innocent girl buoyant with fine purposes of duty, in all the street
full of eager and rosy faces, but a cynic can chill and dishearten with
a single word. Despondency comes readily enough to the most sanguine.
The cynic has only to follow their hint with his bitter confirmation,
and they check that eager courageous pace and go home with heavier step
and premature age. They will themselves quickly enough give the hint he
wants to the cold wretch. Which of them has not failed to please where
they most wished it? or blundered where they were most ambitious of
success? or found themselves awkward or tedious or incapable of study,
thought, or heroism, and only hoped by good sense and fidelity to do
what they could and pass unblamed? And this witty malefactor makes
their little hope less with satire and scepticism, and slackens the
springs of endeavor. Yes, this is easy; but to help the young soul, add
energy, inspire hope, and blow the coals into a useful flame; to redeem
defeat by new thought, by firm action, that is not easy, that is the
work of divine men.
We live on different planes or platforms. There is an external life,
which is educated at school, taught to read, write, cipher, and trade;
taught to grasp all the boy can get, urging him to put himself forward,
to make himself useful and agreeable in the world, to ride, run, argue,
and contend, unfold his talents, shine, conquer, and possess.
But the inner life sits at home, and does not learn to do things, nor
value these feats at all. ’Tis a quiet, wise perception. It loves
truth, because it is itself real; it loves right, it knows nothing
else; but it makes no progress; was as wise in our first memory of
it as now; is just the same now in maturity and hereafter in age, it
was in youth. We have grown to manhood and womanhood; we have powers,
connection, children, reputations, professions: this makes no account
of them all. It lives in the great present; it makes the present great.
This tranquil, well-founded, wide-seeing soul is no express-rider, no
attorney, no magistrate: it lies in the sun, and broods on the world.
A person of this temper once said to a man of much activity, “I will
pardon you that you do so much, and you me that I do nothing.” And
Euripides says that “Zeus hates busybodies and those who do too much.”
OLD AGE.
OLD AGE.
On the anniversary of the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, in 1861,
the venerable President Quincy, senior member of the Society, as well
as senior alumnus of the University, was received at the dinner with
peculiar demonstrations of respect. He replied to these compliments
in a speech, and, gracefully claiming the privileges of a literary
society, entered at some length into an Apology for Old Age, and,
aiding himself by notes in his hand, made a sort of running commentary
on Cicero’s chapter “De Senectute.” The character of the speaker, the
transparent good faith of his praise and blame, and the _naïveté_ of
his eager preference of Cicero’s opinions to King David’s, gave unusual
interest to the College festival. It was a discourse full of dignity,
honoring him who spoke and those who heard.
The speech led me to look over at home--an easy task--Cicero’s famous
essay, charming by its uniform rhetorical merit; heroic with Stoical
precepts; with a Roman eye to the claims of the State; happiest,
perhaps, in his praise of life on the farm; and rising at the
conclusion to a lofty strain. But he does not exhaust the subject;
rather invites the attempt to add traits to the picture from our
broader modern life.
Cicero makes no reference to the illusions which cling to the element
of time, and in which Nature delights. Wellington, in speaking of
military men, said, “What masks are these uniforms to hide cowards!”
I have often detected the like deception in the cloth shoe, wadded
pelisse, wig, spectacles, and padded chair of Age. Nature lends herself
to these illusions, and adds dim sight, deafness, cracked voice, snowy
hair, short memory and sleep. These also are masks, and all is not Age
that wears them. Whilst we yet call ourselves young, and our mates
are yet youths with even boyish remains, one good fellow in the set
prematurely sports a gray or a bald head, which does not impose on
us who know how innocent of sanctity or of Platonism he is, but does
deceive his juniors and the public, who presently distinguish him with
a most amusing respect: and this lets us into the secret, that the
venerable forms that so awed our childhood were just such impostors.
Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders,
and then a young heart beating under fourscore winters.
