OLD AGE AND YOUTH

Greymouth Evening Star, 9 October 1928, Page 10

OLD AGE AND YOUTH

LORD BALFOUR’S MESSAGE.

Lord Balfour, just before his 80th. birthday, at a celebration luncheon of. the British Academy, said: “I am.not sure that any of the distinguished writers or speakers who have devoted themselves to the subject have ever succeeded—at any rate when they have reached my time of life —in speaking instructively about old age. “But I would say that in an especial measure the thoughts of one when one grows old consist in reflecting that the young are thinking of you. The greatest privilege, after all, of the old is that the young condescend to have some consideration for you. “There is a superstition going about which has high authority behind it, that the old are reverenced by the young, and that the young naturally are disposed to pay them the reverence which orthodoxy suggests is appropriate. I am not sure that the practice of mankind in this is more honoured in theory than in other and perhaps more important matters. I

do not think, so far as my observation goes, that it is the ordinary practice of the young to look with reverential admiration at the tottering efforts of those who have reached years in some cases far beyond what is known, I believe, as the allotted span of life.

“The old must bear with that intolerance, if intolerance it may be. Depend upon it, they were just as bad when they were young, and they have not the slightest right, in my opinion, to complain if the young should treat them and regard them exactly as they treated and regarded their seniors in the ordinary course of generations.

' “There was a time, not so very far. 1 back in the history of the world, when omnivorous learning was then the ' competence of men of real ability and 1 opportunities, and I daresay they were ’ very proud of their learning. I re--1 member a story to the effect that Bentley, the great scholar who flourished at the beginning of the eighteenth century, expressed the hope that he would live—l think the age he selected was the one I happen to have reached or just failed to attain —I think it was to be eighty years. The reason he wanted to live until he reached his 80th. year was that he thought by that time he would have read and mastered every book worth reading in the world. I believe he could have done it. I believe at that time it was possible for a man of his memory, his industry, his knowledge of the languages which were then thought worth cultivating, to have read every book in the world which at that time was worth reading . . . Day by day human knowledge as it grows, and human faculty as it remains stationary, get further and further apart, and in these days I do not believe there is a single expert in this room who would jn-etend that he really knew every book worth reading in allied subjects. In his own subject, yes.”

After referring to the of the British Academy, Lord Balfour concluded: “No Bentley—if a new Bentley were born into the world —could hope to grasp in all its details the infinite variety of modern knowledge. “Therefore, whatever else happens, whatever gowns we may wear, or degrees we may attain, I am quite sure that the era has gone by when the idea might be held that man of learning knew everything and the mites around him knew nothing.”