a bewildering complexity and vividness.
But between childhood and youth there comes a trying period when the child has become well cognizant of the practical world, but has as yet no hint of the gorgeous colors of youth. At thirteen, for instance, one has the world pretty well charted, but not yet has the slow chemistry of time transmuted this experience into meanings and values. There is a crassness and materiality about the following three or four years that have no counterpart until youth is over and the sleek years of the forties have begun. How cocksure and familiar with the world is the boy or girl at this age! They have no doubts, but they have no glow. At no time in life is one so unspiritual, so merely animal, so much of the earth, earthy. How different is it to be a few years later! How shaken and adventurous will the world appear then! For this waiting period of life, the virtues are harder to discover. Curiosity has lapsed, for there do not seem to be many things left to be curious about. The child is beautifully unconscious of his own ignorance. Similarly has the play activity diminished; the boy has put away his Indian costumes, and the girl her dolls. At this season of life the virtue would seem to consist in the acquirement of some skill in some art or handicraft or technique. This is the time to search for the budding talents and the strong native bents and inclinations. To be interesting is one of the best of virtues, and few things make a person more interesting than skill or talent. From a selfish point of view, too, all who have grown up with unskillful hands will realize the solid virtue of knowing how to do something with the hands, and avoid that vague restlessness and desire to get at grips with something that haunts the professional man who has neglected in youth to cultivate this virtue of technique. And it is a virtue which, if not acquired at that time, can never be acquired. The deftness of hand, alertness of mind, are soon lost if they are not taken advantage of, and the child grows up helpless and unskillful, with a restless void where a talent and interest should be.
It is with youth, then, that the moral life begins, the true relish of right and wrong. Out of the crucible of passion and enthusiasm emerge the virtues of life, virtues that will have been tested and tried in the furnace of youth’s poignant reactions to the world of possibilities and ideals that has been suddenly opened up to it. Those young people who have been the victims of childish morality will not feel this new world so clearly or keenly, or, if there did lurk underneath the crust of imposed priggishness some latent touch of genius, they will feel the new life with a terrible searing pain that maddens them and may permanently distort their whole vision of life. To those without the spark, the new life will come stained by prejudice. Their reactions will be dulled; they will not see clearly; and will either stagger at the shock, or go stupidly ahead oblivious of the spiritual wonders on every side. Only those who have been allowed to grow freely like young plants, with the sun and air above their heads, will get the full beauty and benefit of youth. Only those whose eyes have been kept wide open ceaselessly learning the facts of the material and practical world will truly appreciate the values of the moral world, and be able to acquire virtue. Only with this fund of practical knowledge will the youth be able to balance and contrast and compare the bits of his experience, see them in the light of their total meaning, and learn to prefer rightly one bit to another. It is as if silent forces had been at work in the soul during the last years of childhood, organizing the knowledge and nascent sentiments of the child into forms of power ready for the free expression of youth.
Youth expresses itself by falling in love. Whether it be art, a girl, socialism, religion, the sentiment is the same; the youth is swept away by a flood of love. He has learned to value, and how superlative and magnificent are his values! The little child hardly seems to love; indeed, his indifference to grown people, even to his own parents, is often amazing. He has the simple affection of a young animal, but how different his cool regard from the passionate flame of youth! Love is youth’s virtue, and it is wide as well as deep. There is no tragic antithesis between a youth’s devotion to a cause and his love for a girl. They are not mutually exclusive, as romanticists often love to think, but beautifully compatible. They tend to fuse, and they stimulate and ennoble each other. The first love of youth for anything is pure and ethereal and disinterested. It is only when thwarted that love turns sensual, only when mocked that enthusiasm becomes fanatical or mercenary. Worldly opinion seems to care much more for personal love than for the love of ideals. Perhaps it is instinctively more interested in the perpetuation of the race than in its progress. It gives its suffrage and approval to the love of a youth for a girl, but it mocks and discredits the enthusiast. It just grudgingly permits the artist to live, but it piles almost insurmountable obstacles in the path of the young radical. The course of true love may never run smooth, but what of the course of true idealism?
