When I was a college professor, I sometimes wondered why there was no socialism among the sophomores. Now that I am not there to welcome it, the thing seems to have come.
I say to welcome it, because although I
am a high Tory in my sympathies, I recognize that different hearts must be set
on different things, and I like young people who have hearts, and who set them
on something. It is a great pity if, for lack of self-knowledge, or a congenial
environment, they set them on the wrong thing, and miss their possible
happiness, or miss even the noble martyrdom of knowing why they are unhappy.
But they will not have set their hearts on the wrong thing simply because that
thing may be indifferent or disagreeable to me. My personal feelings
have nothing to do with their happiness, if they are able to attain it. At
most, my experience may make me suspect that these ideals may be unattainable,
or that in choosing them these young men, in some cases, may have misunderstood
their own nature, and may be pursuing something which, if they got it, would
make them very sick. When that is so, a word of warning from an outsider may
not be entirely useless.
The reason why it is easy to mistake the demands
of one’s own nature is that human instincts are very complex and confused, and
that they mature at different times, or are suppressed or disguised altogether;
whereas the fancy is peopled only by the shallow images of such things as we
happen to have come upon in our experience. We cannot love, nor warmly imagine,
what we have never seen; even when we hate things as we find them (as every
fresh soul must in a great measure) our capacity to conceive better things is
limited to such hints as actual things have vouchsafed us. We may therefore
have no idea at all of what would really satisfy us; even if it were described
to us in words, we should not recognize it as our ideal of happiness. It would
seem cold, exotic, irrelevant, because nothing of that sort had as yet entered
our experience, or lay in the path immediately open before us.
I was accordingly not at all surprised that the
life of the ancients, although alone truly human and addressed to a possible
happiness, should not appeal to young America. It is too remote, too simple; it
presupposes the absence of instrumentalities on which young America is borne
along so merrily. What surprised me a little was that everybody seemed content
to go on swimming and swimming: for even when a man grumbled and worried about
his difficulties or mishaps — athletic training, college clubs, family
friction, dubious prospects, unrequited love — he yet seemed to be entirely at
peace with the general plan of existence as he found it; not at all oppressed
by the sense of any surrounding ugliness, vulgarity, vanity, servitude, or
emptiness. Was there in these youths, I used to ask myself, so engaging often
in their personal ardor, no human soul at all, but rather the soul of some
working ant or unquestioning bee, eager to run on its predetermined errands,
store its traditional honey, and build its geometrical cell, for the queen of
the hive, the future Mrs. Ant or Mrs. Bee, to lay her eggs in? I am far from
regarding romantic man as necessarily the best of animals, or a success at all,
so far; and I am quite willing he should be superseded, if nature, in America
or elsewhere, can evolve a superior species to take his place; but this sudden
extinction of human passion seemed a little strange, and I doubted whether
perfect happiness in mechanism was as yet possible even for the healthiest,
busiest, most athletic, most domestic, and most conventional American. Might
not the great American panacea for human wretchedness, Work, be not so much a
cure as an anaesthetic?
And now, apparently, the awakening has come, at
least to a few, and the sophomores (who are many of them out of college) have
discovered the necessity of socialism. I call it socialism for short, although
they are not all advocates of socialism in a technical sense, but style
themselves liberals, radicals, or (modestly) the Intelligentsia. The
point is that they all proclaim their disgust at the present state of things in
America, they denounce the Constitution of the United States, the churches, the
government, the colleges, the press, the theaters, and above all they denounce
the spirit that vivifies and unifies all these things, the spirit of Business.
Here is disaffection breaking out in which seemed the most unanimous, the most
satisfied of nations: here are Americans impatient with America.
Is it simply impatience? Is it the measles, and
by the time these sophomores are reverend seniors will it have passed away? Or
is it a tragic atavism in individuals, such as must appear sporadically in all
ages and nations, an inopportune sport of nature, hatching a bird of paradise
in the arctic regions? Even in this case, pathetic as it is, nothing can be
done except to wait for the unhappy creatures to come to a fluttering end, for
lack of sunshine and appropriate worms. Untoward genius must die in a corner. I
am ready to believe that these young radicals are geniuses and birds of
paradise, as they evidently feel themselves to be; if so, their plaints ought
to make a beautiful elegy; but it would still be a dying song. Or is it
possible, on the contrary, that they are prophets of something attainable,
boy-scouts with a real army behind them, and a definite future?
I have made a severe effort to discover as well
as I may from a distance, what these rebels want. I see what they are against
– they are against everything — but what are they for? I have not
been able to discover it. This may be due to my lack of understanding or to
their incapacity to express themselves clearly, for their style is something
appalling. But perhaps their scandalous failure in expression, when expression
is what they yearn for and demand at all costs, may be a symptom of something
deeper: of a radical mistake they have made in the direction of their efforts
and aspirations. They think they need more freedom, more room, a chance to be
more spontaneous when there was nothing in them to bubble out. Their style is a
sign of this: it is not merely that they have no mastery of the English
language as hitherto spoken, no clear sense of the value of words, and no
simplicity; that they are without the vocabulary or the idiom of cultivated
people.
That might all be healthy evolution, even if a
little disconcerting to us old fogies, who can’t keep up with the progress of
slang. America has a right to a language of its own, and to the largest share
in forming that pigeon-English which is to be the “world-language” of the
future. But it is not comparatively only that the style of the young radicals
is bad, nor in view of the traditional standards: it is bad intrinsically; it
is muddy, abstract, cumbrous, contorted, joyless, obscure. If their thoughts
were clear, if the images in their minds were definite and fondly cherished, if
their principles and allegiances were firm, we should soon learn to read their
language and feel it to be pure and limpid, however novel its forms. Dante
wrote in a new dialect, provincial and popular; yet how all his words shine
like dew on a sunny morning! But Dante had looked long and intently; he had
loved silently; he knew what he felt and what he believed. No: it is not more
freedom that young America needs in order to be happy: it needs more
discipline.
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