This essay was mentioned in another blog and was easily located. Though it was published nearly a hundred years ago, it seems quite applicable today. It is an interesting departure for the author of the 'Blue Pete' western series, aka Luke Allan.
Degrading a Generation
By W. Lacey Amy
Author of "The Blue Wolf"
From The Canadian Magazine, April 1917. Digitized by Doug Frizzle, July
2014.
IRREVERENCE as an accomplishment
is a distinct development of this generation. It has become the standard of
modernism, the badge of the automobile age. We call it freedom, rationality,
progressiveness, and even genius—anything to blind us to its real essence:
repudiation of the tenets of our fathers. New gods interfere with our religion,
divorce courts laugh at marriage, festivity disturbs our homes, slit skirts and
transparent waists violate the sanctity of the body, the tango shocks
Terpsichore, cubism shatters art, sex stories distort literature, problem plays
defile the stage. Our music has become mechanical, our charity an
advertisement, our worship a form.
Summed up in a paragraph like
that it is a disturbing picture—an unpopular one and inviting contradiction. We
do not see it because the drug of our dissipations continues to control our
senses. The picture is not yet completed; we are still painting it, most of us
adding our daub of red and blue, and working up unconsciously a part of the
consistent whole.
Perhaps, were the adult in
control, common sense would right things before a cataclysm. That superficial
intelligence which enables us to see wrong right, to urge a sophism in
justification of every step, might strike deeper and become a sense of
proportion, saving us, perhaps, from the full penalties of our foolishness.
But the young man and woman are
growing up in the new life; and there's the rub.
Contumely has become, in the
youth, a fine art. The disrespect of the father for the religion of his
ancestors has extended in the son—and quite naturally—to include age,
experience and control in his list of sneers. Eighteen years, or thereabouts,
is the age of proficiency, of omniscience. An egg is not the only thing spoiled
by time.
Religion? A nuisance, an
interference with personal rights and reflection, a repudiation of individual
acumen, a fossilized, unfounded fable fit only for the mentally unequipped.
Age? A misfortune, a condition surrounded by hoary misconceptions that must now
give way to more throbbing sapience. Experience? A handicap of the years that
blinds the eye of reason, deafens the ear of wisdom, muddles the tongue of
talent; a word to which time has attached an erroneous value. Control? If
physical, vulgar and contemptible; if moral, a curb on individualism. The
learning of years is but a drag on genius; and genius becomes senile after the
twenties.
The youth of to-day acknowledges
no value in the gift of the ages, denies the disadvantage of juvenility, permits
no preference to the teachings of time, yields nothing to years. He sees in
himself the embodiment of the progress of the world, the proof of it, the
result of it; and he demands that the facts be recognized in the determination
of future schemes for advancement or entertainment.
About the only thing reserved to
the advantage of age is the vote, and that because any alteration rests in the
hands of those who are beginning to realize their responsibility for the
ravages of domineering buds. The ballot box is the sole fortification of years;
and even it will yield to the licensed demands of youth unless adult
responsibility is more than recognized. "You can't hold down a good
thing," says the boy; and he's a mighty brave man who points out that a
really bad one is quite as difficult to control.
The boy is not to blame. The father
has shaped the son; the image is his carving.
Modern entertainment is bent to
the whim of the young. The "Not-outs" rage in a whirl of gaiety which
would unsettle their seniors. A young girl of seventeen of my acquaintance yawns
dolefully on her infrequent evenings at home, and bemoans her inability to
accept all three invitations for to-morrow. A girl's health suffers, her
intellect is untrained owing to early renunciation of studies, her moral fibre
is warped by indulgence and independence, her sense of proportion is left
unguided. For she has long since overcome the interference of her parents by a
persistent fight, and by holding up her young friends as examples of liberty and
license.
She dresses as she pleases,
regardless of cost, age, and even decency. The nell-rose hat she induced her
mother to purchase for her, demands a nell-rose parasol; a purple hat requires
a purple petticoat and veil. When she selects the youth who is to be favoured
for a while with her company, he needs must recognize his good fortune by
taxis, roses, and a gift for every anniversary. A girl nowadays is apt to size
a young man by the quality of his flowers, the name on the chocolate box, the
location of the theatre seats. She has made vases a standard decoration,
bon-bon dishes a fad, opera cloaks a necessity for every wardrobe.
She rises at nine, after the
frivolities of the previous night, and fills her morning with fittings and the
shops. Her afternoons are topped off with teas at a down-town hotel. Her
evenings are a round of turkey-trots, tangos and theatres. No dance is long
taboo, no play too risque, no hour too late, few dissipations too abandoned.
Perhaps the secret of the license
accorded to youth—especially to girls—is our frenzy for publicity, our
determination to "keep in the swim". In the desire to prevent eclipse
of our daughters we consent to conduct we find it difficult to defend.
"Dorothy does it" is sufficient reason why our Gladys should go a
shade better. It was Mrs. Jones's tea determined our dinner-dance. It is
anything rather than be old-fashioned or "behind". We deliberately
turn our backs on the evening's entertainment of our children to prevent a
tussle with our consciences—or our daughters.