The springs that feed this love are found, of course, in hero-worship. Sexual love is objectified in some charming and appealing girl, love for ideals in some teacher or seer or the inspiring personality of a friend. It is in youth that we can speak of real influence. Then is the soul responsive to currents and ideas. The embargo which kept the child’s mind immune to theory and opinion and tastes is suddenly lifted. In childhood, our imitation is confined to the external; we copy ways of acting, but we are insensitive to the finer nuances of personality. But in youth we become sensitive to every passing tone and voice. Youth is the season when, through this sensitiveness, the deadly pressures get their purchase on the soul; it is also the season for the most momentous and potent influences for good. In youth, if there is the possibility that the soul be permanently warped out of shape, there is also the possibility that it receive the nourishment that enables it to develop its own robust beauty. It is by hero-worship that we copy not the externals of personality, as in childhood, but the inner spirit. We feel ourselves somehow merged with the admired persons, and we draw from them a new stimulating grace. We find ourselves in them. It is not yielding to a pressure that would force us to a type, but a drawing up of ourselves to a higher level, through the aid of one who possesses all those qualities which have been all along, we feel, our vague and hitherto unexpressed ideal. We do not feel that our individualities are being lost, but that they are for the first time being found. We have discovered in another personality all those best things for which our hearts have been hungering, and we are simply helping ourselves to that which is in reality our own. Our hero gives of himself inexhaustibly, and we take freely and gladly what we need. It is thus that we stock up with our first store of spiritual values. It is from the treasury of a great and good personality that we receive the first confirmation of ourselves. In the hero-personality, we see our own dim, baby ideals objectified. Their splendor encourages us, and nerves us for the struggle to make them thoroughly our own.
There is a certain pathos in the fact that parents are so seldom the heroes from whom the children derive this revelation of their own personality. It is more often some teacher or older friend or even a poet or reformer whom the youth has never seen and knows only through his words and writings. But for this the parents are partly responsible. They are sufficiently careful about the influences which play upon their young children. They give care and prayers and tears to their bringing-up in the years when the children are almost immune to any except the more obvious mechanical influences, and learn of ideals and values only in a parrot-like fashion. But when the child approaches youth, the parent is apt to relax vigilance and, with a cry of thanksgiving and self-congratulation that the child has been brought safely through so many perils to the desired haven, to surrender him to his own devices. Just at the time when he becomes really sensitive for the first time to spiritual influences, he is deprived of this closest and warmest influence of the home. But he has not been brought into a haven, but launched into a heaving and troubled sea. This is the time when his character lies at stake, and the possibility of his being a radical, individual force in the world hangs in the balance. Whether he will become this force depends on the pressures that he is able to dodge, and on the positive ideals he is able to secure. And they will depend largely on the heroes he worships, upon his finding the personalities that seem to contain all the best for which he yearns. Hero-worship is the best preservative against cheapness of soul, that besetting sin of modern youth. It directs our attention away from the light and frothy things of the world, which are wont to claim so much of youth’s interest, to qualities that are richer and more satisfying. Yet hero-worship is no mere imitation. We do not simply adopt new qualities and a new character. We rather impregnate our hitherto sterile ideals with the creative power of a tested and assured personality, and give birth to a new reliance and a new faith. Our heroes anticipate and provide for our doubts and fears, and fortify us against the sternest assaults of the world. We love our heroes because they have first loved us.
Out of this virtue of love and the clashing of its clear spirit with the hard matter of established things come the sterner virtues. From that conflict, courage is struck off as youth feels the need of keeping his flame steady and holding to his own course, regardless of obstacles or consequences. Youth needs courage, that salt of the virtues, for if youth has its false hopes, it has its false depressions. That strange melancholy, when things seem to lose their substance and the world becomes an empty shell, is the reverse shield of the elation of youth. To face and overcome it is a real test of the courage of youth. The dash and audacity, the daring and self-confidence of youth, are less fine than this simple courage of optimism. Youth needs courage, too, when its desires do not come true, when it meets suspicion or neglect, and when its growth seems inexorably checked by circumstance. In these emergencies, the youth usually plays the stoic. He feels a savage pride in the thought that circumstance can never rob him of his integrity, or bring his best self to be dependent on mere change of fortune. Such a courage is a guarantor of youth. It forms a protecting crust over life and lessens the shock of many contingencies. The only danger is that it may become too perfect a shell and harden the character. It is not well for youth to shun the battle. Courage demands exposure to assault.
