OLD AT FORTY.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXIX, Issue 5226, 13 January 1928, Page 1

OLD AT FORTY.

A WRITER’® IMPRESSIONS, Whepi I was a, young man—say, about about 22 years of age—men of 40 seemed to me to be so old that the duly thing for them to do was to retire from active life and prepare, for the next world (writes Hugh Walpole, iii T.P’s. Weekly). Indeed, I wrote at that time a novel, called “ Maradick at Forty, and the point of this book was that 40 marked the closer of life. Incredible though it may seem, the.re are numbers of young men of 20 or so at the present moment who think now exactily as I. did then. My difficulty, now that I am 43, is to know when middlq-age life begins. I’ am certainly more active now than I was at 22, more active both physically , and mentally ; I am stouter in figure than !■ was, at 22, but not so stout as I was as 35; I do not feel now, as I, did tten, as I did then, that some catastrophe is waiting round thei corner to leap upon me at any mo.ncj.it and spoil all. my cherished plans. It will be seep that 1 was a morbid young man ; I was certainly more morbid spiritually, 'mentally and physically than I am now. I am fipreed, in fact, to make the platitudinous statement offered by all ageing person", that I ifael younger than I was when I was a boy ; I feel younger because I> am much more tolerant, because I nd longer try to do the things for which I am quite unfitted, and because I am not so deeply impressed by the uniqueness of my personality. But then it is precisely these changes, I suspect, that mark middle age. The first compensation of middle age is that one ceases to feel middle-aged. Someone once said, rather cruelly, that I was enjoying my second childhood, and this, if I remember r’ghtly, because I published a novel shortly after thq war in which I suggested that the world possiblywasn’t in complete ruin and was moving into a stage; of its history more interesting than the immediate prewar period- But if 10 years ago I was in my sepond childhood, I am now, I suppose, in my second middle age, and it is beyond question the most dqlightifcl of all the stages that I have known.