YOUNG OLD MEN

Greymouth Evening Star, 4 December 1929, Page 9

YOUNG OLD MEN

NOTABLE INSTANCES. . “Let us admit that there has been, during the last ten years, some writing of quality done by the new generation,” writes Mr Ivor Brown, in the “Pall Mall Magazine.”. “But, judged in the- round, the whole achievement of the under-forties is inconsiderable. The novels lack size and stature and the feel of permanence. They are not to be set agains, the Continued superiority of the work of Old Hands. 'rhe pretence' that after the war, Youth would up and teach Age a lesson has simply withered away into complete dissolution and absurdity. Youth has done nothing of the kind. “My general argument is simply that the decade 1920-30 has not been a triumph for the young idea, which, we were led to suppose, would sweep all before it and hustle into an utter oblivion the pillars of pre-war fogeydom,” adds Mr Ivor Brown. , “We still turn to Bernard Shaw for the play of the year and to John Gals worthy for the book that will most faithfully and fully reflect the habit and form of our time and place while maintaining the fascination of an excellent narrative method and style. The laugh is not with the saucy nephews and nieces, but with the grave, seignorial uncles. “Mr Shaw should take consolation His insistence on the will to li''ong and healthily and his belief that age is a matter of opinion are really prevailing. One reason, and a verj important reason, why age keeps up its end is that age refuses to be bullied by birthdays. The idea of ‘too old at forty’ is utterly pre-war. “There have been few changes so remarkable as that in the human attitude to years. Think of Shakespeare’s England in which a man might die worked out and worn out in the early thirties. Essex was only 33 wher he came to the scaffold. Shakespear gave up work before he was’fifty and died at fifty-three. Marlow with his mighty line .had founded the English poetic drama and had come to a bad end before he was thirty. It was an age when Juliet was unthinkable ar a girl just entering her ’teens, an age when young people went up like rockets and came down as quickly They took their lives in their hands and their pleasures hard. They were eady to be old at forty. “But we are not. We are mor sparing of our,flame of life, mor' thrifty of our health. Accordingly the men of sixty_ and seventy are still young enough to be the most vigorous in the country. The vitality of Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, David Lloyd George, and others is incom parable. They. have none of them lost their appetite for effort and fidventure. Age gets in first; youth follows in its wake.

“So really the failure of youth tc 'ive up to the boasts and promises of war-time is not all its own fault. It is due to the welcome and splendid fact that age has resolved to be young. The Victorian householder rarely took exercise and consistently over-ate and over-drank. What is the atmosphere of a prosperous household in the novels of Dickens? Mainly'hot brandy and blood-pressure behind stuffy curtains and closed windows.

“It was worse in the eighteenth century when the dons at Oxford dined at five and drank port for the rest of the night. It was only a few years ago that grandpa’s gout was an ordinary picture-paper joke. We have got rid of that tragic jest by sensible dieting, by exercise, and by the same usage of active holidays in the fresh air. We open our windows; we go to the dentist; and we get the reward. Some sneer at golf; but it is better than gout. “There are some who mourn the good old Bohemian days when it was the custom of men about town to hang about bars and clubs and drink all night. But are the new Londoners, male and female, with tbfteir suburban tennis-courts, their week-end dashes to the open air, and their consequent fitness less worthy oi* less happy specimens? They are not. Furthermore, they are performing a thoroughly useful service by reminding the world that youth and age are relative terms. “The old, in short, have met the competition of the young by refusing to admit that they are old. So we may end with the paradox that when seventy beats seventeen it is not a victory of antique cunning over hotheaded boyhood but a triumph of youth maintained over youth newfound.”