The Press Saturday, October 15, 1927. Youth in a Rage.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19132, 15 October 1927, Page 16

The Press Saturday, October 15, 1927. Youth in a Rage.

Youth has been allowed to have things much its own way lately. It has raged against middle and old age in every form of expression, and in the process has lost most of whatever sense of humour it ever possessed. Age, however, has not entirely lost its capacity for self-defence. Often, it is true, age is so busy doing the necessary work of the world that it has no time to correct the view that all the wickedness of society comes from the ignorance and selfishness of the old. Even the worm will turn, however; and sometimes it strikes back with a vigour that must surprise its assailant. Mr St John Ervine, for example, is moved to say something in the "Spec- " tator " about " war and'the old men " that was some time overdue. It is drama in particular that bids him draw his sword in defence of the elders. To more than one recent play, the charge is made directly or by inference that the war was made by old men and that they took a devilish delight in sending young men to their death. In one play the hero "actually rounds upon " his astonished father, who has caught "him in the attic with a half-dressed "chorus girl, and as good as accuses "him of having started the war. The "old and middle-aged, in short, are "malignant muddlers, tyrannical and "stupid, and possessed of a lust for " the blood of young men." In at least three recent plays "any character over " the age of forty-five was shown to be 1 " crassly silly, ignorant, offensive, and ["entirely ridiculous." I It may be said that this tendency , i may be observed in every age. Youth is always rebellious, and often rather hysterical. True, but was there ever i an age in which rebellion was quite so furious, shrill, and humourless as in this? Mr St.-John Ervine says that young gentlemen now at Oxford and Cambridge go about lamenting that the war, which was made by the old, has wrecked and ruined their lives. We do not know what is going on at these venerable Universities, but we do I know, that there are signs of this I disease in New Zealand. There are yonths here, well educated and well read* and young enough now to have been children when the war,, began, who. seem to be full of hatred of everything that stands for tradition and authority, and there is a curious resemblance between their frame of mind and that" described by Mr Ervine. What is the explanation? . Does understandable indignation with the social and economic wrongs of the time/fully account for it?,. Is it possible that a distinguished Englishman is right in ' attributing the hatred of everything "Victorian" among the younger generation largely to sheer envy ? These young people look back at the comfort'and security of the past age and are filled with fury at the thought that they are so much worse off to-day. That is this Englishman's theory. The subject is,far too great to be 'dealt with here in all its aspects. The question of freedom alone demands an article to itself. As Mr Ervine puts -it pithily, these young folk plead for a new "system" as if it were merely a matter of a Parliamentary Bill. They infer that if everybody could do just what pleases him or her, the world would be cured of its ills. The point we wish to stress here is the absurdity of dividing society»into, two "rigid "and contending groups," the young and the old. There is nothing more dangerous than the habit of generalising, and these young rebels are a ' shocking example. Everybody ought to know that there is a tyranny of youth and a tyranny of old age, just as there is a generosity of youth and a generosity of old age. It js not right that- the charge of war-making and blood lust should be lightly made against the old. Mr Ervine, however, has another point to make. When war broke out, he' says, it. was the comparatively young Mr Churchill who was noticed walking across the passage with a smile on his face, and the aged John Morley and the elderly/ John Burns who left the Government rather than be responsible for the war 1 . It was the young poet Rupert Brooke who welcomed'the opportunity to fight, and the old Thomas Hardy who, remembering the common heritage of English and Germans, called a curse down on the makers of, the war. You cannot indict a generation. There is no short cut to the millennium through abuse of the old, and it is simply shiririnV the duty of hard thinking and painful reconstruction to put all the blame for the wars of the world on the men who have passed forty. It may be a comfortable excuse to say ■that we could dp so and so and so and sa but for the war and the persistent stupidity and selfishness of the old, but it is perilous, self-deception.