And besides courage, youth needs temperance. The sins and excesses of hot-blooded youth are a byword; youth would not seem to be youth without its carnality and extravagance. It is fortunate that youth is able to expend that extravagance partly in idealism. Love is always the antidote to sensuality. And we can always, if we set ourselves resolutely to the task, transmute the lower values into higher. This, indeed, is the crucial virtue of youth, and temperance is the seal and evidence of the transmutation. Temperance in things of the flesh is ordained not through sentimental reasons, but on the best of physiological and psychological motives. Temperance is a virtue because of the evil consequences to one’s self and others which follow excess of indulgence in appetite.
But this temperance does not mean quite the same thing as the rigid self-control that used to be preached. The new morality has a more positive ideal than the rigid mastery which self-control implies. We are to fix our attention more in giving our good impulses full play than in checking the bad. The theory is that if one is occupied with healthy ideas and activities, there will be no room or time for the expression of the unhealthy ones. Anything that implies an inhibition or struggle to repress is a draining away into a negative channel of energy that might make for positive constructive work in the character. The repressed desires and interests are not killed, but merely checked, and they persist, with unabated vigor, in struggling to get the upper hand again. They are little weakened by lying dormant, and lurk warily below, ready to swarm up again on deck, whenever there is the smallest lapse of vigilance. But if they are neglected they gradually cease from troubling, and are killed by oblivion where they could not have been hurt by forcible repression. The mortification of the flesh seems too often simply to strengthen its pride.
In the realm of emotion, the dangers of rigid self-control are particularly evident. There are fashions in emotion as well as in dress, and it seems to have become the fashion in certain circles of youth to inhibit any emotional expression of the sincere or the serious. There is a sort of reign of terrorism which prevents personal conversation from being carried on upon any plane except one of flippancy and insincerity. Frankness of expression in regard to personal feelings and likes and dislikes is tabooed. A strange new ethics of tact has grown up which makes candor so sacrilegious a thing that its appearance in a group or between two young people of the opposite sex creates general havoc and consternation. Young people who dare to give natural expression to their feelings about each other or about their ideals and outlook on life find themselves genuinely unpopular. When this peculiar ethics works at its worst, it gives a person a pride in concealing his or her feelings on any of the vital and sincere aspects of life, the interests and admirations and tastes. But this energy, dammed up thus from expression in its natural way, overflows in a hysterical admiration for the trivial, and an unhealthy interest in the mere externals, the “safe” things, of life. Such self-control dwarfs the spirit; it results only in misunderstandings and a tragic ignorance of life. It is one of the realest of the vices of youth, for it is the parent of a host of minor ailments of the soul. It seems to do little good even to repress hatred and malice. If repressed, they keep knocking at the door of consciousness, and poison the virtues that might develop if the soul could only get rid of its load of spleen. If the character is thickly sown with impersonal interests and the positive virtues are carefully cultivated, there will be no opportunity for these hateful weeds to reach the sun and air. Virtue should actually crowd out vice, and temperance is the tool that youth finds ready to its hand. Temperance means the happy harmonizing and coördinating of the expression of one’s personality; it means health, candor, sincerity, and wisdom,—knowledge of one’s self and the sympathetic understanding of comrades.
Justice is a virtue which, if it be not developed in youth, has little chance of ever being developed. It depends on a peculiarly sensitive reaction to good and evil, and it is only in youth that those reactions are keen and disinterested. Real justice is always a sign of great innocence; it cannot exist side by side with interested motives or a trace of self-seeking. And a sense of justice is hard to develop in this great industrial world where the relations of men are so out of joint and where such flaunting anomalies assail one at every turn. Yet in the midst of it all youth is still pure of heart, and it is only the pure of heart who can be just. For in youth we live in a world of clean disinterestedness. We have ambitions and desires, but not yet have we learned the devious way by which they may be realized. We have not learned how to achieve our ends by taking advantage of other people, and using them and their interests and necessities as means. We still believe in the possibility of every man’s realizing himself side by side with us. In early youth, therefore, we have an instinctive and almost unconscious sense of justice. Not yet have we learned the trick of exploiting our fellow men. If we are early assailed with the reality of social disorder, and have brought home to our hearts the maladjustments of our present order, that sense of justice is transformed into a passion. This passion for social justice is one of the most splendid of the ideals of youth. It has the power of keeping alive all the other virtues; it stimulates life and gives it a new meaning and tone. It furnishes the leit-motiv which is so sadly lacking in many lives. And youth must find a leit-motiv of some kind, or its spirit perishes. This social idealism acts like a tonic upon the whole life; it keeps youth alive even after one has grown older in years.
