play: the character of the pompous and banal old “Major”—the “General’s” contemporary and friend and the father of the heroine—and his conversations with the hero, in which his conventional and pompous character is made the butt for the biting and sardonic gibes of the latter, were also evidently strongly coloured with the influence of Polonius and Hamlet. But there was good stuff in these scenes as well; considerable originality and naturalness were shown in the characterization of the old “Major”: he was, for example, trying to support the tottering fortune of a small military school which his family had established several generations before, and whose gigantic futility, amid this decline of a ruined order and a vanquished system was, in the years after the war, ironically apparent. There was, in fact, much telling satire in this situation, and on the whole it was well managed. Moreover, its “modern” implications were evident: it suggested, for example, the Southerner’s pitiable devotion to a gaudy uniform and military trappings, the profusion of ugly, trivial, cheap and brutal little “military schools” that cover the whole South, even to the present day, like an ugly rash, and whose “You furnish the boy—we send back the man” philosophy is nauseous in its hypocrisy, dishonesty, and cheap pretence.
There was much more that was good and pungent and original in these scenes between the “Major” and the hero: a great deal of the falseness, hypocrisy and sentimentality of the South was polished off in these episodes, and “the war”—the Civil War—was used effectively as a stalking-horse to satirize the great World War of modern times. There was, for example, a good, and original—on the whole, a very true—variation of the Youth-and-Age, Old Man-Young Man conflict that was evident at that period, and that provided the material of so many books and plays and poems of the time.
In these scenes, it was very forcefully and amusingly shown that the conflict between youth and age had in it an element of mutual hypocrisy, a kind of mutual acceptance of a literary game about youth and age which both young and old knew in their hearts was false, but which both played.
Thus when the old “Major” would heave a melancholy sigh, and shaking his beard with a doleful and hypocritical regret would say:
“Ah yes, my boy!… We old men have made a sad mess of this world…. We have betrayed our trust, and shown ourselves unworthy of the confidence you young men have reposed in us…. We were given the opportunity of making the world a better place in which to live
