one of my amusements, a mournful one i admit, upon these fine spring days, is to watch in the streets of london the young people, and to wonder if they are what i was at their age.

there is an element in human life which the philosophers have neglected, and which i am at a loss to entitle, for i think no name has been coined for it. but i am not at a loss to describe it. it is that change in the proportion of things which is much more than a mere change in perspective, or in point of view. it is that change which makes death so recognisable and too near; achievement necessarily imperfect, and desire necessarily mixed with calculation. it is more than that. it is a sort of seeing things from that far side of them, which was only guessed at or heard of at second hand in earlier years, but which is now palpable and[pg 129] part of the senses: known. all who have passed a certain age know what i mean.

this change, not so much in the aspect of things as in the texture of judgment, may mislead one when one judges youth; and it is best to trust to one's own memory of one's own youth if one would judge the young.

there i see a boy of twenty-five looking solemn enough, and walking a little too stiffly down cockspur street. does he think himself immortal, i wonder, as i did? does the thought of oblivion appal him as it did me? that he continually suffers in his dignity, that he thinks the passers-by all watch him, and that he is in terror of any singularity in dress or gesture, i can well believe, for that is common to all youth. but does he also, as did i and those of my time, purpose great things which are quite unattainable, and think the summit of success in any art to be the natural wage of living?

then other things occur to me. do these young people suffer or enjoy all our old [pg 130]illusions? do they think the country invincible? do they vaguely distinguish mankind into rich and poor, and think that the former from whom they spring are provided with their well-being by some natural and fatal process, like the recurrence of day and night? are they as full of the old taboos of what a gentleman may and may not do? i wonder!—possibly they are. i have not seen one of them wearing a billycock hat with a tail coat, nor one of them smoking a pipe in the street. and is life divided for them to-day as it was then, into three periods: their childhood; their much more important years at a public school (which last fill up most of their consciousness); their new untried occupation?

and do they still so grievously and so happily misjudge mankind? i think they must, judging by their eyes. i think they too believe that industry earns an increasing reward, that what is best done in any trade is best recognised and best paid; that labour is a happy business; and that women are of two kinds: the young[pg 131] who go about to please them, the old to whom they are indifferent.

do they drink? i suppose so. they do not show it yet. do they gamble? i conceive they do. are their nerves still sound? of that there can be no doubt! see them hop on and off the motor 'buses and cross the streets!

and what of their attitude towards the labels? do they take, as i did, every man much talked of for a great man? are they diffident when they meet such men? and do they feel themselves to be in the presence of gods? i should much like to put myself into the mind of one of them and to see if, to that generation the simplest of all social lies is gospel. if it is so, i must suppose they think a prime minister, a versifier, an ambassador, a lawyer who frequently comes up in the press, to be some very superhuman person. and doubtless also they ascribe a sort of general quality to all much-talked-of or much-be-printed men, putting them on one little shelf apart, and all the rest of england in a ruck below.

[pg 132]

then this thought comes to me. what of their bewilderment? we used all to be so bewildered! things did not fit in with the very simple and rigid scheme that was our most undoubted creed of the state. the motives of most commercial actions seemed inscrutable save to a few base contemporaries no older than ourselves, but cads, men who would always remain what we had first known them to be, small clerks upon the make. at what age, i wonder, to this generation will come the discovery that of these men and of such material the great are made; and will the long business of discovery come to sadden them as late as it came to their elders?

i must believe that young man walking down cockspur street thinks that all great poets, all great painters, all great writers, all great statesmen, are those of whom he reads, and are all possessed of unlimited means and command the world. further, i must believe that the young man walking down cockspur street (he has got to northumberland avenue by now),[pg 133] lives in a static world. for him things are immovable. there are the old: fathers and mothers and uncles; the very old are there, grandfathers, nurses, provosts, survivors. only in books does one find at that age the change of human affection, child-bearing, anxiety for money, and death. all the children (he thinks) will be always children, and all the lovely women always young. and loyalty and generous regards are twin easy matters reposing natively in the soul, and as yet unbetrayed.

well, if they are all like that, or even most of them, the young people, quite half the world is happy. not one of that happy half remembers the lion of northumberland house, or the little streets there were behind the foreign office, or the old strand, or temple bar, or what coutts's used to be like, or simpson's, or soho as yet uninvaded by the great and good lord shaftesbury. no one of the young can pleasantly recall the metropolitan board of works.

and for them, all the new things—houses[pg 134] which are veils of mud on stilts of iron, advertisements that shock the night, the rush of taxi-cabs and the yankee hotels—are the things that always were and always will be.

a year to them is twenty years of ours. the summer for them is games and leisure, the winter is the country and a horse; time is slow and stretched over long hours. they write a page that should be immortal, but will not be; or they hammer out a lyric quite undistinguishable from its models, and yet to them a poignantly original thing.

or am i all wrong? is the world so rapidly changing that the young also are caught with the obsession of change? why, then, not even half the world is happy.