Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/43



There is an interesting and true passage in the letters of Matthew Arnold which spirited young fellows encounter with a chill. It is this: "The aimless and unsettled, but also open and liberal, state of our youth we must perhaps all leave and take refuge in our morality and character; but with most of us it is a melancholy passage from which we emerge shorn of so many beams that we are almost tempted to quarrel with the law of nature which imposes it on us."

The revolt of youth, the cries of which are now so audible in our literature, is an attempt to resist as long as possible the imposition of the traditional morality and the traditional character upon the fluent welter of youth's desires and possibilities. The revolt derives its bright enthusiasm from the belief of the insurgents that as the yoke of custom is something wilfully imposed by tyrannical elders, it may, by a superior wilfulness of the young, be thrown off. The wise young Arnold dashes cold water on that belief by referring to the imposing power as a "law of nature."

What is that law of nature to which, in the end,