With justice comes the virtue of democracy. We learn all too early in youth the undemocratic way of thinking, the divisions and discriminations which the society around us makes among people. But youth cannot be swept by love or fired by the passion for justice without feeling a wild disgust at everything that suggests artificial inequalities and distinctions. Democracy means a belief that people are worthy; it means trust in the good faith and the dignity of the average man. The chief reason why the average man is not now worthy of more trust, the democrat believes, is simply that he has not been trusted enough in the past. Democracy has little use for philanthropy, at least in the sense of a kindly caring for people, with the constant recognition that the person who is kind is superior to the person who is being done good to. The spirit of democracy is a much more robust humanity. It is rough and aggressive; it stands people up on their own feet, makes them take up their beds and walk. It prods them to move their own limbs and take care of themselves. It makes them strong by giving them something to do. It will have nothing more to do with the superstition of trusteeship which paralyzes now most of our institutional life. It does not believe for a minute that everybody needs guardians for most of the serious concerns of life. The great crime of the past has been that humankind has never been willing to trust itself, or men each other. We have tied ourselves up with laws and traditions, and devised a thousand ways to prevent men from being thrown on their own responsibility and cultivating their own powers. Our society has been constituted on the principle that men must be saved from themselves. We have surrounded ourselves with so many moral hedges, have imposed upon ourselves so many checks and balances, that life has been smothered. Our liberation has just begun. We are far from free, but the new spirit of democracy is the angel that will free us. No virtue is more potent for youth.
And the last of these virtues, redolent of the old Greek time, when men walked boldly, when the world was still young, and gods and nymphs not all dead, is wisdom. To be wise is simply to have blended and harmonized one’s experience, to have fused it together into a “philosophy of life.” Wisdom is a matter not of quantity, but of quality of experience. It means getting at the heart of it, and obtaining the same clear warm impression of its meaning that the artist does of the æsthetic idea that he is going to represent. Wisdom in youth or early middle life may be far truer than in later life. One’s courage may weaken under repeated failure, one’s sense of justice be dulled by contact with the wrong relations between men and classes, one’s belief in democracy destroyed by the seeming failure of experiments. But this gathering cynicism does not mean the acquiring of wisdom, but the losing of it. The usefulness and practicability of these virtues of youth are not really vitiated by the struggles they have in carrying themselves through into practice; what is exhibited is merely the toughness of the old forces of prejudice and tradition, and the “pig-headedness” of the old philosophy of timorousness and distrust. True wisdom is faith in love, in justice, in democracy; youth has this faith in largest measure; therefore youth is most wise.
