The Press Saturday, April 24, 1926. Age and Crabbed Youth.

Press, Volume LXII, Issue 18674, 24 April 1926, Page 14

The Press Saturday, April 24, 1926. Age and Crabbed Youth.

In one of Conrad's stories the eloquent Marlow refers to his youth and the feeling that could " never come back "any more: the deceitful feeling that " lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, ' vain effort—to death; the trium"phant conviction of strength, the "heat of life in the handful of du t, " the glow in the heart that with every "year grows dim, grows cold, grows " small, and expires—and expires, too " soon, too soon—before life itself." It is perhaps true enough that the eyes of age are lack-lustre, and that the philosophic mind which years of experience have formed is often philosophic only in resignation to defeat. It may be true also that age, wise too late and embittered by disillusionment, sometimes deserves the epithet which Shakespeare gave it in the song. Age may lack inspiration, courage, faith, purpose, adventure, power: all the gifts with which youth is crowned. And yet it is possible' to be young without any of them, and to be old with all of them. To-day, whether young writers must curse the spite of war and social turmoil which compelled them to be born in times noticeably out of joint, or whether they must curse something else, it is an interesting fact that many of them exhibit a sour peevishness, pardonable no doubt in their grandfathers, did their grandfathers exhibit it; but the old writers, and especially the oldest, decline to be dull, inactive, or perversely crabbed, and far from sighing " If age but could!" put iis all deeply in their debt by proving how admirably they can. Many a great man has held time in check, continuing, for years after the period when leisure and rest, if not enfeeblement, should begin, to do what he has always .'one, in the various arts, in politics or law, and in scholarship. Mommsen,, Lord Balfour, Lord Haldane, Carlyle, Goethe, Anatole Trance, the Earl of Chatham, Jowett, William James, Landor, Newton, Lister, Bentley, Metternich, and a host of others come to mind as men who thus held or hold off time with one hand, while astonishing lesser men with their ability to rival the performances of their youth. Selfknowledge counts for much, mastery of a technique for much, in the victories which such veterans gain; but perhaps what counts most of all is the steady thrust of some profound belief, which, whether false or true, nerves the arm for yet another effort and gives it direction. Here, it may be, is the explanation of tlie querulous or bitter cynicism of many young writers of the present day. Surveying a world •which, for all the cherished faiths of their fathers, seems to them little better than the playground of folly and the breeding ground of vice, and finding in the foolish, vicious past no promise but of a future even more foolish and vicious, they devote their very real literary talent to the shaping of bitter mockeries. Writers like Mr Aldous Huxley, who have come into this sceptical inheritance, picture for us in their novels a society about as idealistic and honourable as a piggery. Perverts, hypocrites, sycophants, halfwits, guzzlers, lechers, and gross selfseekers crowd the canvas, and if there is a gleam of faith or innocent goodness in any of them, a savage irony makes it shine uselessly in the halfwits. Another group of novelists, headed by Mr T. F. Powys, gives . us an image of the world in 4 series of rutal studies, in which all the villagers are mad or bad or both, but madder and worse than anyone with a normal imagination could easily conceive. A course of such reading is almost enough to start the mind rocking, and the reader suspecting his dull-faced dustman of nnmentionably crooked evils. And so, wondering what has 1 come of that " glow in the heart," of the audacious faith and chivalry of youth, he turns to the old men of our day, in search, perhaps, only of the relief- that balanced sanity can give, even when it is sad and without much hope of the millennium: but, miraculous-seeming contrast, he finds them not only sane, but serene, and not less witty, because wise, bnt less withering. As we pointed out above, old age has by no means seldom been able to defy time and rival in accomplishment the eager days of youth; but it is doubtful whether at any period so much has been done by so many old men, and with such spirit, as during the last few years. Indeed, more than once time has not only been 13pt at bay, but been forced to a triumph. Mr Shaw's "St. Joan," for instance, is the work, of a , younger, moro romantic man than the Shaw who wrote "Heartbreak House," ard yet Mr Shaw is now seventy years old. Early this year, again, the Poet Laureate, whose first exquisite verses appeared well over fifty years ago, and who has been more adventurous ill pursuit of true poetic beauty during that half-century than any other writer, published hia " New Verse," a volume full of loveliness and as bold in experiment, rhythmical and verbal, as the youngest rebel's could be. But Bridges is a Ulysses of eighty-two 1 A few months ago Hardy gave us another collection of his poetry,, not all new, certainly; but the new is as toughly good as the old, nor is there ycf any slackening of invention in the verse-forms, the variation of which he contrives to make so significant. Further, only a year or two ago Mr Hardy published " The Queen of Corn"wall," a play quite remarkable for dramatic intensity. " Thought," wrote Mr H. W. Massingham, describing Hardy's appearance about that time, "has mastered the flesh and written "its mark there of the life that has "been lived from within; but the " spirit remains wonderfully yonng so young that the man's age, which happens to be eighty-six, becomes wellnigh irrelevant. Thoße three " Scrapbooks'' and the "Cellar-Book" with which Dr. George Saintsburx, now aged

