Old Jolyon. And yet the figures of Insurance Societies and the utterances of Judges reassure us daily that our earthly paradise is still a rich preserve, where the wild raiders, Beauty and Passion, come stealing in, filching security from beneath our noses. As surely as a dog will bark at a brass band, so will the essential Soames in human nature ever rise up uneasily against the dissolution which hovers round the folds of ownership. "Let the dead Past bury its dead" would be a better saying if the Past ever died. The persistence of the Past is one of those tragi-comic blessings which each new age denies, coming cocksure on to the stage to mouth its claim to a perfect novelty. But no Age is so new as that! Human Nature, under its changing pretensions and clothes, is and ever will be very much of a Forsyte, and might, after all, be a much worse animal.
M o s t of the time, they magically survive this death and are literally or symbolically reborn to reap the consequences of having cheated death. T h e y have passed the main test of being a hero. Spielberg's E . T dies before our eyes but is reborn through alien magic and a boy's love. S i r Lancelot, remorseful over having k i l l e d a gallant knight, prays h i m back to life. C l i n t Eastwood's character in Unforgiven is beaten senseless by a sadistic sheriff and hovers at the edge of death, thinking he's seeing angels. Sherlock H o l m e s , apparently k i l l e d with Professor M o r i a r i t y in the plunge over Reichenbach Falls, defies death and returns transformed and ready for more ad ventures. Patrick Swayze's character, murdered in Ghost, learns how to cross back through the veil to protect his wife and finally express his true love for her. CHANGE Heroes don't just visit death and come home. T h e y return changed, transformed.
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