Middle age steals upon a youth almost before he is aware. He will recognize it at first, perhaps, by a slight paling of his enthusiasms, or by a sudden consciousness that his early interests have been submerged in the flood of routine work and family cares. The later years of youth and the early years of middle life are in truth the dangerous age, for then may be lost the virtues that were acquired in youth. Or, if not lost, many will be felt to be superfluous. There is danger that the peculiar bias of the relish of right and wrong that the virtues of youth have given one may be weakened, and the soul spread itself too thin over life. Now one of the chief virtues of middle life is to conserve the values of youth, to practice in sober earnest the virtues that came so naturally in the enthusiasm of youth, but which take on a different hue when exposed to what seem to be the crass facts of the workaday world. But there is no reason why work, ambition, the raising of a family, should dull the essential spirit of youthful idealism. It may not be so irrepressible, so freakish, so intolerant, but it should not be different in quality and significance. The burdens of middle life are not a warrant for the releasing of the spiritual obligations of youth. They do not give one the right to look back with amused regret to the dear follies of the past. For as soon as the spirit of youth begins to leave the soul, that soul begins to die. Middle-aged people are too much inclined to speak of youth as a sort of spiritual play. They forget that youth feels that it itself has the serious business of life, the real crises to meet. To youth it is middle age that seems trivial and playful. It is after the serious work of love-making and establishing one’s self in economic independence is over that one can rest and play. Youth has little time for that sort of recreation. In middle age, most of the problems have been solved, the obstacles overcome. There is a slackening of the lines, a satisfied taking of one’s reward. And to youth this must always seem a tragedy, that the season of life when the powers are at their highest should be the season when they are oftener turned to material than to spiritual ends. Youth has the energy and ideals, but not the vantage-ground of prestige from which to fight for them. Middle age has the prestige and the power, but too seldom the will to use it for the furtherance of its ideals. Youth has the isolation, the independence, the disinterestedness so that it may attack any foe, but it has not the reserve force to carry that attack through. Middle age has all the reserve power necessary, but is handicapped by family obligations, by business and political ties, so that its power is rarely effective for social or individual progress.
The supreme virtue of middle age will be, then, to make this difficult fusion,—to combine devotion to one’s family, to one’s chosen work, with devotion to the finer idealism and impersonal aims that formed one’s philosophy of youth. To keep alive through all the twistings and turnings of life’s road the sense of a larger humanity that needs spiritual and material succor, of the individual spiritual life of ideal interests, is a task of virtue that will tax the resources of any man or woman. Yet here lies the true virtue of middle age,—to use its splendid powers to enhance the social and individual life round one, to radiate influence that transforms and elevates. The secret of such a radiant personality seems to be that one, while mingling freely in the stress of everyday life, sees all its details in the light of larger principles, against the background of their social meaning. In other words, it is a virtue of middle life to be socially self-conscious. And this spirit is the best protector against the ravages of the tough material world. Only by this social consciousness can that toughness be softened. The image of the world the way it ought to be must never be lost sight of in the picture of the world the way it is.
This conservation of the spirit is even more necessary for the woman than for the man. The active life of the latter makes it fairly certain that he, while he may become hard and callous, will at least retain some sort of grip on the world’s bigger movements. There is no such certainty for the mother. Indeed, she seems often to take a real pleasure in voluntarily offering up in sacrifice at the time of marriage what few ideal interests and tastes she has. The spectacle of the young mother devoting all her time and strength to her children and husband, and surrendering all other interests to the interests of the home, is usually considered inspiring and attractive, especially by the men. Not so attractive is she thirty years later, when, her family cares having lapsed and her children scattered, she is left high and dry in the world. If she then takes a well-earned rest, it seems a pity that that rest should be so generally futile and uninteresting. Without interests and tastes, and with no longer any useful function in society, she is relegated to the most trivial amusements and pursuits. Idle and vapid, she finds nothing to do but fritter away her time. The result is a really appalling waste of economic and social energy in middle age. Now it is the virtue of this season of life to avoid all this. The woman as well as the man must realize that her home is not bounded by the walls of the house, that it has wider implications, leading out into all the interests of the community and the state. That women of this age have not yet learned to be good mothers and good citizens at the same time, does not show that it is impossible, but that it is a virtue that requires more resolution than our morality has been willing to exhibit. The relish of right and wrong must be a relish of social right and wrong as well as of individual.
As middle age passes on into old age, however, one earns a certain right of relaxation. If there is no right to let go the sympathy for the virtues of youth and the conservation of its spirit, there comes the right to give over some of the aggressive activity. To youth belongs the practical action. At no other age is there the same impulse and daring. The virtue of later middle age is to encourage and support, rather than actively engage. It is true we have never learned this lesson. We still surrender to semi-old men the authority to govern us, think for us, act for us. We endow them with spiritual as well as practical leadership, and allow them to strip youth of its opportunities and powers. We permit them to rule not only their own but all the generations. If we could be sure that their rule meant progress, we could trust them to guide us. But, in these times at least, it seems to mean nothing so much as a last fight for a discredited undemocratic philosophy that modern youth are completely through with. From this point of view one of the virtues of this middle season of life will be the imaginative understanding of youth’s purposes and radical ideals. At that age, one no longer needs the same courage to face the battles of life; they are already most of them irrevocably won or lost. There is not the same claim of temperance; the passions and ambitions are relaxed. The sense of justice and democracy will have become a habit or else they will have been forever lost. Only the need of wisdom remains,—that unworldly wisdom which mellowing years can bring, which sees through the disturbance and failure of life the truth and efficacy of youth’s ideal vision.
