PRESENT GENERATION

Greymouth Evening Star, 26 November 1927, Page 12

PRESENT GENERATION

AN ACUTE ANALYSIS ’; • ’ - — i “Like t)i.e poor, the present generation -js' 'always with us, and just as opinions of the poor vary from the Tennysonian .dictum, of regarding them as bad in the lump to the soapbox orator’s cliche of their being a sort of extensive and inexhaustible reservoir of all. the. nation s virtues, so have opinions of the younger generation, especially in their formative years, been equally diverse,’ says Mr. Cloudsley Brereton in the September “Contemporary Review.” The truth, he believes, lies between the two extremes. The problem of forming an estimate of the present generation is complicated by the fact that the younger generation of to-day is not entirely normal. Every teacher will agree that the war has left an indellible mark on the mind and temperament of practically every child who lived through it. From a physiological and mental standpoint one might almost describe the present generation as slightly shell-shocked. From the broad spritual point of view the war has been equally devastating. Young men returning have been embittered by realsing the loss of opportunity not to be regained. Girls also have been embittered by being robbed of the enjoyment of their best years of youth which they spent in war work, and hundreds of thousands have lost potential husbands in those who have fallen or those whose beginning in life has been spoilt. “If the present generation may be regarded as comprising the members of both sexes from 18 to 30 —that is those who have left school and have either attained the comparative freedom of college or the complete freedom of every-day life —then I think the present generation, and especially its elder members, may be a somewhat disillusioned and disgruntled generation,” says Mr. Brereton. Moreover, the young have lost most of their natural leaders, the men who would have been between 30 and 45, who fell as leaders in the war. The profound dissatisfaction of the present generation finds a further back ground of discontent in the failure of the older generation and pre-war civilisation either to i avert war or to reap its supposed fruits. Hence the universal slump in authority in every branch of life, with impatience of all tradition in religion, hatred of convention in manners and customs, and general contempt of technique in all the arts, coupled with a sort of fierce determination to build up everything denouo. Nothing shows this better than the literature which the present generation admires and produces, which is essentially a literature of revolt. It doubtless, has its good side in its burning desire to have done with shams of all sorts, and to this extent it is, in a true sense, moral, even if its criticism of life is mainly destructive and negative, rather than positive or constructive. But it finds little room for those finer qualities of generosity and self-sacrifice which are one believes, the cement of every stable civilisation. This renunciation of the higher ideals accounts for the almost pathetic condition of many of the younger generation, who, having jettisoned all conventions and codes, are now boxing the compass In their efforts to steer by the will-o’-the-wisp of instinct alone, or, rather, by that of their instincts. There is a growing tendency to short-circuit infancy, childhood, and boyhood, and to make adolescence, a hotch-potch of all the ages, an evil from which the younger members of the present generation have suffered and are suffering. There is a tremendous need to-day of someone to get out a new map of life, delineating for each age its particular passions, pleasures, and dangers, its rights and duties. Naturally every age sums up and includes the age that precedes it, but in the present welter and chaos of things far too many small boys under 16 smoke and too many men over GO jazz| To the credit side Mr. Brereton places the growing emphasis on physical fitness, the increasing temperance of men (offset by the laxity of women for whom emancipation has been too rapid), the increasing camaraderie of the sexes (which he thinks has come to stay), and the rising standards of amusement. It is a great mistake, he says, to regard the present generation as irreligious. Organised religion of every kind, though its inner • vitality is probably little impaired, has lost its hold—at least temporarily—on a large mass of people, possibly because these fundamental truths also require restatement in modern language. In the unwritten religion of the chivalry of life the rising generation is sound.