AFTER FORTY

Evening Star, Issue 19893, 15 June 1928, Page 11

AFTER FORTY

" TEACHING AN OLD DOG TRICKS " Some time ago an eminent physician staggered humanity by declaring that every man had exhausted himself at forty. Sir William Beveridge has not quite such a low opiinon of his fcllow-croaturcs, but ho felt it his duty to tell an audience of schoolboys that the older one gets tho harder it is to learn; ami his illustration was that a man could never learn to play chess well “once he had come to forty years.” It was not kindly done (says the London ‘Daily Telegraph’). Those boys will now survey their parents, their pastors, and masters with a more supercilious brow as creatures publicly acknowledged and officially certified as incapable of learning anything. If Sir William has formed the opinion that boys need this sort of stimulus, his experience of them must be less extensive than peculiar. He might plead the authority of the ancients, whose wisdom has declared to us that " you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” But the point in dispute is whether a man of forty is an old dog. Wc prefer not to admit chess as a test, for in that field, ns in music, it seems that all tho great masters are precocious. There are less specialised activities of the human intellect. Few politicians attain a position in which they can learn (ho business of administration until after forty. Sir William Beveridge will not bo cynical enough to retort that tho consequences prove his case.- What is the explanation of Chatham, who, having held no important office before, was made Secretary of State at forty-eight, and instantly became as great a War Minister as the world has ever seen? When Marlborough was forty William HI. said there was “ no man so fit to bo a general who had seen so few campaigns”; when, at fifty-two, he was at last given an independent command, a life spent in Court intrigues had left him with everything which practice and experience can teach of war still to learn. There are no rules which apply to the capacity, of genius. But all around us wc see men not to be suspected of genius wlm have moved in middle life from one kind of work to another, yet show sufficient competence in learning their new jobs, and perform the unfamiliar tolerably well. We cannot approve of Sir W’illiam Beveridge’s dictum that the older one gets the harder it is to learn. Many young men in every profession could tell him that they have found a trained, experienced, elderly_ intellect most inconveniently quick in picking up something new. As a matter of moral training, what could be worse for boys than instructing them that anyone over forty is fossilising?