For if the essence of age is not present, these signs, whether of Art
or Nature, are counterfeit and ridiculous: and the essence of age is
intellect. Wherever that appears, we call it old. If we look into the
eyes of the youngest person, we sometimes discover that here is one who
knows already what you would go about with much pains to teach him;
there is that in him which is the ancestor of all around him: which
fact the Indian Vedas express when they say, “He that can discriminate
is the father of his father.” And in our old British legends of Arthur
and the Round Table, his friend and counsellor, Merlin the Wise, is a
babe found exposed in a basket by the river-side, and, though an infant
of only a few days, speaks articulately to those who discover him,
tells his name and history, and presently foretells the fate of the
by-standers. Wherever there is power, there is age. Don’t be deceived
by dimples and curls. I tell you that babe is a thousand years old.
Time is, indeed, the theatre and seat of illusion: nothing is so
ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century, and
dwarfs an age to an hour. Saadi found in a mosque at Damascus an old
Persian of a hundred and fifty years who was dying, and was saying to
himself, “I said, coming into the world by birth, ‘I will enjoy myself
for a few moments.’ Alas! at the variegated table of life I partook
of a few mouthfuls, and the Fates said, ‘_Enough!_’” That which does
not decay is so central and controlling in us, that, as long as one
is alone by himself, he is not sensible of the inroads of time, which
always begin at the surface-edges. If, on a winter day, you should
stand within a bell-glass, the face and color of the afternoon clouds
would not indicate whether it were June or January; and if we did not
find the reflection of ourselves in the eyes of the young people, we
could not know that the century-clock had struck seventy instead of
twenty. How many men habitually believe that each chance passenger with
whom they converse is of their own age, and presently find it was his
father, and not his brother, whom they knew!
But not to press too hard on these deceits and illusions of Nature,
which are inseparable from our condition, and looking at age under
an aspect more conformed to the common sense, if the question be
the felicity of age, I fear the first popular judgments will be
unfavorable. From the point of sensuous experience, seen from the
streets and markets and the haunts of pleasure and gain, the estimate
of age is low, melancholy, and sceptical. Frankly face the facts,
and see the result. Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid,
strychnine, are weak dilutions: the surest poison is time. This cup,
which Nature puts to our lips, has a wonderful virtue, surpassing
that of any other draught. It opens the senses, adds power, fills us
with exalted dreams, which we call hope, love, ambition, science:
especially, it creates a craving for larger draughts of itself.
But they who take the larger draughts are drunk with it, lose their
stature, strength, beauty, and senses, and end in folly and delirium.
We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to
write, and we one day discover that our literary talent was a youthful
effervescence which we have now lost. We had a judge in Massachusetts
who at sixty proposed to resign, alleging that he perceived a certain,
decay in his faculties; he was dissuaded by his friends, on account
of the public convenience at that time. At seventy it was hinted to
him that it was time to retire; but he now replied, that he thought
his judgment as robust, and all his faculties as good as ever they
were. But besides the self-deception, the strong and hasty laborers of
the street do not work well with the chronic valetudinarian. Youth is
everywhere in place. Age, like woman, requires fit surroundings. Age
is comely in coaches, in churches, in chairs of state, and ceremony,
in council-chambers, in courts of justice, and historical societies.
Age is becoming in the country. But in the rush and uproar of Broadway,
if you look into the faces of the passengers, there is dejection or
indignation in the seniors, a certain concealed sense of injury,
and the lip made up with a heroic determination not to mind it. Few
envy the consideration enjoyed by the oldest inhabitant. We do not
count a man’s years, until he has nothing else to count. The vast
inconvenience of animal immortality was told in the fable of Tithonus.
In short, the creed of the street is, Old Age is not disgraceful, but
immensely disadvantageous. Life is well enough, but we shall all be
glad to get out of it, and they will all be glad to have us.
