Youth Be Damned!

Beckles Willson, a Canadian writer and journalist who made his home in Britain, was 68 when he wrote Youth Be Damned!, an attack on the young of his day, prompted in large part by silly newspaper articles which acclaimed young people en bloc as The Great Hope for The Future.

Lately, we have all listened to divers perfervid tributes paid by eminent statesmen to the Youth of the Species. We have heard appeals to Youth to come forward, at what is described as a critical period in our history, and by its superior intelligence, skill and wisdom save the British Empire, which (we are given to understand) is now endangered by the prejudices, ineptitude and debility of the Old Men.

I confess that these recurrent Panegyrics of Youth (in the abstract), this assumption of its mental and physical superiority, provoke some thing more than mere annoyance in my bosom, I am resentful: I become angry. I am not aware of any inferiority, and I am not disposed to admit the claims of these youngsters to equality with their seniors merely on the grounds of their precocity.

He quotes an unnamed "enthusiastic champion" of Youth to illustrate the sort of thing that got up his nose:

“Our social system was running down at the end of the nineteenth century, much as the mainspring of a watch loses its resilience after long usage. It was at this decadent period that, as by a miracle, Youth, of a new species, issued from the laboratory of Time, Youth of a stronger, yet more resilient steel, so that Society, relaxed and retarded, suddenly found itself equipped with a new mainspring which leapt to its function of acceleration with elan."

One might sympathise with any critic of such drivel, but Willson was not content to stop at quiet disagreement, no, the young were not merely unworthy of such overblown accolades, they were in fact markedly inferior to all previous generations.

[...] that is the point we have reached to-day, about as far from the Greek cultural ideal for Youth as it is possible for a civilized people to go, a generation without Character or Reverence, a generation without manners or refinement, boys and girls who let themselves go the limit without scruple, steeped to the lips in sex fiction, jazz music and celluloid drama; hatless, heartless, careless and godless, out to have “a good time" and to do as little real work as possible.

"Hatless"? Good God, man, I say, really.

Every booby in the Kingdom has a car

One factor in the decay of civic values is the presence of the motor-car, which is both a menace and worse, an inexpensive one:

Through mass production the price having come down to as low as £120 for a brand-new saloon-car, and as low as £20 for a second-hand one, every booby in the Kingdom who wants to travel faster than his grandfather, can tear noisily up and down the public streets and highways to the terror and destruction of his fellow-men. In their desire for speed and still greater speed, this class of persons is encouraged by the manufacturers, who offer prizes and pay premiums to exceptionally daring drivers in order to break the speed records over various courses. 

“Speed,” observed Mr, Shaw Desmond, the other day, “is the god of democracy and autocracy alike, It is the universal god. All things—money, effort, thought, are bent to the service of this swift-moving, elusive monster.” 
A friend of mine, a young officer in the Coldstream Guards surprised me recently by remarking: 
“It would be a good thing for this country if every motor-car in this country were towed out into the Atlantic and sunk.” 

Clearly not all young people are bad, exceptions being made for officers in the Guards who have opinions aligned with those of Beckles Willson. 

Where have all the high-minded virgins gone?

What young officers think about another matter, that of Women, is not reported, but never mind, Willson has plenty to say on his own account. 

[The] modest, beauteous, tender, pure, high-minded virgin, to whom Shakespeare and Spencer, Herrick, Goldsmith, Scott, Thackerary and Dickens, in fact, all the Elizabethan-Victorian poets, novelists and playwrights, extolled as the ideal young female, suddenly in the year of grace 1895 or thereabouts, died on London’s doorstep. Save in retrospective literature, drama and art, she is seen no more. It is difficult to name the chief assassin, but it is certain that Mr. Bernard Shaw was a leading member of the gang. I mention a particular year, because a picture of a girl by a popular Academician, Mr. Sant, was then exhibited at the Royal Academy, attracting great attention. It portrayed a comely young woman holding an open volume in her hands. Her vivid upward glance revealed that she was experiencing some intense spiritual illumination. The title of this famous picture was “The Soul’s Awakening.” Opinions may differ as to whether the volume in this young’s girls hands was the Yellow Book, Esther Waters or The Woman Who Did—but it was the cause of her awakening—and awakening to some purpose. 

