COMPULSORY YOUTH.
" TP I with my present experience could begin life over
I again ! " How often have we heard this exclamation in the mouths of men and women who have passed their youth and not yet begun to be old, people, we mean, who are still in their full strength, but who five years ago seemed immovably settled in the groove in which they must run till seventy. In
some sense their wish has come true. Circumstances have caused them to renew their youth, so far as it can ever be re- newed. It is a strange thing this which has happened to the middle-aged world. The future is once more full of possibilities, many of them very disagreeable ones. The sense of assurance is gone, and with it much peace. On the other hand, the sense of the inevitable has gone, and with it much monotony and some despair. The great interruption of the war is past. The great social change has only begun. The detonations of the explosion are over, and we have leisure to look how much damage has been done before we proceed to rebuild. Anyhow, the old " grooves " are destroyed. To some of us their destruction brings eonater. nation and to some relief. Thousands of men have before them once more a choice of work, and thousands of their wives and daughters have no choice but to work. They feel as if they were preparing to emigrate to a new country, or more truly as though they were being borne along by an irresistible current into a new world. To all this newness they must come with a load of experience, not, as they came out of their teens, with a light heart and a head full of nothing heavier than hope. In many ways this second youth which circumstances have forced upon mature men compares but ill with the real heyday. Yet it has some good things of its own to boast. Little of romance re- mains. Our ordinary thoughts have no bright background such as dazzles adolescence. To many natures, however, there is always a certain romance about the unknown. Free of youth's personal preoccupations, not a few of us will throw ourselves into new duties in a new atmosphere with a zest always accredited to boys and girls but not very generally claimed by them. Against the worst disappointments wo are secure. We do not expect store than a moderate share of the lump of happiness, which has always been insufficient to satisfy the appetites of average men. We perhaps know that we shall never set the Thames on fire, and that piece of knowledge quenches a good many sparks of secret delight ; but we know also that wo are no fools, and we know by experience that the men we must contend with in the race are probably just like ourselves. Genius is very rare ; we are not likely to hit up against it. Exceptional luck is a con- spicuous but not a common thing. There is little wizardry to be encountered in the struggle to excel; nothi rig but wits and work. Still, it is undeniable that a few men who have reached middle life without making any name for themselves, and who would in the natural course of things have gone to their graves with the crowd, will be singled out for great accomplishment. The present upheavals will shake some square men out of round holes, to their obvious advantage and that of today. They will find !ate in life the vocation which they thought irrevocably missed.
For the great majority of professional people, indeed we suppose for the whole middle class, the new way of life will mean what is generally called a smaller way—less luxury, less variety, fewer dependants or none. Ways of life in this sense, however, please or displease by comparison. There is not much fear that life will be sadder for the change. Whether it will in is true as well as a technical sense be narrower remains to he seen. Will the men and women who bravely begin life again determined to make the best of everything, and perhaps really convinced that the "second chance " which has befallen them makes up for many sacrifices, yet look back to their " better days " as really better ? We are inclined to think they will. At beat it is hard work, this being young to order. All new work, however attractive, takes
it out of the workman, and still more out of the workwoman. Every second chance is a chance to do worse as well as better. The exhilaration of risk can be exaggerated. No money to waste means no time to waste, and that means no thought to waste. Anxiety is of necessity a sort of egotism. Serenity is not an attribute of youth, and those who must perforce renew their youth must part with it. Hitherto the people who have lived in a small way have not been conspicuous for a wide outlook. Perhaps one rea on is that hitherto they have been cut off from ambition. The new man in the new " small way " will not have this disadvantage. Short steep cuts to power and place may to found now from everywhere. They are not very frequent, these lucky turnings in the long lane; but every one knows now that they are there, and knows men who have forced their way up them. Even those who realize that they have not endurance to undertake the climb may dream for their children as pleasantly as when they lived more at ease.
There has been lately, there was at any rate before the war, a sad breach between the generations. They had somehow got out of sympathy. The anxiety of parents to keep the friendship of the growing children to whom when they were little they had been as indulgent gods was pathetic. The young people for whom everything was new and unknown, and the people for whom everything was old and familiar, had fallen apart. One cannot help thinking that this unnatural state of things will not go on. Together father and son will begin," together they will face the new times. The younger man will be glad of the older man's experience, and the latter will at last realize that " vision" is at least as valuable as experience in face of the uncertain future. There will of course be danger of jealousy. But youth is seldom jealous of age, and parents have so much greater a love for their children than children for their parents that they will surely be able where their own are concerned to overcome the natural envy of youth. It sometimes seems amazing to the present writer that this vast crowd of young men in their new armour and full of their new dreams are content to be led and governed by the old men of the world. Yet they are content. All over Europe they choose old men to rule. These old men are no doubt far above the average in strength and elasticity of purpose. They too have to play, and on the whole they play marvellously well, at being young. Youth does not laugh or grudge in this matter, but accepts. May we not therefore hope that theywill be glad to have their fathers fighting with them in the stream ? Before the women of the middle class the outlook is rather different. So far as we can see, the breakdown of domestic service means not new work but a return to their old work, to a hard domestic life. Well, in spite of some contem- porary evidence to the contrary, the present writer cannot help believing that woman is at heart an intense, we mean a fervent and emotional, conservative. She will to her traditional work with pleasure once more. " Then she will go back to service," we hear some one say. But are we sure that it is not her conser- vatism, her determination to fulfil her destiny, which has taken her out of service ? Servants—so they all say—are now at a disadvantage in the marriage market. They have declined to make themselves into an army of professional women ; they wish to be wives and mothers. There is no very startling inns vation involved in such a determination as that.
But to turn from the middle to the hand-working class. They also have before them, or they believe they have, a new and better way of life. There is a sense in which they also must in middle life begin again. Perhaps they are on the wrong track, but they think that they are on the right one. They believe that undeserved poverty can be stamped out. The result is that the atmosphere is keen and revivifying. It enables the young men to run and not be weary, and those who have renewed their youth to hold on their way and forget that they are tired.
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