This is odious on the face of it. Universal convictions are not to
be shaken by the whimseys of overfed butchers and firemen, or by the
sentimental fears of girls who would keep the infantile bloom on their
cheeks. We know the value of experience. Life and art are cumulative;
and he who has accomplished something in any department alone deserves
to be heard on that subject. A man of great employments and excellent
performance used to assure me that he did not think a man worth
anything until he was sixty; although this smacks a little of the
resolution of a certain “Young Men’s Republican Club,” that all men
should be held eligible who were under seventy. But in all governments,
the councils of power were held by the old; and patricians or _patres_,
senate or _senes_, _seigneurs_ or seniors, _gerousia_, the senate of
Sparta, the presbytery of the Church, and the like, all signify simply
old men.
The cynical creed or lampoon of the market is refuted by the universal
prayer for long life, which is the verdict of Nature, and justified by
all history. We have, it is true, examples of an accelerated pace by
which young men achieved grand works; as in the Macedonian Alexander,
in Raffaelle, Shakspeare, Pascal, Burns, and Byron; but these are rare
exceptions. Nature, in the main, vindicates her law. Skill to do comes
of doing; knowledge comes by eyes always open, and working hands; and
there is no knowledge that is not power. Béranger said, “Almost all
the good workmen live long.” And if the life be true and noble, we
have quite another sort of seniors than the frowzy, timorous, peevish
dotards who are falsely old,--namely, the men who fear no city, but
by whom cities stand; who appearing in any street, the people empty
their houses to gaze at and obey them: as at “My Cid, with the fleecy
beard,” in Toledo; or Bruce, as Barbour reports him; as blind old
Dandolo, elected Doge at eighty-four years, storming Constantinople
at ninety-four, and after the revolt again victorious, and elected at
the age of ninety-six to the throne of the Eastern Empire, which he
declined, and died Doge at ninety-seven. We still feel the force of
Socrates, “whom well-advised the oracle pronounced wisest of men”; of
Archimedes, holding Syracuse against the Romans by his wit, and himself
better than all their nation; of Michel Angelo, wearing the four crowns
of architecture, sculpture, painting, and poetry; of Galileo, of whose
blindness Castelli said, “The noblest eye is darkened that Nature ever
made,--an eye that hath seen more than all that went before him, and
hath opened the eyes of all that shall come after him”; of Newton, who
made an important discovery for every one of his eighty-five years;
of Bacon, who “took all knowledge to be his province”; of Fontenelle,
“that precious porcelain vase laid up in the centre of France to
be guarded with the utmost care for a hundred years”; of Franklin,
Jefferson, and Adams, the wise and heroic statesmen; of Washington, the
perfect citizen; of Wellington, the perfect soldier; of Goethe, the
all-knowing poet; of Humboldt, the encyclopædia of science.
Under the general assertion of the well-being of age, we can easily
count particular benefits of that condition. It has weathered the
perilous capes and shoals in the sea whereon we sail, and the chief
evil of life is taken away in removing the grounds of fear. The
insurance of a ship expires as she enters the harbor at home. It were
strange, if a man should turn his sixtieth year without a feeling of
immense relief from the number of dangers he has escaped. When the
old wife says, ‘Take care of that tumor in your shoulder, perhaps it
is cancerous,’--he replies, ‘I am yielding to a surer decomposition.’
The humorous thief who drank a pot of beer at the gallows blew off the
froth because he had heard it was unhealthy; but it will not add a
pang to the prisoner marched out to be shot, to assure him that the
pain in his knee threatens mortification. When the pleuro-pneumonia
of the cows raged, the butchers said, that, though the acute degree
was novel, there never was a time when this disease did not occur
among cattle. All men carry seeds of all distempers through life
latent, and we die without developing them; such is the affirmative
force of the constitution; but if you are enfeebled by any cause,
some of these sleeping seeds start and open. Meantime, at every stage
we lose a foe. At fifty years, ’tis said, afflicted citizens lose
their sick-headaches. I hope this _hegira_ is not as movable a feast
as that one I annually look for, when the horticulturists assure me
that the rosebugs in our gardens disappear on the tenth of July;
they stay a fortnight later in mine. But be it as it may with the
sick-headache,--’tis certain that graver headaches and heart-aches are
lulled once for all, as we come up with certain goals of time. The
passions have answered their purpose: that slight but dread overweight,
with which, in each instance, Nature secures the execution of her
aim, drops off. To keep man in the planet, she impresses the terror
of death. To perfect the commissariat, she implants in each a certain
rapacity to get the supply, and a little oversupply, of his wants. To
insure the existence of the race, she reinforces the sexual instinct,
at the risk of disorder, grief, and pain. To secure strength, she
plants cruel hunger and thirst, which so easily overdo their office,
and invite disease. But these temporary stays and shifts for the
protection of the young animal are shed as fast as they can be replaced
by nobler resources. We live in youth amidst this rabble of passions,
quite too tender, quite too hungry and irritable. Later, the interiors
of mind and heart open, and supply grander motives. We learn the fatal
compensations that wait on every act. Then,--one after another,--this
riotous time-destroying crew disappear.
