THE VICTORIAN AGE VETERANS

Evening Star, Issue 20315, 25 October 1929, Page 12

THE VICTORIAN AGE VETERANS

THE GRANDMOTHER OF MISS 1323 Though Queen Victoria’s days seem to have a. far-away sound to "modern young persons, they have still ample chance of studying its “typo” in their bale grand-parents. _ That is, indeed, the most striking thing about the ante preceding generation—its hardiness. says the ‘Star.’ A celebrated physician, coming tin other day from a visit to an ohTlady, was heard to exclaim; “ Marvellous vitality, and typical of her time. Ligbty years old, lias had ten children. hut remains sound in body and mind! That won’t be the common tale of the present generation.” He is prohahl.v right. Our grandparents were trained in a hard and rigorous school, full of restrictions and observances that have been broken down since the beginning of this century. “Fetus be free. ’ cried the younger generation, and it Jim achieved its emancipation, but it is more than doubtful if it has not in the process also lost something.- “ Bright young tilings.” we say. and the butterfly simile is not inapt. LOST GREATNESS. Though the post-war generation is bv no means effete, it seems to lack something oj the iron that entered into the composition of the fibre of Victoria’s contemporaries. That little, erect though aged figure of the first QueenEmpress, with its air of splendid defiance of weakness, is the prototype of many living grandmothers, who’ were themselves in their prime when that well- remembered old lady passed on. “There was too much discipline in those days,” say the young moderns. “Too much narrow-minded interference with personal liberty and no chance of self-expression.” A fair enough comment on the disadvantages of the era as seen from the present-day angle, but one that overlooks the resultant endurance ami firmness of character that they engendered. DISCOVERED BOREDOM. The wise grandmother might reply to her young granddaughter: “ Yes, my dear, yon fling about with your tennis rackets and your hockey clubs; you smoke, you travel unattended, yon invade hitherto sacrosanct male domains, but 1 observe that you arc often more bored than I was. whose circle of activities you consider so very confined.” This grandmother bad not the same eager, almost passionate quest for diversion that obsesses the girl of today, but hers was a full life, oven if her hours were perhaps too rigorously planned and mapped out to accord i with our latter-day notions. 1 It fitted her for the serious calls of i family and social life that are sometimes nowadays voted “old-fashioned,” I and for the period of serene old age that she is now enjoying. i