eighty-one, has lately delighted all who have a taste for wisdom, /nit, and prejndice nicely mixed, and are not shocked by a professor's liking for bottles and casks —nobody but an old man could have written them; and yet they are not an old man's books: rather, the books of a young- man who has, happily for us and for himself, lived a long time. The same thing is true of Jlr A. B. Wulkley's volumes of " Prejudice," three of them, and equally true of Sir Edmund Gosse's latest essays in journalism. Mr Walkley is over seventy, Sir Edmund nearly eighty; but time is their friendly collaborator, it seems. Mr George Moore, a year off seventy, talks from Ebury street more gracefully than ever he did in the 90's, and leaves indecorous confidences to SLobbish young gossips of Mr Michael Arlen's type. Mr Wells, Mr Bennett, Mr Galsworthy, and Mr Montague are so boyish at sixty that Ave shall do no more than mention them, suggesting that even then they are older than Barrie at sixty-six; and for a last example we shall turn to Joseph Conrad, recently dead, and to Maurice Hewlett, who died two or three years ago, because both seemed to develop rather than to shrink or merely to hold their own as they grew older. Hewlett in his latter days abandoned romance and turned poet, essayist, and student of England's peasantry. It was a new Hewlett who wrote " The "Song of the Plow," and "Wiltshire " Essays," a much deeper thinker and a much better writer. And Conrad, when he threw off little by little the "poetic" style of which our opening quotation is a beautiful though truncated specimen, discovered himself, by a strange paradox, as a poet.' He had been in danger of being only a stylist; but in the books of his last years, like "The Rescue," and "The Rover," beauty of words was subordinated to the expression of a genuinely poetic vision of life. This was the triumph of Conrad's old age; and the phrase in which we sought to express it prompts the hope that time, which cures so many ills, will cure some of our young moderns of their habit of glaring at life like hanging judges or squinting at it like urchins. Local Industries and Protection. la one of two letters (that signed " 1.M.") which we print to-day dealing with the Industrial Association's demand for an addition of 10 per cent, to the existing duties on imported manufactures two points are mentioned which deserve particular notice. We do not associate ourselves with this correspondent's severe strictures upon local manufactures, but we do think he is fully justified in complaining of the Industrial Association's desire that the Government should impose a further burden of 10 per cent, on the products of Great Britain. The Association will perhaps claim, as it has claimed in the past, that it favorite "preference" for British goods «nd that its tariff demands—including its latest—leave that "preference" untouched. But since its policy is obviously the shutting-out of British as well as foreign goods, it cannot fairly ask us or anyone else to include it amongst the sincere well-wishers of the Motherland, which not only provides us with the bdst market for our primary produce, but provides us with the means of existing as a free State. At the present time Britain is striving to recover her economic health and strength, and it is urgently necessary to New Zealand's welfare that she shall recover speedily and completely. For this reason, even if there were no •others, the Association's demand that a penal duty should be imposed on British goods will by most people be thought hardly decent.

"Wo should like to think that our correspondent is right in his belief that organised Labour will unhesitatingly reject the clumsy bid 'of the Association for its support. Higher duties on manufactured articles will increase prices, and the higher prices will be felt most severely by the workers. But it does not follow—as, if the workers were as clear-headed as they are honest, it would follow—that organised Labour would come out against fill such proposals as that which the Industrial Association has made. Organised Labour keeps its opposition to tari" for use exclusively against the man on the land. Its leaders will rend the skies with protests against a wheat duty that may cost the average household ninepence a week at the most, but they will not say a 'word against the duties on other necessaries of life even though those duties add twenty ninepences to their weekly expenditure. The reason is simple enough N to see: they hate the farmer because he cannot be converted to Socialism, and as for the secondary industries they either imagine, through ignorance, that high wages are preferable to cheap commodities or else believe, as some of them do, that everything that makes for unwholesome economic conditions helps the movement against private enterprise. The fact that some of our manufacturers arc ready to seek the co-operation of organised Labour in exploiting the consuming public should set the public thinking.