AN APOLOGY FROM AGE TO YOUTH. T HE December number of
Macmillan's Magazine contains an interesting apology addressed by Age to Youth for the appearance of coldness and want of sympathy between them, for which Age takes a certain amount of responsibility. We should hardly have thought such an apology very appropriate to the latter days of the nineteenth century. This is the time in which, if any excuses between the young and the old for want of sympathy are timely at all, it is the young who owe an apology to the old, and not the old to the young. Indeed, that is, perhaps, on the whole, meant to be the up- shot of the excuses which the father offers to his children for having seemed to enter too little into their interests and pleasures. It is they, he intimates, though with a certain amount of humble self-reproach for not having been able to bridge the chasm which had opened between them, who had made the daily conversation at dinner " turn its back " on him, rather than he who had voluntarily displayed any want of interest in their studies or pleasures or pursuits. The writer describes his own experience of being sent to Coventry by his children with a good deal of piquancy ; so much, indeed, that we venture to extract a rather long descriptive passage:— " Yon four young people have known me from my fifty-ninth, sixtieth, sixty-first birthday,—I know not precisely when, but thereabout—as a close, severely silent, rarely smiling old man, withdrawing more and more into himself every year, little seen at last among you except at dinner, where the head of the table was as the North Pole in a graduady advancing ice-age. One of the contemporaries of my own bright days (a great man as com- pared with your father, whose companionship he generously tolerated), was known as • the Gruncher.' The name was to me as the sound of it ; and many a time as I descended the stair to join you in the dining-room this was the thought in my mind: Now my children will say to themselves, Here comes the Gruncher '—I don't mean Gruncher exactly, but something of similar signification. Nor do I deny that a Gruncher I seemed; well, and perhaps for some time now a Gruncher I have been. But I vow and declare that Brunching was no spontaneous growth in my nature, but something quite foreign to it. It was sown, it was planted, and flourished, so much as it ever did flourish, to my own conscious hurt and sorrow. Here comes the Gruncher ! ' And accordingly, as I entered the room, whatever word was
passing among you dropped, and the brighter the word the sooner For a moment I have felt the air in the room alive and tingling with your jolly talk, and the next moment have been aware of a sensation as if the various currents of the jollity were creeping
back or being gathered back to their source in your bosoms Thus abashed I have taken my seat, a gentle breath from Green- land's icy mountains circling round the table at the same moment and bringing with it an interval of Arctic silence. But not a long interval. Soon a word from Charles to George, from George to Elizabeth, softened the too poignant clatter of the table-furniture, and presently all four young voices were chiming away on this and on that ; but, you will hardly believe it, in that tone of voice which has a back,—the back which strangers in a public place feel is turned upon them when we talk with each other in their pre- sence. Though your brisk conversation may have been only of the cricket-match, of the people at the vicar's garden-party, or some strange story in one of the popular journals, I could but wish myself included in it, if only as an acknowledged listener, just as I used to be before the shroudings of age began. As it was, ex- clusion, the back of the talk, which, while it seemed so very natural to you, was not meant, I am sure, in unkindness to me. But how could I help it, if it had the effect of unkindness sometimes ? Or how if I felt angry as well as hurt when, breaking in with a little talk of my own, I was answered by one of you [none of the rest even looking at the chair'] in the dry respectful tone of catechu- men to catechist, and found it wise to cease?"
