WHAT OF THE FORTIES

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 137, 6 December 1930, Page 25

WHAT OF THE FORTIES

There comes a moment in the life of everyone, man or woman/when we are forced, as it were, to turn a searchlight in upon ourselves and our journey through this world. Something happens, sometimes a big and obvious thing, more often a small and apparently irrelevant event, which forces us to take stock of the. immense difference between what we have done and are do"ing, and what we meant to do, writes Lord Gorellin.the "Sunday News." Very occasionally that is father wonderful, usually it is melancholy enough. There was once a man who kept a diary in two columns; in the first, on getting up, he wrote down what he intended his day to be; in the second, at night-fall, he entered what in fact';.it had been. A disheartening process, thus formally conducted! Yet it is what we all of us do, uncon- ■ Bcioiiely, more or less. We hope, wo plan; and then at the end we find we have' done something quite different. Prospect and retrospect—between these two what a gulf! How far can we realise our ambitions? Surely the answer to a very large extent must depend upon what our ambitions are. Some belong to a kind which can never be realised. It was said of Lord Bosebery that he began with two, both difficult of achievement, to be Prime Minister and to win the Derby. He succeeded in both, yet these, for all their difficulty, belong to the hit-or-miss order of ambition. If a man sets before himself a goal, the boundaries of which can be precisely defined, it is obvious afterwards whether he has reached it or not. So may a man have an ambition to become a millionaire, and succeed in that restricted aim. I have heard people declare that a ■ man can succeed in realising any ambition provided that he will devote him-' sef tp it undeviatingly, always. It is not true, yet it has in it a degree of truth. It is astonishing what a man can achieve if he is willing to give his all in exchange. But there are some ambitions of a different order. To be a poet or an artist—that is a goal that no one. has ever yet gained; always, even to the greatest, there is in such an ambition a beyond. Always performance falls short of achievement, in everything which is based upon.an ideal. I am led to these reflections inevitably to-day. Rumour has been busy connecting my name with a big political appointment; did I, as a boy, ever imagine that such .1 thing could be? As little as I thought it possible that I should ever be a soldier. Entering divisional hcad<|iartcrs at Montauban, during the Battle of the Somme in 1916, I ran into a battalion commander I had not seen for years, not since the days when he, a Tegular soldier, has just obtained his captaincy, and nothing in the world seemed more unlikely than that I should ever bear arms. I,was then "licut. and adjt.j" . and, of course, saluted respectfully. Two years later, by a queer turning of Fortune's wheel, I was his senior in Army rank.

IS ROMANCE DEAD BY THEN ?

Laughable, absurd, yet true. An ambition'realised? I have been a civilian again these ten years, and it is just the queer unimportant past. What my ambition has always been, what life, in short, in reality means to me lies in the realm of poetry; so it has always been and so it is still, in spite of five volumes of poetry issued to any who care to read them. Would.it be ambition realised if any, or all, of these had sold, in'their tens' of * thousands? The goal would still be beyond. It is interesting to try "to hitch one's wagon to a star," but who ever succeeds? The rope 'breaks* or the star recedes beyond its reach. Ah, but a man's reach, should exceed his grasp, Or what's heaven for? asks Browning. A terribly vital, and quite unanswerable question. One reason why life is so interesting is that wo San never tell which are the important and which the unimportant things in it. It is as a witty Frenchwoman once wrote, "like travelling in a carriage with one's back to the horses: one never sees the best things till one is past.'' In 1921, suddenly, and, to me, entirely .unexpectedly, I was called from the cross-benches to assume political responsibilities—and many friends were kind enough to congratulate me warmly, as upon a goal achieved. Yet it was a wise man who wrote, "Romance is dead when a man either becomes an Undersecretary of State or reaches 40 years of age." 'I have been the one, and, alas! I have passed Beyond the other — and Romanc.e is worth allthe positions in the world. So, if anyone were to ask me either to-day, as I write, or in the unknown to-morrow, whether I have realised my ambition, I should reply—if I were truthful, the hardest thing to be in the world—"No, not yet, nor shall I ever." Does that matter? Very little, if one considers one's lifo rightly. It is a curious truth that the ambitions one can realise are nearly always those which matter very little. There was a time when, more than anything in the world, I longed to be a cricketer. I succeeded —to a degree, that is: at any rate, I won a place both in my school and in the Oxford elevens. How odd it seems now that that could have mattered so vitally in those.tremendously vital years! And what difference would it now make if all then had been different? The truth is we can all of us realise our ambitions, even though it be equally true that we none .of us can unless they are of a kind that "in a little hour or two'are gone." And the highest of all are those that ban never be measured, to make our homes full of light, our children joyful, our friends happy. Is not this to"-reach up to that immortality which is beyond Fame or Success, those two frauds which only illuminate what MoTley Eoberts has recently called "that fragile form of immortality ,'which is to be remembered by men"? :