Slump in Adventure
By MOTII.
KNOW of few keener intellectual pleasures than that 1 to be derived from listening to two old men talking about Modern Youth and the Spirit of Adventure.
They always take the same line. For the first time in our, rough island story, they complain, young men have ceased to be adventurous.
What do they mean by adventure ? They mean what popular historians of the Elizabethan age have taught them to 'nett' n. They mean the Wide World Magazine, lyricized by a Muse who seems to have something to do with both Rudyard Kipling and Rupert Brooke. They mean travelling steerage, and topers, and stockades, and husbanding every drop of the precious fluid, and planting the. Union Jack, and going down with fever, and at the end of it all a sheaf of assegais over the sideboard and a slight limp. You don't find young men doing that sort of thing nowadays, they mutter gloomily, shaking their heads and staring with horrified fascination at the photo- graphs of the latest fancy dress party in the Tatter.
They are quite right. You don't. And for the best of reasons. Adventure—adventure in the grand old manner —is obsolete, having been either exalted to a specialist's job or degraded.to a stunt. It is all very well to cheapen us against the Elizabethans, for whom every other landfall meant a colony. In those days all you needed was an enquiring turn of mind and a profound contempt lOr scurvy and Spaniards. A passage on any boat with a sufficiently conjectural destination was almost certain to make an Empire-builder of you. And since on those journeys every able-bodied man was useful, you were entitled to feel that you were doing something worth doing. . Nobody accused you of wanting balance, or said that it was time you settled down. The community capitalized your wanderlust. Restlessness was good citizenship.
But the age of geographical discovery has gone, and so has the age of territorial annexation. Experts are quietly consolidating the gains of spectacular amateurs. in Darien. to=day a pair of eagle eyes is not much good unless you have also a theodolite. A wild surmise will not do. As for planting the Union Jack, those portions of the earth's surface where such an action can have any lasting political significance are very few and (I strongly suspect) entirely valueless from the economic, the strategic, and the residential point of view.
Of course, there is st ill plenty of adventure of a sort to be had. You can even make it pay, with a little care ; for it is easy to attract public attention to any exploit which is at once highly improbable and absolutely useless. You can lay the foundations of a brief, but glorious, career on the music-halls by being the First Girl Typist to Swim Twice Round the Isle of Man; and anyone who successfully undertakes to drive a well-known make of car along the Great Wall of China in reverse will not fail of his reward. And then there are always records to be broken. Here you can make some show of keeping within the best traditions, and set out to take the Illustrious Dead down a peg by repeating their exploits with a difference. Rivers which they ascended in small boats you can ascend in smaller ; if they took five months to cross a desert, go and see if you can do it in four. Where they went in litters you can ride ; where they went on mules you can go on foot ; and where they went on foot you can go (for all I care) on roller-skates. It is a silly business, this statistical eye-wiping. These spurious and calculated feats bear as much relation to adventure as a giant gooseberry does to agriculture.
The old men who grumble that Modern Youth (the capitals are theirs) is not adventurous make two cardinal mistakes. They fail to appreciate the facts, and they have got their values all wrong.
The facts are that four male children out of five start life predisposed in favour of adventure. This has always been so, and it is so to-day. Young men arc just as adventurous in 1933 as they ever were. But they can see with one eye that chances of any form of useful or profitable adventure arc very rare indeed. If they have the time and the money to equip themselves with a more than ordinary knowledge of surveying, or tropical hygiene, or marine zoology, or even aviation, they can put themselves in a position to -take one of these rare _chances. Or, again, if they have _ the time and the money, they can take as much adventure of the picaresque, -irresponsible kind as their stomachs and the far-flung consulates will stand. But few of them can afford either the time or the money. So they give up all thoughts of a topee, buy a bowler, and start working at jobs which are almost always, at first, drab and uncongenial. This is a very good thing for the country and everyone else con- cerned ; and it reflects great credit on the young men.
For (and this is where clubland gets its values wrong) adventure is really a soft option. Adventure has always -been a selfish business. Men who set out to find it may —like men who go and get married—feel reasonably confident that a successful issue to their project will be of service to the world. But the desire to benefit the community is never their principal motive, any more than it is the principal motive of people who marry each other. They do it because they want to. It suits them; it is their cup of tea.
So it requires far less courage to be an explorer than to be a. chartered accountant. The courage which enables you to face the prospect of sitting on a high stool in a smoky town and adding up figures over a period of years is definitely a higher,- as well as a more useful, form of courage than any which the explorer may he called on to display. For the explorer is living under natural conditions, and the difficulties he meets with are the sort of difficulties which nature equipped man to face : whereas the chartered accountant is living under unnatural conditions, to which a great deal of his equipment is dangerously ill-suited. Moreover and finally, the chartered accountant is doing an essential job, and the explorer (in- these days) is not.
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