The Witch-Woman Trilogy

  No, I really cannot remember that in my late-Victorian boyhood (McKinley being Consul), young persons when left to themselves were over-rigorously hampered either in speech or action. Certain words one avoided: but all these had many synonyms, apart from the fact that the things they stood for could be, and were, made livelily communicative in pantomime. In brief, all our unlegalized and callow, but consummated, amours were conducted with a civil furtiveness, yet without, in the last outcome, demanding any strenuous and time-taxing amount of concealment.

  One found, instead, that society at large was here, in a benevolent, slightly flustered way, intent to ignore what was plain enough. Approaching points a bit more delicate, and entering now in reverie the Rooseveltian era, one found that intelligent husbands and intelligent parents had every logical reason to avoid publicity for all such discoveries as they, in either capacity, would particularly deplore. It followed that the Rooseveltian husband, or the Rooseveltian parent, whensoever visited by unavoidable suspicions, was at polite pains not to verify them. ... So the younger generation of those days was more quiet than are its current successors: but I cannot assert that, beneath this relative quietness, it was any the less sophisticated, nor that it sacrificed upon the altars of respectability any undue amount of carnal indulgence.

Chapter III. Which Touches Youth and Uncrabbed Age

  I INCLINE, in short, to think that in human economy the younger generation has always remained a tolerably staple product. Its language varies, as does also perhaps, at times, the pitch of its voice: but its theme does not vary. Its age-old theme is, always, a restatement of the truism that its elders have lied about most matters, and have mismanaged all matters, beyond human endurance. And its mistake is—always—to believe that the lying and the mismanagement may by and by be remedied.

  For youth, to the one side, has faith and hope. But middle age tends rather to dismiss these two cardinal virtues in favor of charity. Youth, in a less happy aspect, is heir to the superior pleasures of pessimism, and to the warm gustos of moral indignation: but middle age has mastered that invaluable gesture which is known as a shrug.

  Meanwhile, until forty-five or thereabouts, no man has any first-hand knowledge as to the average of human life, through the sufficing reason that he has seen but tatters and small scattered segments of the affair. At forty-five, though, he has watched his own thinned generation straggle into maturity, and the generation of his parents filed away in caskets. Old age still remains to be endured—perhaps. But he has observed it, day by day, through near half a century: he has seen his elders pass, by the hundreds, baffled and withered and yet, in some pathetic way, content enough: so that he knows in general terms what old age too is like.

  Thus does it come about that to whosoever reaches forty-five the entire average course of human life has been displayed in somewhat the bewildering fashion of a moving picture of which the first and second halves are being shown simultaneously on the same screen. The spectator has got little enough out of it, God knows. Even so, he has the sad advantage of one who has not yet witnessed the inconsequent, astounding jumble. He at least has perceived it all with his own senses: he has perceived, with an immediacy which no report can parallel, what actually does befall the average man between the hours of birth and death: and it remains an affair of which his knowledge, howsoever blurred, and howsoever limited, comes to him at first hand. He is not dependent, as his juniors yet stay necessarily dependent, as even the superior thirties yet stay dependent, upon guesswork and the statements of others and those extremely misleading posters in the lobby. . . . Or let us vary the figure. Let us say that the traveler who has made a journey, it matters not how unperceptive his nature, does, after all, know more about that particular journey than is ever revealed to the most faithful and the most imaginative student of guidebooks.

Chapter IV. Which Records a Strange Truism