Chapter IV

The Pain of Youth


It is the habit of the poets, and of many who are poets neither in vision
nor in faculty, to speak of youth as if it were a period of unshadowed
gaiety and pleasure, with no consciousness of responsibility and no sense
of care. The freshness of feeling, the delight in experience, the joy of
discovery, the unspent vitality which welcomes every morning as a
challenge to one's strength, invest youth with a charm which art is always
striving to preserve, and which men who have parted from it remember with
a sense of pathos; for the morning of life comes but once, and when it
fades something goes which never returns. There are ample compensations,
there are higher joys and deeper insights and relationships; but a magical
charm which touches all things and turns them to gold, vanishes with the
morning. In reaching its perfection of beauty the flower must part with
the dewy promise of its earliest growth.

All this is true of youth, which in many ways symbolises the immortal part
of man's nature, and must be, therefore, always beautiful and sacred to
him. But it is untrue that the sky of youth has no clouds and the spirit
of youth no cares; on the contrary, no period of life is in many ways more
painful. The finer the organisation and the greater the ability, the more
difficult and trying the experiences through which the youth passes.
George Eliot has pointed out a striking peculiarity of childish grief in
the statement that the child has no background of other griefs against
which the magnitude of its present sorrow may be measured. While that
sorrow lasts it is complete, absolute, and hopeless, because the child has
no memory of other trials endured, of other sorrows survived. In this fact