BOYS AND GIRLS.
A PICTORIAL joke in this week's Punch marks what may be the high tide of a mannerism among the rising generation which deserves more than a passing notice. " Ah !" remarks the gentleman ; "everybody's getting too clever nowadays. I assure you, my chief object in society is to conceal my ignorance, and prevent people from finding out what an abject fool I really am." "And do you succeed!" smilingly asks the lady. The opportunity was perhaps irre- sistible, at least in our day, when no girl thinks of concealing her cleverness; but we are not sure that the savage snub was entirely deserved. The "masher " who spoke seemed guilty, no doubt, of an affectation which, when the next generation studies this volume of Punch, will seem in- credible ; but it was in a great degree only seeming. He did but express in exaggerated language a feeling among the young, and especially the young and prosperous, which is one of the most marked, as it is one of the least in- telligible, signs of our generation. The young man of to-day not only affects self-depreciation, but he is honestly sell. depreciative. The old self-confidence, upon which Dons lace Dr. Thompson were so effectively bitter, appears, except in Dons, to have temporarily disappeared, and young men gravely pronounce themselves young idiots. They do not know any- thing, they say; they are not clever, and they shall, they
think, never do much in life. They preface every state- ment with the remark that "they do not know much about it ;" and if they want to contradict, do it in the formula, "I always thought, don't you know, that it was thus "—the exact opposite of what you had said—" bat that is just like me, I never can get my facts right." So far from being dogmatic, they are not sure of the multiplication-table, and only grow absolute where the question is of a false quantity, when they may ask if such-and-such a quotation is not "irresistible evidence?' They "are not very popular," they say ; " people are kind to them because they are kind, they do not know why ;" and as for friends, they have more than they deserve. Indeed, it is currently reported, though we will by no means vouch for anything so absolutely incredible, that a young man was recently heard to say, with a deprecatory smile, that he thought, on the whole, pretty girls did not like him much. To listen to the new generation, you would think they were the humblest of mankind, thought of themselves as school- boys, and were gravely convinced that knowledge, so far from ending with themselves, could never filter down to them. Apart from an indefinable difference of manner, they talk as workmen talk upon statistics, a topic upon which the half-educated are, for some inexplicable reason—unless it be that the evidence, when found, must be absolute—invariably reverential towards their superiors in culture. Nor is this merely a manner, or a recurrence towards that Chinese form of politeness which cannot allude to self without asking pardon for the existence of anything so insignificant and worthless. There is affectation in it, no doubt, as there is in all politenesses which become so general; but there is also sincerity. The young have acquired a new self-distrust. So far from believing that they are fit to be Lord Chancellors, or Premiers, or Physicians to the Queen, as we all believed thirty years ago, they doubt whether they can do as well as their neighbours, ask for all manner of protections from com- petition, and start for a competitive examination, or an interview with a patron, with a warning to their friends—quite sincere— that they are not to expect anything, because "other fellows, don't you know, know such a lot that I don't." They are sure of their own weak places, and of nothing else. That is a very curious phase of feeling to appear in such a number of nice lads, and one not easy to explain. A little of it, perhaps, is due to the new truthfulness born of culture which is developing itself in society, and which has, for example, entirely revolutionised the old etiquettes about references to money. Our fathers lied about money, to speak plainly, habitually and systematically, constrained by etiquette. The rich man never admitted that he had any money, unless he meant to boast ; while the poor man thought a plea of poverty, if clearly made in so many words, was either an immodesty or an affront to his interlocutor. That has completely passed away, and the rich man of to-day says, if necessary, "I have some money, you know ;" or the poor man, "I cannot afford it," as simply as they would mention any other indifferent fact. Truthfulness must with some be a cause of self-depreciation; but then, it is not so with all, for all do not deserve it. All the confident youngsters of a passed-away day cannot have been consciously fibbing, and, besides, they acted, often to their own grave hurt, under the influence of that self-confidence. Vanity, again, cannot have diminished very greatly in this generation or any other. It is, to a certain extant at all events, as in- stinctive in men as in animals, and it certainly has not vanished either