I count it another capital advantage of age, this, that a success more
or less signifies nothing. Little by little, it has amassed such a
fund of merit, that it can very well afford to go on its credit when
it will. When I chanced to meet the poet Wordsworth, then sixty-three
years old, he told me, “that he had just had a fall and lost a tooth,
and, when his companions were much concerned for the mischance, he had
replied, that he was glad it had not happened forty years before.”
Well, Nature takes care that we shall not lose our organs forty years
too soon. A lawyer argued a cause yesterday in the Supreme Court, and
I was struck with a certain air of levity and defiance which vastly
became him. Thirty years ago it was a serious concern to him whether
his pleading was good and effective. Now it is of importance to his
client, but of none to himself. It has been long already fixed what he
can do and cannot do, and his reputation does not gain or suffer from
one or a dozen new performances. If he should, on a new occasion, rise
quite beyond his mark, and achieve somewhat great and extraordinary,
that, of course, would instantly tell; but he may go below his mark
with impunity, and people will say, ‘O, he had headache,’ or, ‘He lost
his sleep for two nights.’ What a lust of appearance, what a load of
anxieties that once degraded him, he is thus rid of! Every one is
sensible of this cumulative advantage in living. All the good days
behind him are sponsors, who speak for him when he is silent, pay for
him when he has no money, introduce him where he has no letters, and
work for him when he sleeps.
A third felicity of age is, that it has found expression. The youth
suffers not only from ungratified desires, but from powers untried, and
from a picture in his mind of a career which has, as yet, no outward
reality. He is tormented with the want of correspondence between things
and thoughts. Michel Angelo’s head is full of masculine and gigantic
figures as gods walking, which make him savage until his furious chisel
can render them into marble; and of architectural dreams, until a
hundred stone-masons can lay them in courses of travertine. There is
the like tempest in every good head in which some great benefit for
the world is planted. The throes continue until the child is born.
Every faculty new to each man thus goads him and drives him out into
doleful deserts, until it finds proper vent. All the functions of
human duty irritate and lash him forward, bemoaning and chiding, until
they are performed. He wants friends, employment, knowledge, power,
house and land, wife and children, honor and fame; he has religious
wants, æsthetic wants, domestic, civil, humane wants. One by one,
day after day, he learns to coin his wishes into facts. He has his
calling, homestead, social connection, and personal power, and thus,
at the end of fifty years, his soul is appeased by seeing some sort
of correspondence between his wish and his possession. This makes the
value of age, the satisfaction it slowly offers to every craving. He
is serene who does not feel himself pinched and wronged, but whose
condition, in particular and in general, allows the utterance of his
mind. In old persons, when thus fully expressed, we often observe a
fair, plump, perennial, waxen complexion, which indicates that all
the ferment of earlier days has subsided into serenity of thought and
behavior.
The compensations of Nature play in age as in youth. In a world so
charged and sparkling with power, a man does not live long and actively
without costly additions of experience, which, though not spoken, are
recorded in his mind. What to the youth is only a guess or a hope, is
in the veteran a digested statute. He beholds the feats of the juniors
with complacency, but as one who, having long ago known these games,
has refined them into results and morals. The Indian Red Jacket, when
the young braves were boasting their deeds, said, “But the sixties have
all the twenties and forties in them.”
