III. Two Notes on Youth
The Release of Youth
John Fiske perceived that human history has been greatly affected by the fact that man has a longer infancy than the other animals. A creature which grows to its full stature and faculties in a few hours or weeks or months or even years has not the same opportunity to travel far in knowledge or to build its intelligence upon observations and conclusions as has the creature which normally matures through at least a score of years. There still remains to be studied the effect upon mankind of the deliberate prolongation of infancy which, particularly in Europe and America, has been going on for something over a century. Perhaps it should be called less a prolongation of infancy than a discovery that infancy actually lasts longer than had been realized. The social effect is much the same. In the eighteenth century the unproductive and acquisitive period of infancy for boys rarely lasted beyond twenty years, even for those who were trained at the colleges and universities. For the same class in the twentieth century—a class now proportionately larger than then—a period of twenty-five years is nearer the average. The shift is even more marked as regards girls, who a hundred years ago were likely to be married at seventeen or eighteen but who now are quite likely to remain unmarried till twenty-five, and very many, of course, till later. What has become of those years of human life thus lost to adult society, or at least diverted to new purposes?
It will not do to answer that such years of youth have been offset by the years added at the end of life through the advance of hygiene and medicine. Even if the total number were the same—and there are no figures to prove or to disprove it—there would still be an incalculable difference in quality. Consider the matter in a simple biological aspect. The postponement of marriage has reduced the number of children born, and has therefore released for other functions a vast amount of human energy once devoted by very young women to gestation and lactation. Anyone who has had occasion to observe a group of girls in the schools and colleges of this generation knows how tremendous is the store of surplus energy for which there is no biological outlet and which too often fails to be sublimated as it might well be into other forms of service. The quantity of such energy which the war showed to be in reserve should not have been a surprise to the teachers or observers of youth. No more should it have been a surprise that those who were thought of as mere boys should have suddenly and successfully taken up heavier labours and larger responsibilities than they had known before. The energy had been all the time in existence, though it had been spent on study or sports or dissipation. Thousands and thousands of years had instructed the race to give about so many years and about so much energy to youth, and the arbitrary customs of a century could not accomplish anything but the most superficial changes. The war, which wasted and worse than wasted human riches, almost certainly threw away a larger treasury of youth than any previous generation could have done, for the reason that there was more youth to throw away.
Surely the splendour of modern life, its variety and glitter and colour and movement, capable even of blinding men now and then to the drabness of its machine-processes, must have been due in part to the prolongation of infancy. There have been longer hours for play and more ways of playing: new games, new dances, new contests of speed and strength and dexterity, and in America especially an increasing return to the mimic wild life of the summer camp. What, among other things, peace must be made to give back is that abundance of youth. We need no increase of the birth-rate to absorb the energy of the girls; we need no new wars to waste the energy of the boys. We need instead to recognize this precious asset and to employ it. The first step should be to distribute the fulness of life among more boys and girls than had it before the war, when it belonged to a too narrow privileged class. The next should be to civilize it, not by cramping and restraining its activities but by associating them with thought and passion and beauty. In how many quarters of the world have athletics, the natural expression of the release of youth, been viewed as sheer rowdyism or at best as squandered power! But, viewed more largely, athletics must appear the physical symbol of the energy which the race has latterly been hoarding. Not athletics merely but the thing thereby symbolized must be drawn into the general current of existence. It means the enlargement of youth’s pleasure, the evocation of its deeper thought and passion, the development of its capacities. And of course whatever enriches youth in time enriches all society.