Aging & Wisdom Quote by James Payn

Payn’s line lands like a polite Victorian jab: the real scandal isn’t that young people might be exposed to vice, but that they might be exposed to ambition. By pairing “Literature” with “the Stage,” he yokes two pursuits that respectable society treated with the same suspicious half-smile. The theater was an obvious moral panic machine in the 19th century: actresses, bohemia, late nights, money that didn’t come from land or the Church. Literature pretended to be safer, but Payn needles the hypocrisy by implying it, too, was viewed as socially destabilizing when taken seriously - not as a genteel pastime, but as a calling you “bring” someone up to.

That verb matters. “Bring young people up” echoes childrearing and class formation. Payn is describing a culture where education wasn’t simply about learning; it was about being trained into acceptable destinations. To “raise the eyebrows” is a small gesture with big policing power: the look that keeps a family’s aspirations within the lanes of “proper” work. His irony is that the eyebrow-raisers see the stage as corrupting the young, while they see literature as corrupting in a different way: it teaches sensitivity, skepticism, self-fashioning, desire for public voice. A novelist like Payn knew how quickly writing slid from “improving reading” into the dangerous business of authorship.

The subtext is defensive and strategic: if society treats writers like performers, then writers might as well claim the same legitimacy - and expose the supposed moral hierarchy as a fragile piece of theater itself.