For a fourth benefit, age sets its house in order, and finishes its
works, which to every artist is a supreme pleasure. Youth has an excess
of sensibility, before which every object glitters and attracts. We
leave one pursuit for another, and the young man’s year is a heap of
beginnings. At the end of a twelvemonth, he has nothing to show for
it,--not one completed work. But the time is not lost. Our instincts
drove us to hive innumerable experiences, that are yet of no visible
value, and which we may keep for twice seven years before they shall
be wanted. The best things are of secular growth. The instinct of
classifying marks the wise and healthy mind. Linnæus projects his
system, and lays out his twenty-four classes of plants, before yet he
has found in Nature a single plant to justify certain of his classes.
His seventh class has not one. In process of time, he finds with
delight the little white _Trientalis_, the only plant with seven petals
and sometimes seven stamens, which constitutes a seventh class in
conformity with his system. The conchologist builds his cabinet whilst
as yet he has few shells. He labels shelves for classes, cells for
species: all but a few are empty. But every year fills some blanks, and
with accelerating speed as he becomes knowing and known. An old scholar
finds keen delight in verifying the impressive anecdotes and citations
he has met with in miscellaneous reading and hearing, in all the years
of youth. We carry in memory important anecdotes, and have lost all
clew to the author from whom we had them. We have a heroic speech from
Rome or Greece, but cannot fix it on the man who said it. We have an
admirable line worthy of Horace, ever and anon resounding in our mind’s
ear, but have searched all probable and improbable books for it in
vain. We consult the reading men: but, strangely enough, they who know
everything know not this. But especially we have a certain insulated
thought, which haunts us, but remains insulated and barren. Well,
there is nothing for all this but patience and time. Time, yes, that
is the finder, the unweariable explorer, not subject to casualties,
omniscient at last. The day comes when the hidden author of our story
is found; when the brave speech returns straight to the hero who
said it; when the admirable verse finds the poet to whom it belongs;
and best of all, when the lonely thought, which seemed so wise, yet
half-wise, half-thought, because it cast no light abroad, is suddenly
matched in our mind by its twin, by its sequence, or next related
analogy, which gives it instantly radiating power, and justifies the
superstitious instinct with which we have hoarded it. We remember our
old Greek Professor at Cambridge, an ancient bachelor, amid his folios,
possessed by this hope of completing a task, with nothing to break his
leisure after the three hours of his daily classes, yet ever restlessly
stroking his leg, and assuring himself “he should retire from the
University and read the authors.” In Goethe’s Romance, Makaria,
the central figure for wisdom and influence, pleases herself with
withdrawing into solitude to astronomy and epistolary correspondence.
Goethe himself carried this completion of studies to the highest point.
Many of his works hung on the easel from youth to age, and received
a stroke in every month or year. A literary astrologer, he never
applied himself to any task but at the happy moment when all the stars
consented. Bentley thought himself likely to live till fourscore,--long
enough to read everything that was worth reading,--“_Et tunc magna
mei sub terris ibit imago._” Much wider is spread the pleasure which
old men take in completing their secular affairs, the inventor his
inventions, the agriculturist his experiments, and all old men in
finishing their houses, rounding their estates, clearing their titles,
reducing tangled interests to order, reconciling enmities, and leaving
all in the best posture for the future. It must be believed that there
is a proportion between the designs of a man and the length of his
life: there is a calendar of his years, so of his performances.
America is the country of young men, and too full of work hitherto for
leisure and tranquillity; yet we have had robust centenarians, and
examples of dignity and wisdom. I have lately found in an old note-book
a record of a visit to ex-President John Adams, in 1825, soon after the
election of his son to the Presidency. It is but a sketch, and nothing
important passed in the conversation; but it reports a moment in the
life of a heroic person, who, in extreme old age, appeared still erect
and worthy of his fame.