That is a very remarkable passage, and if it really describes the chasm which often springs up between the old and the young, it seems to us to picture it in a way which rather throws the responsibility, and the duty of apology, on the young than on the old, except, indeed, that experience has taught the old more lessons as to the best way of breaking down this growth of frigid reserve than it has taught the young. But we cannot say that our own experience of life at all verifies the view of the writer that such chasms do open between the young and the old half as often in our own day as they did in that of our fathers. We should say that so far as the relation is unsatisfactory at all, it is oftener unsatis- factory in the failure of reciprocal sympathy than in the failure of the sympathy felt by the old for the young. We often see,—much oftener than the last generation saw,—the most eager and vivid interest taken by the old in the hopes and fears and ambitions and pleasures of the young,—an interest heartily appreciated and even looked for as almost matter of right by the young,—without any corresponding interest felt by the young in the pursuits and interests of the old. And when we see this, we generally see the old bringing themselves to this state of things with some- thing like a willingness to admit that it is perfectly right and natural that it should be so. But even this is not true without remarkable exceptions. We know more than one case in which it has been the young who have spon- taneously and ardently adopted the interests and pursuits of the old, and that with a blitheness and elasticity that has lighted up those interests afresh ; nor can any relation 'be more beautiful than one of this kind, which is in no way due to the slightest tinge of exactingness on the part of the old. Still, while the number of relations of that kind could be counted on the fingers of one hand, the number of relations in which the old give themselves up heart and soul to the young may be counted by the dozen or the score. So far as we can compare the present day with any past day, we should have said that nothing distinguishes it more than the complete disappearance of the notion that the old have any proper claim to the services of the young, and the substitution for it of a sort of understanding that parents should consult their children before they take any serious step in life, and should
be disposed to renounce it if the children disapprove. We should have supposed that the chasm so vividly described by the writer in Macmillan as springing up between the old and the young, is one of the rarest of our modern social phenomena, and seldom, indeed, due to the failure of the old to enter warmly into the hopes and wishes of the young. Whether or not the young are comrades of the old, the old are constantly found to be the most eager of the comrades of the young, often almost at the cost of their own more personal tastes. It is, indeed, necessarily rare for the young to throw themselves with enthusiasm into the pursuits of the old, but it is the com- monest thing in the world for the old to throw themselves with true enthusiasm into the pursuits of the young. The stiffness of the muscles of the mind in the old, of which the Macmillan writer complains, appears to us to be very much a thing of the past. However stiff their muscles may be for their own hobbies, let the children once ride a hobby of their own, and the old find no difficulty at all in adapting their ancient limbs to the rhythm of the new plaything. It is only when they turn to their own favourite tastes that they find out how much they have lost of the ardour and suppleness of youth. In "Topsy-turvy World" it is the parents who are sent to bed at eight. Though we do not exactly live in "Topsy-turvy World," we do live in a world which our Rhadamanthine old grandfathers and grandmothers would have thought quite topsy-turvy if they could only have fore- seen it. "Young people should be seen and not heard" was the favourite maxim of the seniors fifty years ago. Now it is the old people who are oftener seen and not heard, and seen, when they are seen, listening with rapt attention to the wit and wisdom of youth.
We are clear, at all events, that it is by no means the special defect of our time that the old do not enter heartily into the life of the young. Comparing the present generation with generations past, we should say that one of the most distinc- tive notes of the present day is the sympathy of the old for the young, a sympathy which the young generally, and rather heartily, appreciate, but which they do not very often reciprocate. Instead of conversing so as to turn " the back of the conversation" towards the old, they usually expect, and confidently expect, that a good deal of its life and interest will be contributed by the old, and are rather scandalised if the expectation be disappointed. In fact, they habitually expect the old to be juvenile in their interests ; and they are very much seldomer disappointed than the young people of forty or fifty years ago, if they had formed the same expectations (which they certainly did not often do) would have been. Just as the rich are now habi- tually expected (and very often justify the expectation), to find their deepest interest in alleviating the condition of the poor, so the old are now habitually expected to find their deepest interest in rendering the pursuits and pleasures of the young still more attractive, nor do they very often disappoint expectation. Even in literature the as- tonishing growth of the demand for children's books and books of adventure, is one of the features of the day. More than half the old people who write at all, write books for the young, and too often they make almost preternatural efforts to be young and sprightly, which sometimes end in a sort of deadly liveliness that is very mournful. We should say, indeed, of the present age, that its tone is predominently youth- ful. It disbelieves in the warnings of the past, and believes in the practicability of all that it wishes for, with almost touching youthfulness and elasticity. Even when it worships the old as it often does, the object of worship,—for example, the Grand Old Man,—is usually one who has in him all the sanguineness of early youth, and all the vivacity which the young especially appreciate. It is an age in which the young have apparently made a conquest of the hearts of the old, instead of being governed and tutored and disciplined by them as they used to be. And we are not sure that the world is wholly the better for the change. The old no longer believe in the value of their own experience. At any rate, they grow timid of expressing their belief in its value, and are so over- come by the new pace of life that they are inclined to think the government should pass to those who are not over- whelmed by it, and who believe that human nature can keep pace with all the discoveries and novelties of scientific pro- gress and democratic aspiration. Almost the last thing we should have thought of would have been that the old need offer any special apology for not sympathising with the young. We believe that they sympathise with them almost too much, and that they are induced to ignore some of the best lessons of experience in their eagerness to make the young generation happy, and to enter into the spirit of their opti- mistic dreams.
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