It may shock us to hear of an
evening spent by our young girls wholly in turkey-trots and bunny-hugs, interspersed
with cooling-off joy-rides; but that is not unusual even in Toronto, the Good.
The father in a prominent house
sought to protect the entertainment given by his "not-out" children,
by locking his stock of cigars in his billiard-room. The youths present—sons of
social leaders—promptly broke through the locked door, forced open the cabinet,
and calmly helped themselves, while below stairs the girls waited in vain for
partners for the censored dance list. It mattered not that these young men came
from families accustomed to guard their reputations as their most valuable asset.
It was not that they condoned house-breaking and theft, but that their
resentment at restraint was keener than their appreciation of the crime they
had committed. It was merely the result of the license to which they were
accustomed.
Our thirst for the evidences of
wealth is turning the world upside down. Self-amusement blinds us to results;
the fever of the excitement beclouds our common sense; the spectacle of our
neighbours urges only to emulation. And into the vortex we have drawn our
children whose ballast is not yet adjusted, whose balance does not keep their
heads above the whirl. It may be hard to believe that the adult of to-day,
deliberately selecting the life he lives, is able to withstand the stronger currents
of that whirlpool; but it is certain as the sun that adolesence cannot hold its
own. We exchange our cars every year, join golf clubs too numerous to be
patronized, travel to surfeit—thereby living up to and beyond our incomes. And
we saturate our children with the virus of extravagance.
A mother with some foreboding
still, urged on her daughter more carefully considered expenditure. "You
can't expect that any young man you marry will be able to keep you as you are
living now."
The girl laughed carelessly.
"I won't marry him if he can't," she replied. "Or else father'll
make me an allowance."
And all the time the young man
contemplating marriage shudders at the troubles that face him—even while he
maintains the standard of extravagance of his set. He balks at the cost of
marriage; she balks at everything else.
A foolish—I should say, criminal—mother
brushed aside the warnings of friends concerning her daughter's conduct by
openly accusing them of jealousy. In the meantime the uncontrolled girl was
rapidly passing through the stage of popularity that greets a vivacious, pretty
youngster, and had already closed against herself the respectable homes of her
set. Finally the mother awoke to a secret marriage with a young scapegrace—and
then looked to the courts to undo what her criminal foolishness had done.
Engagement has become to the debutante
merely a proof of popularity. The eagerness with which she looks forward to
that condition is seldom realized by her parents. With her young friends she
discusses it and the man as one might the new maid. In cold blood they compare
chances, delve into "thrills" and psychology, and arrive at
conclusions which would stagger their parents. At twenty the unengaged girl
frets circles around her eyes. At twenty-one a joke about her condition rends
her. And at twenty-three she begins to retire in abashment.
"Musn't it be awful,"
said a debutante, apropos of an elderly spinster, "to have to go through
life without a chance to marry." She could not imagine spinsterhood with
any opportunity of altering it. It is the result of the attitude of the mother
who longs for nothing but the "success" of her daughter; for that
"success" is measured by the train of pseudo-lovesick youths in her
wake. Girls are thrown into society with a reckless disregard of health, innocence,
mental equipment and real happiness—in order that Mrs. Jones 's daughter may
not be the "belle".
Take a census of the homes any
night between September and May, and the few girls there will be yawning their
heads off. And there lies the cause of blase maidens in their twenties, of
cigarette-loving boys who prefer loafing and untimely gossip and pleasures to
anything else on earth. Reading is confined to the "popular" book—whose
popularity depends upon its trifling with the sentiments of this new life of
ours. Sewing is left to the bazaars—an accepted revelry of to-day. Music is a
charm cultivated for further conquest. And with it all, life is a continuous
Coney Island, a parent is but a bank, home a sleeping-place.
Some of us look on and manage to
feel it at times to the wringing of hands—and the next minute work the hypodermic.
We have spasms of conscience. the inconsistency of which is justly ridiculed by
our children. We exercise a momentary control—and to-morrow exceed even our
former license. We stand aghast at the month's bills—and go shopping the same
morning with our insatiable daughters.
But within our grasp is the
remedy. The restraint of the parent can revive in a decade the simplicity of
youth, the glow of innocence, the respect owing age and experience, the
unadulterated merriment that goes only with purity. To-day a mother may lay her
hand on the throbbing head of her daughter and impel that peace which alone
makes for real happiness and virtue. The father holds the rein that can keep
his son from destruction.
If mother and father withhold the
hand of peace what shoals will threaten ten years ahead?
If at that time our children
retain a conscience, a sense of right and wrong, a tinge of reverence, there
will be marked up to the discredit of weak, foolish parents the lassitude and
weariness and worse that follow hard on the heels of a life of revelry. Our
license will not be remembered as love, as desire to gratify a son's wish, a
daughter's whim. For always, while the world lasts, there will remain the
conviction that the parent is responsible for the child.
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