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Hoping that D H Lawrence is by now out of copyright (he died in 1930), I offer the following poem of his from my trusty commonplace book, which according to Google is not readily available on the web.
Erika Baker and I had begun a conversation in response to my previous post about the quality of Anglicanism and Ivor Stolliday tweeted me about “the delicate melancholia of the educated anglican”.
Here is D H Lawrence’s take on this delicate melancholia:
Fate And The Younger Generation
‘It is strange to think of the Annas, the Vronskys, the Pierres, all the Tolstoyan lot
wiped out.
And the Aloyshas and Dmitris and Myshkins and Stavrogins, the Dostoevsky lot
all wiped out.
And the Tchekov wimbly-wombly wet-legs all wiped out.
Gone! Dead, or wandering in exile with their feathers plucked,
anyhow, gone from what they were, entirely.
Will the Proustian lot go next?And then our English intelligentsia?
Is it the ‘Quos vult perdere Deus’ business?
Anyhow the Tolstoyan lot simply asked for extinction:
‘Eat me up, dear peasant!’ – so the peasant ate him.
And the Dostoevsky lot wallowed in the thought:
‘Let me sin my way to Jesus!’ – So they sinned
themselves off the face of the earth.
And the Tchekov lot: ‘I’m too weak and lovable to live!’-
So they went.
Now the Proustian lot: Dear darling death, let me
wriggle my way towards you
like the worm I am! – So he wriggled and got there.
Finally our little lot: ‘I don’t want to die
but by Jingo if I do!’
– Well, it won’t matter so very much either.’
David Herbert Lawrence 1885-1930
I love that poem!
I am not so sure that to truly applies to the younger generation.
I live with teenagers and have step children in their thirties.
I find them all to be hugely passionate and very active. But they are much less willing to be tied into ancient structures and hierarchies that refuse to change or to take them seriously.
They are single issue campaigners with a keen sense of social justice and of concern for the environment. They go out there and actively do something for their chosen cause.
They genuinely cannot understand why we still discuss women bishops and lgbt rights in the church. These are yesterday's topics, they have been solved in their lives and any passion expended on them is mis-guided.
Their only response to our claims for Christ is to see our hypocrisy and to turn away from our structures.
They're not the ones to solve our problems for us. It's us middle aged lot, who for some strange reason still love the church, who need to change it for them.
No, I agree that it doesn't apply to today's teenagers – though I seem to remember from my youth that it was 'cool' to be 'laid-back'.
I am afraid I haven't been able to find out the year the poem was written, or whether there was a particular event that led to this thought.
But I do know the feeling, when reading 19th century novels, of wishing they would pull themselves together and get on with it! Somewhat reminiscent of the way I feel now about the Anglican Communion hierarchy…
I see this as quite a negative view of the potential of today's young people. I have teenage grandchildren, who want to do well for others, as well as for themselves. I agree with Erika on this.
During my long army career, I was privileged to meet many young people, coming forward to join the army, firstly as Regulars, but in the last 20 years as Volunteers to serve in the TA.
They seemed to come from different constituencies. The Regular recruit tended to be younger between 17 and 25), most with little formal eduction. The average TA recruit tended to have completed full time education, or perhaps a student in further education. Despite their differences, I found most to be articulate, intelligent and capable of thinking for themselves. They came from all backgrounds, deprived, broken families, to the more well off middle and even upper class. The trait that they seemed to share was one of wanting to contribute, to make a difference and their exploration of service in the forces was one outlet for that drive to some something different.
They were representative of their particular generation, while our culture has changed over those years, I actually think that the traits shown through them all seemed to me to be pretty constant.
Perhaps my faith in human nature is mistaken, but it always gave me great hope when meeting, talking to and interviewing these people. It was a privilege (and a responsibility) for me to encourage and support them into this new journey and see them succeed. I was in a position to see them develop, grow in knowledge and confidence and to go through career progression, some of them being commissioned and now holding quite senior rank.
Off course, we were recruiting people who we as a society were going to send into harms way, this was something that could not and should not be hidden from them. And I would always advise someone joining, that it was certain that they would be called upon to see active service as part of the obligation they were taking on. Sometimes when I see casualties coming back from Afghanistan I feel a guilt that I might have sent someone to suffer in that way, but I quickly realise that they were there of their own volition (we had not conscripted them) and normally, fulfilling the contract they signed up for.
However, I find it very hard to see the actions of politicians who involved us in places like Iraq on a false premise, and I wonder about how we meet the 'Just War' theory in our current deployments in Libya and Afghanistan. It's called peace support operations? But they don't seem very peaceful to me?
Still, the caliber and quality of the young men and women we send is second to none. Surely these qualities are held in great abundance by our young people, its just we always seem to strain to see the negative, rather than the positive in them.
Yes, though of course DHL was not talking about today's teenagers. He may have been talking about the teenagers of his era, but I have never read it like that.
What the poem means to me is that even the younger generation in the books by Tolstoy, Proust, Chekhov and Dostoevsky were hopelessly impractical and useless at running their lives.
Chekhov is the writer I know best of these. If you look at plot of The Cherry Orchard, for example (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cherry_Orchard), you will see at every step of the way tragedy could have been averted. But every time there was a choice of paths, the characters took the wrong one.
The reason this poem has resonance for me in this context is the tendency of our leaders to behave like characters in a Chekhov play, with potentially disastrous results for them as well as the rest of us!