when men walked boldly, when the world was still young, and gods
and nymphs not all dead, is wisdom. To be wise is simply to have
blended and harmonized one’s experience, to have fused it together
into a “philosophy of life.” Wisdom is a matter not of quantity,
but of quality of experience. It means getting at the heart of it,
and obtaining the same clear warm impression of its meaning that
the artist does of the æsthetic idea that he is going to represent.
Wisdom in youth or early middle life may be far truer than in later
life. One’s courage may weaken under repeated failure, one’s sense of
justice be dulled by contact with the wrong relations between men and
classes, one’s belief in democracy destroyed by the seeming failure of
experiments. But this gathering cynicism does not mean the acquiring
of wisdom, but the losing of it. The usefulness and practicability of
these virtues of youth are not really vitiated by the struggles they
have in carrying themselves through into practice; what is exhibited
is merely the toughness of the old forces of prejudice and tradition,
and the “pig-headedness” of the old philosophy of timorousness and
distrust. True wisdom is faith in love, in justice, in democracy; youth
has this faith in largest measure; therefore youth is most wise.
Middle age steals upon a youth almost before he is aware. He will
recognize it at first, perhaps, by a slight paling of his enthusiasms,
or by a sudden consciousness that his early interests have been
submerged in the flood of routine work and family cares. The later
years of youth and the early years of middle life are in truth the
dangerous age, for then may be lost the virtues that were acquired in
youth. Or, if not lost, many will be felt to be superfluous. There is
danger that the peculiar bias of the relish of right and wrong that
the virtues of youth have given one may be weakened, and the soul
spread itself too thin over life. Now one of the chief virtues of
middle life is to conserve the values of youth, to practice in sober
earnest the virtues that came so naturally in the enthusiasm of youth,
but which take on a different hue when exposed to what seem to be the
crass facts of the workaday world. But there is no reason why work,
ambition, the raising of a family, should dull the essential spirit
of youthful idealism. It may not be so irrepressible, so freakish, so
intolerant, but it should not be different in quality and significance.
The burdens of middle life are not a warrant for the releasing of the
spiritual obligations of youth. They do not give one the right to look
back with amused regret to the dear follies of the past. For as soon
as the spirit of youth begins to leave the soul, that soul begins to
die. