My friend, the Professor, whom I have mentioned to you once or twice, told
me yesterday that somebody had been abusing him in some of the journals of
his calling. I told him that I did n't doubt he deserved it; that I hoped
he did deserve a little abuse occasionally, and would for a number of
years to come; that nobody could do anything to make his neighbors wiser
or better without being liable to abuse for it; especially that people
hated to have their little mistakes made fun of, and perhaps he had been
doing something of the kind. The Professor smiled.
Now, said I, hear what I am going to say. It will not take many years to
bring you to the period of life when men, at least the majority of writing
and talking men, do nothing but praise. Men, like peaches and pears, grow
sweet a little while before they begin to decay. I don't know what it
is,--whether a spontaneous change, mental or bodily, or whether it is
through experience of the thanklessness of critical honesty,--but it is a
fact, that most writers, except sour and unsuccessful ones, get tired of
finding fault at about the time when they are beginning to grow old.
As a general thing, I would not give a great deal for the fair words of a
critic, if he is himself an author, over fifty years of age. At thirty, we
are all trying to cut our names in big letters upon the walls of this
tenement of life; twenty years later, we have carved it, or shut up our
jackknives. Then we are ready to help others, and care less to hinder any,
because nobody's elbows are in our way. So I am glad you have a little
life left; you will be saccharine enough in a few years.
Some of the softening effects of advancing age have struck me very much in
what I have heard or seen here and elsewhere. I just now spoke of the
sweetening process that authors undergo. Do you know that in the gradual
passage from maturity to helplessness the harshest characters sometimes
have a period in which they are gentle and placid as young children? I
have heard it said, but I can not be sponsor for its truth, that the
famous chieftain, Lochiel, was rocked in a cradle like a baby, in his old
age. An old man, whose studies had been of the severest scholastic kind,
used to love to hear little nursery stories read over and over to him. One
who saw the Duke of Wellington in his last years describes him as very
gentle in his aspect and demeanor. I remember a person of singularly
stern and lofty bearing who became remarkably gracious and easy in all his
ways in the later period of his life.
And that leads me to say that men often remind me of pears in their way of
coming to maturity. Some are ripe at twenty, like human Jargonelles, and
must be made the most of, for their day is soon over. Some come into their
perfect condition late, like the autumn kinds, and they last better than
the summer fruit. And some, that, like the Winter Nelis, have been hard
and uninviting until all the rest have had their season, get their glow
and perfume long after the frost and snow have done their worst with the
orchards. Beware of rash criticisms; the rough and stringent fruit you
condemn may be an autumn or a winter pear, and that which you picked up
beneath the same bough in August may have been only its worm--eaten
windfalls. Milton was a Saint Germain with a graft of the roseate Early
Catherine. Rich, juicy, lively, fragrant, russet-skinned old Chaucer was
an Easter Beurre'; the buds of a new summer were swelling when he ripened.
--Holmes.