Depressing Young Men

Auckland Star, Volume LXXI, Issue 17, 20 January 1940, Page 2 (Supplement)

Depressing Young Men

By--Cyrano

FROM time to time many of you must turn to old photographs of cricket and football teams, and not only play matches over again, but wonder what has happened to all the players. In some cases— notably with school teams—you will know something about the subsequent careers of all or most of them. Do you find that these old comrades of yours have done badly in life? Are financial sharks or rakes; have they gone to gaol or made a mess of their domestic lives? I ask (lie question because in n new hook of Knglish verse I lisive come upon a poem called "Lament for a Cricket Klc.vcn," which seems to point an interesting moral. The poet looks at a group of taken l»v the "weak photographer with the moist moustaches an<l the made-up tie," and in ten of them finds no good. Jf the eleventh is the poet, it must he. in a purely imaginative sense, because the publisher's note says lie is young. Of the ten, Two sit in Threadnoedle Street like gnomes. One Is a careless schoolmaster, Ilusy with carved desks, honour and lines. lie is eaten by a wicked cancer. They have detectives to watch their homes. Another "climbs mountains in a storm of fear"; another "went n:ad by a tape machine"; another Laughed for a fortnight and went to sea. Like a sun one follows the jeunesse doree. (what this means I don't know); another was "beaten in a prison riot," and "needs injections to keep him quiet"; another "was a handsome clergyman, but mortification has long set in"; another "kc.eps six dogs in an unlit cellar"; and the tenth is a bachelor described by an impolite adjective. Now, J. ask you. Of ten men not a good word is said. Yet there is quite a good chance, I think, that if you took two London city magnates at random you would find they were cheerful fellows who loved their wives and children, cultivated their gardens assiduously, and laughed at* the idea of being guarded. The schoolmaster might be another Mr.

Chips. The clergyman might have put aside preferment to work in a slum. But this wouldn't make poetry as so many present-day poets see it. Gloom is the only way. Now I have a photograph of a cricket team. So far as I know, none of the masters or boys in it has come to a sticky end, or fallen into disgrace. Of the three masters two arc dead, and I don't know what has happened to the third, but everyone who came under him will assert most positively that he could not have gone off the rails. He had a most remarkable way with boys. The second got promotion and died in the prime of life. The third became headmaster, and if ever there was a Christian gentleman, he was. All three were conscientious men who did something worth while in the world, and there was never a breath of scandal against their private lives. Of the bovs, one gave up what promised to be a distinguished career in science to go into the Church, and I am quite certain no mortification has set in there. The Civil Service and the professions claimed <•> <S>

others, and one or two I have lost traea of. One lias developed a literary turn though writing isn't his trade) widely, has a' delightful Eense of hum* our, and gets a great deal out of lift Another makes a hobby of political and other memoirs, and knows more about the politics of the last hundred years than is perhaps good for him. Ho is 0 c« of the few people who can tell you j us i what Gladstone did Sa\- in ISTS. The psychologist may say that I don't know anything about the inner lifo ot tlicso men; all of them may have vultures tearing at their 'moral an! spiritual livers. Well, I deny that his lirst statement covers all eases; I hip. pen to know, or to have known, one or two of them pretty well. Some of these men have had their share of trouble perhaps more, but it hasn't got them down, and I think one is justified in saving that they lead useful, decent and reasonably liappy lives. And bear in mind that this Knglish poet is less concerned with psychology than with ascertainable facts, such as the carelessness of the schoolmaster and the keeping 0 f dogs in an unlit cellar. This is typical of a disposition of the time to depict men as a little breed, stumbling in gutters through what the . most pessimistic poet of his generation described as a -'long fool's errand to the grave." A. 33. Housman, however, was made of sterner stuff than some of his school. He had an eye for the heroic, which one sadly misses in some other places. If life was bitter and futile there was a game to be played according to high rules, and he admired those wlio so played it. When I read some novels and poems, I often wonder where the writers get their experience of life. Who are the people they have known! If these are like the characters they present to us, they must be a qurer lot. Have these writers been unfortur.iite in their family circle and their friends, or do they exercise their imagination on the principle laid down in the definition of a pessimist as one who, given the choice of two evils, takes both? Or have I been fortunate beyond the average? Perhaps I have. But I do protest that to take ten men out of eleven and pillory them is a bit over the edds.