The Seeing Eye
Where-You Are Old. By Gwendolen Freeman. (Allen & Unwin. 95. 6d.) " •SYMPATHY " is a much-misused word ; like " charity " it has come dOWn in the world, even if not quite so far. Its deterioration is a peculiar handicap to anyone attempting to convey the essential character and flavour of Miss Freeman's book. For sympathy, in the true, the old, the ffluininating sense, is the quality which' above all others informs these sketches of a dozen old people, some lovable and admirable, some decidedly neither ; some happy, some wretched, some lbnely, some at the centre of a warm family life. There are relations of the author's own: Rosetta Singleton, the Victorian martyr to " nerves," Auntie Nancy, the generous but unlovable tyrant, Old Bill, failure in business and in art but most successful grandfather. There are neighbours ; Mr. Leaf, the gardener at the local " Big House," who called all his plants " he " or " she," and his wife ; Joe Wire, the snuff-taking master messenger of the News. There are the invalids, the " shut-ins " whom the narrator visited, chatted with, and on occasion championed against Health Authority ; there are their friends and relations. They form a remarkable and heartening gallery of portraits, not over-dramatised, never carica- tured, but unpretentiously though delicately limned in a style whose informal, smoothly-running limpidity looks deceptively easy. Miss Freeman has laid her mind and heart alongside theirs ; without sentimentality or arrogance of judgement, without vicarious resent- ' ment at misfortune, with a synthesis of affection and detachment.
Her book does not paint life couleur de rose—far from it, as witness the unsparing account of the last months of a paralysis victim shunted. from squalid lodging to inhuman hospital and back --nor are her heroes and heroines universally amiable. Mrs. Tagg, the " gossip," is by any normal standards a thoroughly nasty old woman ; grandmother Rosetta's nerves, Auntie Nancy's bossiness, are not brushed or glossed over ; indeed they are uncompromisingly the central features of the portraits concerned. No one is. clever or distinguished, no one, except the delightful Belle Jackson, is out- standingly virtuous and charming. There is nothing here actually to contradict a pessimist's conclusion that people are in general pretty awful and inclined to get more so as they grow older. Yet the general effect is to make the reader feel much better about the huinan race, reassured about human destiny.
Very lightly and briefly, Miss Freeman draws her own moral in
a Couple of pages of introduction and postscript. There is no better antidote for that sense of futility—or, worse, active misanthropy— generated by contemplating humanity in the mass, and as it were from the outside, than the close knowledge of individual lives ; it is from lives nearly completed, capable, therefore, of being seen as a whole, that most can be learned ; and the chief conviction which such study brings, when undertaken in the spirit which Miss Freeman brings to it, is of the intrinsic value of human experience as such. Miss Freeman does not stress this conclusion, does not offer it as proved, merely states it as her own subjective response to human contacts ; but until the book is closed—and for some time after—it convinces as surely, as gently, and as independently of all logical argument, as the sun breaking through clouds.
HONOR CROOME. HONOR CROOME.
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