Essays On Work And Culture | Page 6

Thackeray, Carlyle,
and Browning; not discerning that, as these master workers gave form
and substance to their visions and insight, the power to see and to
understand deepened and expanded apace with their achievements.

Chapter IV
The Pain of Youth
It is the habit of the poets, and of many who are poets neither in vision
nor in faculty, to speak of youth as if it were a period of unshadowed
gaiety and pleasure, with no consciousness of responsibility and no
sense of care. The freshness of feeling, the delight in experience, the

joy of discovery, the unspent vitality which welcomes every morning
as a challenge to one's strength, invest youth with a charm which art is
always striving to preserve, and which men who have parted from it
remember with a sense of pathos; for the morning of life comes but
once, and when it fades something goes which never returns. There are
ample compensations, there are higher joys and deeper insights and
relationships; but a magical charm which touches all things and turns
them to gold, vanishes with the morning. In reaching its perfection of
beauty the flower must part with the dewy promise of its earliest
growth.
All this is true of youth, which in many ways symbolises the immortal
part of man's nature, and must be, therefore, always beautiful and
sacred to him. But it is untrue that the sky of youth has no clouds and
the spirit of youth no cares; on the contrary, no period of life is in many
ways more painful. The finer the organisation and the greater the ability,
the more difficult and trying the experiences through which the youth
passes. George Eliot has pointed out a striking peculiarity of childish
grief in the statement that the child has no background of other griefs
against which the magnitude of its present sorrow may be measured.
While that sorrow lasts it is complete, absolute, and hopeless, because
the child has no memory of other trials endured, of other sorrows
survived. In this fact about the earliest griefs lies the source also of the
pains of youth. The young man is an undeveloped power; he is largely
ignorant of his own capacity, often without inward guidance towards
his vocation; he is unadjusted to the society in which he must find a
place for himself. He is full of energy and aspiration, but he does not
know how to expend the one or realise the other. His soul has wings,
but he cannot fly, because, like the eagle, he must have space on the
ground before he rises in the air. If his imagination is active he has
moments of rapture, days of exaltation, when the world seems to lie
before him clear from horizon to horizon. His hours of study overflow
with the passion for knowledge, and his hours of play are haunted by
beautiful or noble dreams. The world is full of wonder and mystery,
and the young explorer is impatient to be on his journey. No plan is
then too great to be accomplished, no moral height too difficult to be
attained. After all that has been said, the rapture of youth, when youth

means opportunity, remains unexpressed. No poet will ever entirely
compass it, as no poet will ever quite ensnare in speech the measureless
joy of those festival mornings in June when Nature seems on the point
of speaking in human language.
But this rapture is inward; it has its source in the earliest perception of
the richness of life and man's capacity to appropriate it. It is the rapture
of discovery, not of possession; the rapture of promise, not of
achievement. It is without the verification of experience or the
corroborative evidence of performance. Youth is possibility; that is its
charm, its joy, and its power; but it is also its limitation. There lies
before it the real crisis through which every man of parts and power
passes: the development of the inward force and the adjustment of the
personality to the order of life. The shadow of that crisis is never quite
absent from those radiant skies which the poets love to recall; the
uncertainty of that supreme issue in experience is never quite out of
mind. Siegfried must meet the dragon before he can climb those heights
on which, encircled by fire, his ideal is to take the form and substance
of reality; and the prelusive notes of that fateful struggle are heard long
before the sword is forged or the hour of destiny has come.
There is no test of character more severe or difficult to bear than the
suspense of waiting. The man who can act eases his soul under the
greatest calamities; but he who is compelled to wait, unless he be of
hardy