GROWING OLD

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 106, 1 November 1933, Page 22

GROWING OLD

THE WAY IT IS DONE

ADVICE OF DRINKWATER

WHAT HE WOULD LIKE

Some of my friends tell me that they have no wish to live into old age. It is not merely a fear of growing old, That, indeed, is a common human infirmity, though it is one*bf the few infirmities with which I do not reproach myself. Senility can be dismissed out of hand as hateful, writes John Drink water in the "Daily Mail." Y*ears ago Rupert Brooke, in the first enthusiasm of the war, wrote to me saying how much better it would be to die in youth for England than to cough one's life out in old age on a bed attended by disinfected nurses. and sobbing relatives. To become a burden to the worfd and the people that we have loved is an uuedifying prospect, and if we could achieve a venerable age only on such terms none of us but would refuse it. B.ut, there, are level chances at least that the terms might be handsomer. It has been my privilege to know, in ' some intimacy, Thomas Hardy, Edmund Gosse, Robert Bridges, A. B. Walkley, Stopford Brooke, Israel Zangwill, George Frampton,. Squire Bancroft, Ronald Ross, and Fridtjof Nansen. They are all dead; and they averaged, I think, something nearer ninety than eighty years of life. OLD AND SPLENDID. I still am allowed to take a friendly lunch with Bernard Shaw, lan Hamilton, Hayden Coffin, Edward Elgar, Thomas Wise, Johnston Forbes-Robert-son, A. E. Housman, Archibald Mackenzie, and Nicholas Murray Butler. They look, between them, like raising the average to close upon a century. Clearly, while men may die old and tiresome, they also may die old and splendid. ' . ' ... The argument, therefore, that to grow aged is to grow unfit is barren. The alternative argument, that to grow aged is to outlive delight, is iio. better than a confession of general futility. Giv^n the choice, I should like to take my chance.. Having turned fifty, I am all for turning eighty; and if my .doctors cannot help me to do it decently, they should close the accounts- that, bless them, I haven't paid. ""• ,''..?':' Let us call it, seventy, with a yea.' or two to run. I, should like then to be free of economic troubles, which J shan't. I assume a sufficient income to pay the weekly books, to dine once in a/ while at my favourite restaurant — ■if it still survives—and to buy a piece of Lambeth stoneware or an early English water-colour drawing when it takes my eye. - s ,1 shall, I stipulate, be then an aged dramatist to whom managers of the West End will "give a complimentary box without complaining that business at the moment is so good that if I could wait until the public",.demand is less it would be more convenient. ■. WORLD'S AMATEURS, t Some rich American (for America, in spite of its fiscal, insanities, 'will yet again be- rich) will have bequeathed me a marginal competence in, the belief that "Abraham Lincoln "was the. only work that I ever wrote, and the income tax will :then have, fallen to a figure that will ;no longer wake m| Up at's o'clock in ;the' morning in'a cold sweat: that persuades the docile industrious citizen that he is an hereditary, consumptive. »'"'.. In those declining years, if they arc allowed me, what would I desire? I should like to see my daughter, now aged four,; a young woman who has helped to clean up the obscene moral code in which certain phases of the life of England are now involved. I should like her to have.faced,the inexpressibly lovely facts of human affection with a clear sense 'of natural purity, unvexed by social shams of which Nature knows nothing. ; Then, by consent of the God to whom she "prays each night for kindness to her- friends, she will be able to add her mite to the beauty of the England that 1 Shakespeare knew, and Shelley and ; .William Blake. Her England, when I am pld, will— if my dreams are true-^-have fortified the world again, in the words of Wil--1 liam Pitt, by ,its example. It should : be able to do this, on just one score, i We English, in almost everything, have i immeinorially been the amateurs of the .. world. "■■-,:'■; The French, we are.^told, are Better 1 soldierj than we, mpro Augustan in 1 language; the Germans better music- ' ians; the Americans more intrepid enJ gineors;> the Mediterranean statesmen I more realistic; the Scandinavian farm-. ! ers quicker in the balance between, soil , and produce. ' THE BEST POETS. Yet, with all these logical oddsagainst us, we in England' have somer how contrived to keep, always' steadily [at the centre of international equi- ■ librium. ..'■■'; ! Duffers in so much, we have remained 1 the best poets. It is not' merely that we have a larger .and finer anthology '■ than any other people;, the vision of j our poets has obscurely permeated our ' national life and given a touch of , imagination. to the minds of men who [ have no conscious intimations of poetry at all.' It is this quality that ■in these coming years must bo Engl land's contribution to the counsels of i the world. ■'.•'. I On the far side of seventy^ if I • reach it, I skouldMike to know that my ; coun.try has led N the way, against all ; discouragement and ridicule, in 'civilis- ■ ing international affairs, with an everdeepening sense of her own national j character. I hope that we may by , then have helped to establish an inter- [ national economic balance which will . promote peace and leave England, and . all other, States, to la liberal enjoyi ment of the arts, traditions, land- . scape, manners, and intellectual' prefer- " ences peculiar to each. I shall then • have learnt that an Englishman need not be the less an Englishman because ■ in certain practical affairs he has an ; international outlook. j I should like in my old age to retain ! the self-reliance about which Emerson taught,me so persuasively when I was i a boy. , I should like never to become in- : tolerant or morose. I should like to go on minding my own business and to find other people doing the same thing,, I should like to fear all men's re proach and no man's envy. And, finally, I should like to live in a London cleared of its slums, with work that I could still respect myself for doing, and with a corner in the country that I could call all mj; own,