from boys' dress or from their unconscious demeanour. They " preen " themselves, just as the birds do, as much as ever they did. We might suggest, as we believe many do, that the unconscious influence of "the age" is towards disbelief, and that disbelief in themselves is only the final expression of this tendency ; but then we are met by the greatest puzzle of all, the almost total exemption of the girls from any tendency of the kind. They are all as self- confident as can be, quite elate with the sense of capacity, ready to study anything, to do anything, to trust themselves anywhere, to undertake any possible career, except life in a man- of-war. Their one complaint is that they are debarred from so many things which they could do quite as well as the men. They are boiling over not only with energy and force, but with mental pluck and conceit, and are not a little inclined to tell their brothers and lovers that a good deal more self-appreciation is essential to manliness. "He is so diffident," they say, not without a gleam of contempt. Girls go in for stiff examinations with a serenity the boys can only admire from a distance ; and when they have passed them, face life with a certainty of getting along which seems to their mothers almost miraculous, —a sign of a changed world. The change is there, too. The very bearing of the new generation of girls is different from that of their seniors, and different through the development of the confidence which has decayed or disappeared in the young men. Ask Mr. Du Manner else.
Now, what can be the cause at work the operation of which is so strong that its results attract the attention both of satirists and moralists, yet are not only not identical, but are positively opposed in the sexes, though both are equally exposed to the silent influences of "the age "—that is, to the total influence of new habits of thought—and both in some respects, e.g, in freedom of thought, obviously respond to them alike P We can suggest only one, and though it does in some measure explain the two contradictory sets of facts, it is by no means completely satisfactory to our own minds. We think it possible that the influence of the modern system of examination—that is, of bringing all capacities and acquire- ments to positive and, as it were, undeniable teats—has been unexpectedly far-reaching and profound. The boy trained more or less to belief in himself—for that is the effect, and the beneficial effect, of the mother's training—is tested almost in- cessantly for six or seven years of his lite, is pitted habitually against others, is taught by circumstances a habit of self- measurement, does measure himself a good deal in an unintended direction—that is, against the old—gets a great many illusions scattered, and, as a result, does lose a great deal of his confidence. It is knocked out of him by defeat in what is to him battle ; and being knocked out, he suffers, or it may be benefits, from the recoil. (We must wait to know whether the result is benefit or loss. The new modesty is in many ways very pleasant ; bat then, it is also disheartening, and is somehow not quite natural. Cock- crowing is a nuisance ; but ought cocks to leave off crowing?) The lad underrates himself as he formerly overrated himself, and instead of being to himself the sum of wisdom, is to himself, like Punch's exaggerative friend, "an abject fool." It would seem to be evidence of this theory that lads who always succeed under the tests, who win examinations from boyhood to twenty-four —and we have known boys never defeated—remain as conceited as it is possible to wish ; while others bred at home, or from any other cause exempt from tests, are as self-confident as the last generation, able in their own judgments, if they only got the chance, to command a fleet without seeing a ship, or to cut for cancer without having heard a lecture on anatomy. The girl, on the other hand, is trained by the home influence—for men rule the home intellectually, when all is said—to a certain self-distrust, and the new habit of submitting to tests tends to remove it. She can do more than she thought she could, she measures herself like her brother, and she acquires from every measurement a confidence which, as in her brother's case, produces a recoil. Only her recoil is from self-distrust, and his from self-belief. She becomes as confident as he becomes diffident ; and both being made truthful by the new realism, both say so aloud. Both the processes we have mentioned certainly go on, and they do in a measure explain facts which look mutually self-destruc- tive ; but there is something left still.which we can only confess, in the modern manner, we are not wise enough completely to understand. There is a change of mental climate as puzzling as any recorded by meteorologists, and accompanied, unless our eyes are growing dim, by a positive change of expression of which the portrait-painters, and above all the caricaturists, are thoroughly well aware. That, however, is too big a subject, and one open to too much dispute, to enter on to-day.
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