ENGLAND, it is said, is cruel to the young and kind to the old. The remark usually takes on the tone of an accusation; we who hear it from a critical foreigner find ourselves struggling against a sense of shame; we are quick to denounce something or other, the House of Lords, Sentimentality, Meat-eating, the Educational System, and we uproot and demolish, and are clearly filled with a noble public spirit. If, then, the remark is always construed as a criticism, and if it nearly always succeeds in touching us on the raw, there must be something in it. Apparently, being kind to the old is no excuse for being cruel to the young. Perhaps this kindness itself is wrong. Let us be nice in our ethics, and look a little more closely at the question.

The remark refers, of course, to our English habit of relying upon experience or even mere weight of years. We are—or have been—so apt to listen to a man only when he is tottering on the verge of senility. In politics, the clean young enthusiast has been discouraged, and only the old intriguers have been respected. We have begun to take an artist seriously only when he was past his prime. Pantaloon is our national hero. Even Mr. Bernard Shaw, who ought to know better, would have politicians living for two or three hundred years to acquire wisdom, as if there was not folly enough in the world to delude a man for thrice three hundred years if he should choose to live and look for it. As for the young, they have not been given a hearing amongst us. If one of them, of more courage and energy than his fellows, pushed his way forward and told us something we did not know, we murmured ‘Oh, it’s only young So-and-So,’ and turned our backs upon him. We could afford to wait until his ideals and enthusiasms were gone, his energy sapped, and his body and mind shivering in their late autumn, before we listened to him. Such is our English attitude, which you and I have loudly deplored when we have met the sneers of men from newer countries. But actually there is a good deal to be said for it. In the last resort it does us credit.

But mark, this attitude of ours does not bring us any profit. We shall not try to defend it as a useful thing. When we are kind to the old, and put none but the aged and infirm in places of responsibility and trust, we are not better served; and we know it. The young, whom we put aside, would do the work much better. That, I fancy, is the ground of the criticism against us; but we are regarding it as an ethical question, and the very fact that our attitude works against our profit only makes our ethics shine more brightly. In order that we may give to the old, we have to deny the young some measure of power and substance, but whereas we are certainly kind to the one, it does not follow that we are cruel to the other.

We can afford to be hard upon the young, for youth itself is hard. The young are not dependent in any way upon what we think of them, for they are still convinced that the powers of the universe plotted amicably to fill them with greatness, so that whether the lesser mortals that encompass them think well or ill of them matters little. They are still living in Eternity, and, unlike the old, do not understand the need of claiming some measure of applause while there is yet time for it. Their hours are spacious, golden, crammed with promise. If we should put a young man into high office, it is unlikely that he would think any better of us: he owes us nothing; he has received only his deserts; he has got one office, but he might have had any one of a hundred others that were shining before his path. The world appears to him so fruitful of glorious opportunities that even to thrust him into a post of honour is to do him an injury by limiting his choice. And as for the young who scribble and paint and write music (and they are legion), what can be done for them? They are all geniuses whose work is above the understanding and taste of the age, and as such are beyond our ministrations, for your misunderstood young genius is perhaps the only completely independent, self-satisfied thing in the universe. What are little paragraphs in the papers, invitations to dinner, and the like, to him when he is the man for whom the century has been waiting to give it voice. He can exist, as a young friend of mine did, on stale cake and cocoa, and yet march about the world like an emperor, attended by the glittering cohorts of his vain and heated fancy. If it were possible to measure and tax youthful vanity; if young men could be imprisoned for egotism; if it were a hanging matter to imagine oneself a genius; then we might have a chance of being cruel to the young. Short of that, we cannot reach them. In order to protect ourselves from their dreadful efficiency, we may deny them place and profit, but what are our trumpery rewards to the largess of a fond imagination. So our gifts go where they are appreciated—to the old.

If our so-called cruelty is a myth, our kindness is yet real enough. When we put an old man into power, and give praise to mere persistence in living, our charity has taken no wrong turn. The very inefficiency, helplessness, and wistful vanity of the old make them unequalled objects of our Christian virtues. It would be easy enough to be cruel to them, for, unlike the young, they are at our mercy. They have lost all that goes to sustain youth, which could be careless of the world while it was still dreaming dreams, making love, and able to shout and sing, while life stepped out to the quick drumming of the blood. To the old, Eternity is no longer about them, and the far horizons have vanished. Their hours are remorselessly ticked away. There is no longer time to do everything and be everything: he will be a fortunate man who has rounded off even one little piece of work before the light goes. It is a monstrously silly fable that the aged are indifferent to praise, position and honour, that they have outgrown the little vanities of the world. The fact that a few old men have retired from the world because they were weary and infirm does not support the legend; and one has only to listen to their talk to discover how far such ancients have got beyond vanity. As for your active old men, they ceaselessly bestir themselves in pursuit of notice and applause. And well they might. With the dwindling of time and the shedding of illusions, their imagination has ceased to minister to their vanity. They require some confirmation from the world of their good opinion of themselves. Now that the far horizons, infinitely beguiling in youth, have vanished, the world itself shines more brightly against the steadily deepening background, and a dedication, a respectful hearing, a salute here, some little notice there, these become matters of some moment; they warm the heart when all other fires are being heaped with pale ashes. Consider the position of an old man. His lines are fixed and he cannot begin again; all his argosies left the quayside long ago, and if some of them do not bring him some return, he will find cold comfort now in his tales of their setting out. Now that he is no longer a potential Shakespeare, Beethoven or Lincoln, as he was in youth, your ageing man will try hard to become Deputy-Mayor of Suddleton: he will have the cash in hand. Deny him that, and he has nothing left.

This being so, what is there to be said against this habit of ours. We are not cruel to the young, but we are certainly kind to the old. Nothing could be better, for even supposing that a few youngsters here and there suffer from our neglect, they have only to grow old to remedy it, and if they have not persistence enough to keep on steadily increasing their ages, they are not the men for us. The pity is, not that we have such a habit, but that, having had it for centuries, we are now letting it go at the bidding of mere popular prejudice. Our old English habit of mind wants fortifying: we should push back the age at which a man is entitled to public notice and let our youngsters do their swaggering in private or among their brother fledglings. With some little contriving, it ought to be possible to make this a land in which every man under sixty has his future before him and no past to brood over, every office and place of profit is filled with an elder, and the cackling of gratified senile vanity is heard night and day. Make way for Justice Shallow, and give an ear to Polonius, and be content, for your Prince Hal can look after himself, and as for your Hamlets, their maladies are past your doctoring and their felicity is beyond the shouting of a mob or the solemn foolery of a committee.