ADOLESCENCE ADOLESCENCE BY STEPHEN PAGET CONSTABLE & COMPANY LIMITED LONDON _First printed 1917._ This lecture was read to Oxford University Extension Students, in the Sheldonian Theatre, in August, 1917. The general subject of the lectures and classes was “The Near Future: problems of construction and reconstruction.” The Master of University College, who presided over the meeting, pointed out that I had said nothing of the help which is given to young men by their sisters. He spoke of the legions of young men who “keep straight” because they keep in mind what their sisters are to them. I ought to have said something of this influence of home-life. And I ought, perhaps, to have defined with more exactness the very words which I would use, if it were my duty to attempt a boy’s “sex-education”――we could hardly find an uglier title for it. But I was afraid to say more than I did say. The great thing is, that the parent, or it may be the teacher, should be able to tell the child, “Do come to me, right away, whenever you are puzzled or shocked at anything that you read, or hear, or notice: and I will tell you, as well as I can, all that you need to know about it.” And the greatest thing of all is careful self-preparation. To answer a child with evasive or lying nonsense is to offend the child: and we have it on good authority that we deserve for that offence the millstone round our necks, and the depth of the sea. ADOLESCENCE The honour of coming here was embittered by the difficulty of deciding what to say and how to say it. One of the hardest of all subjects, adolescence, was given to me: with this added hardship, that I was to consider it as something which may be reconstructed in the near future; or as a problem which we may somehow solve. It needs more than a man to understand adolescence: it needs, at the very least, a Royal Commission. I do not understand, really understand, anybody except myself; indeed, I do not thoroughly understand even me. One thing, to begin with, I did know about adolescence. I knew that it was a Latin word. So I looked it up in the Latin dictionary. And there I found to my surprise that the ancients were not agreed as to the term of adolescence. Varro reckons it from the 15th to the 30th year of life. Cicero speaks of Crassus, at 34, as adolescent: he even uses the word of Brutus and Cassius, when they were 40; and, what is most unexpected of all, he uses it of himself, in the year of his Consulship, when he was 44. Nothing could be more incorrigibly middle-aged than Cicero at 44; nothing could be more finally settled beyond all possibility of unsettlement. We cannot discuss adolescence, if it is to include persons of that standing.