WHAT YOUTH THINKS

Greymouth Evening Star, 31 May 1935, Page 4

WHAT YOUTH THINKS

SOME MODERN SPOKESMEN. “I would point out that this book plays a. small, if unworthy, part in carrying on family traditions. There is first work here by a Huxley, a Graves, a Milne, a Herbert,, and a Matthews,” jvrites Alan Campbell Johnson, who has edited a book written by sixteen young men all under twenty-five years ot age. Most of them have been to Oxford and Cambridge, -and some of them —as noted I above. —bear names honoured in the world of literature. “Growing Opinions” is the title for the volume, and each contributor writes on a different subject. David Huxley, a grandson of the famous T. H. Huxley, thus delivers himself on the outlook of youth’ to-day with regard to “literary appreciation.” He writes: — “What is the relation of youth to its exterior environment of ideas, ideas tempered by the standards of time land space, ideas at once intolerant, irresistible, but yet adaptable? “Youth implies a certain measure of discontent, of reaching after- vain ideals, and struggling impotently to build a new world, a world of fact or of thought, out of the ruins of the old. The aim of youth is to live as vividly as possible; it will be conceded that those who have attained to a dreamy middle age also have this aim; they try urgently to recapture the reality of youth, but grasp only its shadow 5 . But true youthfulness cannot be artificial, though much that passes for it is fundamentally insincere.

It is characterised by a certain directness, a belief in one's appointed position in the universe, an immediate realisation of, rather than a. futile search for. experience. But it does not necessarily mean an immediate and complete harmony w’ith the universe. “For life is almost blinding in its beauty or its ugliness, or its feeling cf vibrating novelty. There is; a certain harshness, a certajn rawness as well, but it gives piquancy to thewhole taste of experience. If middle ■.lgo is the time to correlate all this and old age the time to pass ultimate judgment upon it, youth must be the time to gather and to criticise. And by nothing can this necessity for gathering experience be petter satisfied than by literature. . . . “Tn addition to form there is content. The tendency of modern literature is to describe more and more the immediate subjective experience of the writer,' to pour out personality to 1 its dregs. But to what end? It is not co much frank realism or exposure of the artificiality of other literary expressions as a rank and gratuitous' rudeness, a depressing. egotism which imagines that the entire world can be waiting anxiously for sordid selfrevelation.

“Not for a moment does one deplore frankness and reality; not for a moment does one want to remain blind to the less pleasant aspects of fife, and allow oneself to see only an idyllic fantasy; but there is no excuse for interest in sheer conceited nastiness. There are places for psychological misfits to air their complexes; they may be extremely entertaining, but to read nothing but a saga of depression is boredom. And yet they are hailed as the saviours of literature; anything new, anything daring, anything to shock our elders! Is this anything but a prostitution of literature?

FLOWERING AND WITHERING. “Ono feels that, given the demands of a public, it is a pity that that public, is not slightly more! fastidious; it is too easily satisfied, it is amused by satire, it likes being scratched on its lazy back by a little sharp sermonising. It is far too ready to sacrifice its personal individuality in an easy way, and not to assert its independence except in cliches and ill-directed attacks again the rule of the old. This is not the place to raise the question of the advantages and the disadvantages of a profound individuality. But if tho struggle of the individual with the exterior world and all his loneliness and creative urge are dispelled too quickly and too easily, then art as we know it will come gently to an end, and a synthetic substitute will take its place. i “Which is- it to be, a complete flowering of the old tradition of art in the form of literature, or a withering? Yopth has raised the question to-day; youth alone can answer it?’ “Music has the power of lifting man far above his own life into a world of sound that means nothing, but is pervaded with a beauty that must influence him and direct his thoughts along nobler paths,” writes Michael Matthews, the son of the Dean of St. Paul’s.

“There is nothing interposed between this world of beauty and the mind of the listener to balk his vision. In all other forms of artistic expression we are confronted first with some terrestrial interpretation of the metaphysical feeling of beauty that is in the artist’s mind. “Whether it be words, or colours, or marble that, is his medium, we see first of all the expression of fact, the representation of j. landscape, the sculpture of a figure, before we can see behind them all the ultimate beauty tho artist is trying to express. . . . SHOULD WORK FOR GOOD. "Surely this is the age when music should work most strongly for good, when it can soften all that is hard, beautify all that is ugly, and turn cur worshipping eyes away from the gold en calf once more up to the mountaintop, shrouded in Divine mystery. That is music’s task now. and to this task future musicians must train all their genius and their endeavour if their art is to remain not the servant but master of man’s emotion.”

Miss Crystal Herbert, the daughter of Mr. A. I’. Herbert, tackles the problem of "Women and Dress,” and she is indeed outspoken. She says:-— "It is only regrettable that by ‘welldressed’ we inevitably mean ‘fasbim ably dressed,’ for to my mind a welldressed woman is never harnessed by the limitations of fashion. If a woman has her own individual flame of lifo it will be apparent in her dress, and it is this quality which is valued and beautiful. Nevertheless, any one who is not labelled ‘fashionable’ back and front is either ridiculed as eccentric or is so negligible as not to be worth mentioning. 1 think this illustrates what i mean when I say that our judgment, of dress is on a wrong b-i.-’s. Fashion equals sex-appeal. It

is. kind of ballmark, and. as it is also a social qualification, we prefer not to execute any personal taste, but Lo mingle uncriticised with the crowd. . . .

‘■■Women’s clothes, despite their socalled chic, tire inevitably dull, because the wearer herself has no vitality. They are fashionable puppets and nothing more. That is the tragedy of modern women. They are helpless

cog..- in a machine, and this is where freedom has landed them, these business women. Their dress is a fashionable product; a mass product. Though what else have they but this and their stereotyped beauty? The . mall talk of freedom and equality is but. the assertion of their own little .solf-importtince.”

There is much talk in these days as to what young people think about life and affairs. "Crowing Opinions’’ is an attempt to reveal this thought. Professor J. B. S. Haldane says: "Fiom my middle-aged standpoint one thing seems clear. These young men who are my junior by twenty years are far clearer-headed than were their predecessors ten years a go. They aro trying hard to think, ami some are .succeeding remarkably well." I