Mark the date—for it is historical: it was then that the New Woman made her sensational advent into British society. It was then that a new generation of females arrived, not merely knocking at the door,—Oh dear no!—but impulsively bursting into the house, knocking over the furniture and proprieties, chucking away her superfluous baggage (including her petticoats), shortening her skirts, bobbing her hair, painting her face, lighting her cigarettes, and swinging her latchkey. A couple of decades passed and what with the War and the granting of female suffrage, the Young Woman emerged as a totally different sort of person from her Mamma and Grandmamma, generously, even lasciviously exposed to the public gaze, so that there remained no vestige of the mystery of physical form or the reticence of manner which had characterized civilized womanhood for centuries. 

Well, the transformation is now pretty complete, Women have gained liberty; they are even free to take liberties, They have thrown off conventions and manners, and all those charming reticences we admired and respected are utterly démodé, The most we can expect, is that when deeply moved, they will remove the cigarette from their mouths in order to dab on a bit of powder and lipstick on the damp traces of emotion. It is no use arranging their disordered tresses; they haven’t any; and what slight undulations there are in their exiguous hirsute adornment the coiffeur has ironed into an ambrosial permanency. The dreadful secrets of their toilet and wardrobe are blazoned daily in every newspaper —even The Times, It is in public that they rouge and powder their faces and their lips and finger-nails, nay, even their toe-nails incarnadine. Moreover, they drink and smoke and make love as gallantly as the young men they emulate.

Stultifying the claptrap of equality

Willson is anxious to inform us that he knows what a woman is.

Foolish virgins—and some who are foolish but not virgins—may strive to defy nature and repudiate all human tradition and sexual convention by ignoring masculine opinion; but biologists are there to tell us that the first duty of Woman on this planet is to captivate Man. 

I suppose there will always be independents, rebels and perverts: there will always be men and women who are virtually sexless, in whom the sexual instinct is suppressed or sublimated. Some of these may achieve contentment, and even happiness, through work or spiritual intensity. Certain women may be even masterful in their conduct and virile in understanding without losing the attributes of their sex, like Catherine of Russia, George Sand and George Eliot: but there are unhappily abundance of others who seem to abjure and contemn their sex and to imagine that by such abjuration and contempt they enter at once into the status and prerogatives of men. 

To me there is nothing more repulsive than the members of this third sex, attired in masculine tweeds, collars and ties, with cropped hair and thick-soled footgear. Only my innate sense of chivalry has intervened sometimes to prevent my asking one of these grotesque persons why they chose to masquerade in male attire, when they were free to invent a costume of their own less provocative of embarrassing mistakes. A man who wore skirt, long marcelled hair, ear-rings and an artificial bust would quickly find himself in the hands of the police; and I cannot see that a woman who discards the established costume of her sex is any better. She is not a man: but an entirely different order of being, a difference far profounder even than physical structure or functions, profounder than the world at large realizes. Truths about women which primitive man knew, which are recognized to-day in the ancient civilizations, have within recent years been emphasized by the psychologists and students of sex, and stultify all the clap-trap of equality and sexual identity which we got so tired hearing about from the suffragists.

Hitler has the right idea

Young men these days are too often idle, but Willson has the answer to that.

So [...] some tens of thousands of our unemployed Youth might do worse than to enlist in the Army. It is a safe, comfortable, cheery job.

Not a great deal of foresight when writing in 1938, perhaps. But if young men won't join a fighting army, then why not a more peaceful equivalent?