Old age is such a triumph that it may almost be justly relieved of any burden of virtues or duties; it is so unique and beautiful that the old should be given the perfect freedom of the moral city. So splendid a victory is old age over the malign forces of disease and weakness and death that one is tempted to say that its virtue lies simply in being old. Those virtues of youth which grew out of the crises and temptations, physical and spiritual, of early life, are no longer relevant. There may come instead the quieter virtues of contentment and renunciation. Old people have few crises and few temptations; they live in the past and not in the future, as youth does. They cannot be required, therefore, to have that scorn for tradition which is the virtue of youth. They can keep alive for us the tradition that is vital, and from them we can learn many things.
The value of their experience to us is not that it teaches us to avoid their mistakes, for we must try all things for ourselves. The older generation, it is true, often flatters itself that its mistakes somehow make for our benefit, because we learn from their errors to avoid the pitfalls into which they came. But there is no making mistakes by the proxy of a former generation. The world has moved on in the mean time; the pitfalls are new, and we shall only entangle ourselves the more by adopting the methods of our ancestors in getting out of the difficulties. But the value of an old man’s experience is that he has preserved in it the living tradition and hands down to us old honesties, old sincerities, and old graces, that have been crushed in the rough-and-tumble of modern life. It is not tradition in itself that is dangerous, but only dead tradition that has no meaning for the present and is a mere weight on our progress. Such is the legal and economic tradition given to us by our raucous, middle-aged leaders of opinion, adopted by them through motives of present gain, and not through sincere love of the past.
But old men, looking back over the times in which they have lived, throw a poetic glamour over the past and make it live again. They see it idealized, but it is the real that they see idealized. An old man of personality and charm has the faculty of cutting away from the past the dead wood, and preserving for us the living tissue which we can graft profitably on our own growing present. Old men have much of the disinterestedness of youth; they have no ulterior motive in giving us the philosophy of their past. The wisest of them instinctively select what is vital for our present nourishment. It is not old men that youth has to fear, but the semi-old, who have lost touch with their youth, and have not lived long enough to get the disinterested vision of their idealized past. But old men who have lived this life of radical virtue are the best of teachers; they distill the perfume of the past, and bring it to us to sweeten our present. Such men grow old only in body. The radical spirit of youth has the power of abolishing considerations of age; the body changes, but the spirit remains the same. In this sense, it is the virtue of old age not to become old.
The besetting sin of this season of life is apathy. Old age should not be a mere waiting for death. The fact that we cannot reconcile death with life shows that they ought not to be discussed in the same terms. They belong to two different orders. Death has no part in life, and in life there can be no such thing as preparation for death. An old man lives to his appointed time, and then his life ends; but the life up to that ending, barring the loss of his faculties, has been all life and not a whit death. Old men do not fear death as much as do young men, and this calmness is not so much a result of disillusionment with life as a recognition that their life has been lived, their work finished, the cycle of their activity rounded off. One virtue of old age, then, is to live as fully at the height of one’s powers as strength will permit, passing out of life serene and unreluctant, with willingness to live and yet with willingness to die. To know an old man who has grown old slowly, taking the seasons as they came, conserving the spirit of his youthful virtues, mellowing his philosophy of life, acquiring a clearer, saner, and more beautiful outlook on human nature and all its spiritual values with each passing year, is an education in the virtues of life. The virtues which produce an old age such as this do not cut across the grain of life, but enhance and conserve the vital impulses and forces. Such an old age is the crowning evidence of the excellent working of the soul. A life needs no other proof than this that each season has known its proper virtue and healthful activity.