"YOUTH AND ALL THAT"
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR SIR,—May I express my appreciation of Miss Estcourt's excellent article? I think it is one of the most valuable articles of its kind as regards its protest against all these youth organisations, of which we hear so much nowadays. May we have many more such articles!
It has been my good fortune to have enjoyed a public school education that has now been followed by two terms of university life, and as my physique renders me unfit for army service at thc moment, I may be able to spend longer here than I expected, though all that is uncertain. But whatever may happen in the future I feel I have reached a period when I can begin to see the results of my four years at a public school in true perspective, and the memory of them is still unblurred by time. In twenty years I shall have forgotten many of the apprehensions and un- pleasant events of my youth, or very nearly—apprehensions before and during the School Certificate exam., reactions before and after being beaten by a prefect, the agonising hours before performing in a competi- tion, and all the rest. I shall have new things to worry and botherane, all of which will tend to make the period of youth appear as the one golden age in life Ten years later I shall have forgotten what youth really was or what a youth really is.
That, as Miss Estcourt points out, is the dangerous stage. I doubt if any of the people who talk so glibly about better educations, better homes, better boys, ever get as far as thinking how it will help the individual boy in his individual home and education. What is he going to do when the education stops? No one is going to suppose that every person trained as a mechanic is going to remain such always. He may develop into a poet for all they know, and one of the most individual poets of his time, who is going to throw up all his mechanical pursuits in favour of his art. We must not only think of the scientist, the historian, the economist, the musician, as various types. We must think of William Smith the scientist, John Jones the economist, Robinson the engineer, as separate men. The prospect of submerging individuality is all very well in physical spheres, viz., soldiering, making munitions and even being a lire-watcher, but will be fatal where the mental side is concerned. If such things come to pass, we shall become the dullest nation in the world.
Does Sir William Beveridge expect all budding economists to think as he does? Does Bernard Shaw expect all playwrights to write as he does? Does Dr. Vaugham Williams want people to compose as he does? Yet this is the logical outcome of all these youth training organisations, which do not teach people how to think, but what to think. Were any of the three distinguished men I have named told what to think, or what to write? We may admire our allies the Russians for their fighting, but do our critics admire all their music and poetry of the last twenty years so much as all that—critics who know and can give reasons for the fine work of such men as Vaughan Williams, Hardy, Rilke, Yeats, Debussy, Elgar and so on?
Unless we are careful we shall have no more men such as these because their individuality will be squashed before it has had time to develop. I may very well be a member of the last generation to enjoy the liberty of developing on individual lines, unless your paper and others like you do all you can to fight this terrible habit of making generalisations out of everything, and putting everything into groups and sections. Are we to zone the philosophers and thinkers of tomorrow?—Yours faithfully,
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