Читать книгу Some Impressions of My Elders - St. John G. Ervine - Страница 18

Table of Contents

His romantic realism seems to plunge desperately into sentimentalism when he contemplates very old age and death. Dr. Johnson had a strange horror of death, "so much so, Sir," as he said to Boswell, "that the whole of life is but keeping away the thoughts of it." But he achieved quietness of mind when his end came and his last recorded words were of a benignant character. "God bless you, my dear!" he said to Miss Morris, forbidden by his faithful negro servant, Francis, to come nearer to his bed than the outer room. Mr. Bennett seldom, if ever, permits his very old people to die placidly. Their disappointments press hardly upon them, if they are not prevented from remembering them by senility or gross disease. Paralysis claims many of them. Age does not beautify them nor bring peace to them, nor do they face their end with undiminished heads. He is remarkably consistent in this view of old age and death, and perhaps it is natural that he should regard it so gloomily when one remembers how completely he is enthralled by youth. But his view is an unbalanced one.

Old age is not always graceless and crabbed and unlovely. Such an old man as Mr. Thomas Hardy has a grace and quietness and courage discoverable only in those who have endured many things but have not been conquered by them. Mr. Bennett, however, looks upon age as a calamity which must, indeed, happen to all of us, if we live long enough, but cannot possibly be mitigated.

He is able to detect the "young, slim, perhaps beautiful" girl in the "fat, shapeless, ugly and grotesque" old woman, but he cannot so easily detect the gracious old man or woman in the boy and girl. I am oppressed sometimes by the thought that if Mr. Bennett had seen the "young, slim, perhaps beautiful" girl, his romantic nature would have let him down, yielding place to his cynicism, and he would have detected the coming wrinkles on her brow, would have seen that her eyes would grow dull, might even have pointed out her tendency to obesity. "Of course, I should!" Mr. Bennett may retort, "for I am a realist as well as a romantic, and in this case, I should have been right!" And so he would, but the trouble is that, while Mr. Bennett romantically and rightly sees the slim, perhaps beautiful girl in the fat old woman, he always realistically and wrongly sees the fat old woman in the slim young girl! I think that the spirit of "the Five Towns" is entirely responsible for the fact that Mr. Bennett never sees beauty in age. It is a harsh, acquisitive spirit, busy principally in the accumulation of material things (despite the fact that it produces lovely pottery) and inclined to measure a man's worth by the amount of his fortune. The leisurely and gracious things of life are not the immediate or even the ultimate concerns of life in "the Potteries," and old age is likely, in such places, to be harsh and acquisitive. When men and women, who have spent their activities entirely in money-making, reach the age at which they possess much money but are no longer able to employ themselves in its acquisition, they become crabbed, unlovely, mean, for they have no resources. You cannot derive pleasure from literature or music or painting or any other art when you bring to its consideration only the fag-end of your life. One has seen men who were notorious among their neighbours for their hard work—always engaged in their employment from early morning until late night—seldom, if ever, resting or taking holiday. One has seen these men, after they have retired from business, so helpless without their work to occupy their minds that they steadily declined into a condition of misery which brought about premature death! They lived for one thing, and when that thing was no longer available for them, they perished because they had no other resources and it was too late to acquire any! Mr. Bennett must have seen such men many times during his early years in "the Five Towns" and the pitiful spectacle so impressed his mind that old age has become to him a terrifying thing, a complete debâcle of the brain and energies. This life, this youth, is so wonderful, so full of romantic possibilities, that age and death seem to him merely obscene interruptions of an enthralling spectacle.