RISING YOUNG MEN.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 5095, 23 July 1877, Page 3

RISING YOUNG MEN.

(From Truth)

If we are happier than our fathers in the possession of some material comforts—penny papers, shilling telegrams, “pickle sandwiches,” and other joys and glories of ultra-civilisation, it is very certain that we are lamentably weak in the article youthful prodigy. There are several deficiencies in these latter generations, to regard which is a bitter humiliation for the modern Englishman whose chief ambition is to be of his age —dans lemouvement —as the slang of gornmeux Paris aptly puts it. Is it not a vexation to hear the elderly dogmatists, whom we all know, put the pertinacious and pointblank questions—Where are your dramatists ? Where are your generals ? Where is your poet ? Where are your racers ? Your threebottle men ? They are well-meaning old gentlemen, who take wine with you and have the cloth removed for dessert; and no doubt some of their queries are very pertinent and not easily answered. But the one which is mast rasping and humiliating to those vain and volatile creatures, whose beards are not twelve years old, is the favorite and forcible—Where are your rising young men ? It suggests at once a glaring and painful deficiency, an utter, aching void. The most disingenuous must acknowledge it, the most contented deplore it. Where are our rising young men ? Who can name them 1 Where are they rising 1 Young men there are undoubtedly who manage to grow up as of yore, and blossom into coat-tails, and develop a keen interest in meerschaums and I’dternel fdminin ; but they are not rising in the sense in which our critical progenitors used the term. They are simply growing in vegetable fashion—lessening their years and increasing their cares and their incomes in a mere mechanical way. The sudden dash with which young men rose to fortune in days gone by they do not attempt. The brilliant flashes of a juvenile genius that once illumined all a lifetime are seen no more. There is no shallower fallacy than that which defines this age as one of universal precocity. To become convinced of this it is only necessary to glance at one or two of the professions in which one might reasonably presume the fervor and self-devotion of youth would be valuable, and bring forth early fruits. At the Bar, we all know the rising young man is a person of six or eight and thirty at least—a rising, middle-aged man indeed. The man who has anything like a public reputation before his thirtieth birthday is a brilliant exception, for whom we may predict some of the most precious prizes in the forensic lottery. To sport silk before forty is an achievement almost heinous in its juvenile audacity, and suggestive of the employment of incantations upon the Lord Chancellor. Looking at the stage, we find ourselves involuntarily prefixing “young” to the names of mature fathers of . families, with twenty years’ professional experience. There are a vast number of really youthful theatregoers who unconsciously regard Mr.'Euckstone as a gentleman who is perhaps just beginning to look a somewhat elderly Tony Lumpkin, and Mr. Charles Mathews,, as a lively juvenile joker, whose special whim it is’ to play at growing old. A brief study of “ Men of the Time” is fruitful of many disappointments and surprises. How ancient all our Prince Charraanta are! We will leave the Princess Charmantes out of the question. Was this gay, chivalric hero, whom we have so often beheld rescuing injured innocence, with the lissom limbs and mighty muscles of five-and-twenty—was he really born in 1819 ? Can the illustrious tragedian whom we considered a shining and irrefragable example of the precocity of genius—can he be veritably within a year of forty ? Must we conclude that all talent and all genius were created before 1810? It is even so ; the men who have risen are old.men, the rising young men are elderly at least. In political life the change of circumstances has been often noticed. The average age of the House of Commons has increased in an extraordinary degree, and the bald heads and grey beards on the benches of St. Stephen’s will soon outnumber those of a French Senate, where Time, the tonsor, with razor and powderpuff, is always busiest. The modern imagination refuses to grasp the idea of a Pitt of twenty or a Burke of twenty-five ruling debate, and lecturing the Cabinet bench. The “ Eton boys grown heavy” are now, as a rule, long past the middle-aged rollicking humor Praed intended to describe. Save the legion of the younger sons, the representatives of the great families of the peerage, the legislators in the Commons’ House are men whom a polite periphrasis would describe as ripe in years. ■lt is unnecessary to name instances, but whoever has consulted the disappointing publication, the organ of desillusionnemcnt alluded to above, will know that there are very few members having the “ ear of the House” who are not very fairly on the road to threescore. Indeed, one of the most curious Parliamentary idiosyncracies that strikes the stranger in the gallery is the kindly, but somewhat ludicrous, spirit of fatherly indulgence in which the House generally receives the early utterances of rash lads of five-and-thirty.