Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/44

 the rebel necks must bow? What power is it that drives young spirits, trailing clouds of glory, into the austere refuge of morality and character? Suppose, to begin with, we call it the law of self-preservation, individual and racial. That has a formidable sound. And, indeed, it is a formidable power. When we feel its wolfish breath at our back, we lighten our impedimenta; we stiffen our sinews; we lengthen our stride; we fix our gaze on the patch of light beyond the woods; and we become careless of wayside flowers.

Some of us, to be sure, seek for a time, to ignore or evade it. An occasional college boy, stimulated to believe that he is the maker of his own destiny, listens with wonder and eager curiosity to a lecturer commending the "cultural ideal" of Goethe—the seductive notion of the continuous growth and free unfolding of a many-sided personality, developed at all points. He may even, through his undergraduate years, revel a little in his own versatility and caress his multifarious unformed tastes and talents. By extending the years of schooling and popularizing higher education, by bobbing our hair and keeping our faces clean shaven, and by reading the novels of undergraduate authors and taking counsel of their tailors, a few of us manage to extend the plastic age and the experimental and uncertain appearance and opinions of adolescence well into our third decade.

But to pass for a youth beyond that point, requires far more money, leisure, and freedom from