If the [unemployed] men were organized into companies, and treated with firmness, justice and good-humour, and given, besides, plentiful chances for amusement and recreation, every decent employable man, temporarily out of employment, would welcome a turn at draining, ditching and tree-planting, and do his best, just as tens of thousands have done from time immemorial in harvesting, lumbering and hop-picking.

Half a million idlers could be enrolled in this industrial army, which would be given the task of rehabilitating and re-conditioning the roads, soil, forests, mines and quarries of Britain and thus paving the way for that vaster army, the direct producers of the national wealth. 

It's not an original idea, this, but one that has already been shown to work:

It is perhaps to Hitler’s Germany that we must look for the adoption of this movement for the training and employment of Youth on a truly vast national scale.

As support, Willson quotes Major F. Yeats-Brown, writing in The Observer (10 April, 1938), who had interviewed a group of Hitler Youth members who were labouring at draining a marsh near Bernau:

"I asked them how they liked the life; they grinned and said it was very hard work. Obviously they were happy. Anyone who sees these boys, as motorists through Germany can hardly fail to do, bicycling back to their camps, thickly-coated and gloved in winter, half-naked and bronzed in summer, singing as only Germans can, will recognise that here is joyous youth, proud of its tasks, and believing in their motto: ‘Work ennobles.’

“We should be glad that the Germans are becoming a nation of sportsmen. In physical fitness the results are already evident in the splendid boys and girls one sees everywhere, able-bodied, bright-eyed, self-reliant. Admittedly, the German ideal of mens sana may not be exactly ours, but the fact remains that it is an ideal to millions of earnest Nazis.

“Mentally, our two peoples may always differ in their views of life, but surely everyone but a fanatic must welcome such diversity? The more we know of young Germany, its enthusiasm, its trust, its immense capacity for hard work, the more we shall find it sane and likeable. Indeed, we shall find certain parts of its education—the Labour Camps, for instance—worthy of our respect and emulation.”

Did Willson come to reconsider these sentiments when he was Interned in France during the Second World War?

Hallo, England's rose!

Having spent an entire book telling us how terrible young people are, Willson reckons that the trend is about to reverse, his head having been turned by a flower of English maidenhood.

May it not be that Nature and the Time Spirit are fooling us to-day as they have so often fooled us in the past? Has Woman in truth undergone a psychical transformation? Has a brand-new type been evolved for the young of the species? Will the world never again set eyes upon a race akin to those gentle, modest pre-Georgian maidens, with their radiant looks and graceful gestures, their touching enthusiasms for poetry and painting and babies and the Royal Family? who showed such reverence for age, such compassion for suffering and such shrinking from vulgarity?

My own answer to this is: Yes, it will. I will tell you why. This very day I—mos qui vous parle—have seen and spoken to one of those young creatures who conquered us aforetime. She had come up to London from the country, blooming like a rose, slender and willowy, every lineament expressing unconsciousness of self; whose downcast eyelashes, when I spoke to her, lifted to disclose such depths of tenderness and purity of thought and feeling, that my aged heart leapt in my bosom as old Wordsworth’s leapt up at a rainbow.

Wherefore,—mark well my words—although this rara avis is but one, yet the single swallow seen proclaims the coming of a million other swallows. I am reminded of the sight of my first timid, springbok emerging solitary from the African bush, the precursor of a glorious herd. Wherefore, I feel in my heart that the Jong dismal drought is over, that unhallowed era which has lasted since the first suffragette smashed the first plate-glass window and assaulted the first discomfited policeman, that young English womanhood—beauteous, chaste, graceful, wholesome—will soon be back again to resume her ancient reign.

Trust the mothers of to-day, the mothers who have been so wantonly misguided for a generation, and have learnt their lesson. As one of them said to me recently, pointing to her two little girls : “If ‘Victorian’ means decency and manners, I mean my daughters to be ‘ Victorian’."

I will leave it at that.

And how right he was, as everyone is nowadays beauteous, chaste, graceful, and wholesome, and long may it last.