soul is not ignorance, but a touch of the heroic in the heart and in
the imagination. Pride has saved more men than piety, and even
misconduct loses something of its evil if it is conceived upon generous
lines. There lurks a capacity for heroic response in all youth, even in
contaminated youth. Before five-and-twenty, at any rate, we were all
sentimentalists at heart.

And the way to bring out these responses?

Assuredly it is not by sermons on Purity to Men Only and by nasty
little pamphlets of pseudo-medical and highly alarming information
stuffed into clean young hands [Footnote: See Clouston's _Mental
Diseases_, fifth edition, p. 535, for insanity caused by these
pamphlets; see also p. 591 _et seq._ for "adolescent"
literature.]--ultra "adult" that stuff should be--but in the drum and
trumpet style the thing should be done. There is a mass of fine
literature to-day wherein love shines clean and noble. There is art
telling fine stories. There is a possibility in the Theatre. Probably
the average of the theatre-goer is under rather than over twenty-two.
Literature, the drama, art; that is the sort of food upon which the
young imagination grows stout and tall. There is the literature and art
of youth that may or may not be part of the greater literature of life,
and upon this mainly we must depend when our children pass from us into
these privacies, these dreams and inquiries that will make them men and
women. See the right stuff is near them and the wrong stuff as far as
possible away, chase cad and quack together, and for the rest, in this
matter--_leave them alone._