The Art of Growing Old. By John Cowper Powys. (Cape.
los. 6d.)
Tins book brings to mind Dr. Johnson's claim that he was as good a judge of mutton as any sheep, with the converse it implies; does it help any, one wonders, in writing a book about old age to have turned seventy, except to embarrass the reviewer who feels that if he discovers any of the characteristics of old age in it, it will be rather ill-mannered to say so? In the Introduction Mr. Powys promises to tell us how to grow old gracefully both for the sake of ourselves and the younger people about us ; but before the end this purpose is lost in digressions, of which those on Vivisection, the State of the World, and Science as the curse of the age, are the longest. Perhaps it takes maturity, which has nothing to do with years, to see that there has got to be a coming to terms with the inevitable and the acceptances—and rejections—which Meredith understood so well. But there is plenty to provide pleasant and not too strenuous exercise for the mind: the stress on the im- portance of each man's " life-illusion," or the suggestion that old women are happier than old men because their happiness has always come through what they could see from the head of their own table or out of the windows of their rooms ; while for mesa it has lain in the moments of relaxation from work ; or the idea that the garrulousness of the old is like a boy's whistling along a dark alley to keep his spirits up, and the provision of a rule of life in the maxim : "Enjoy all and be kind to all "—things that go together, indeed, more often than traditional moralists allow.
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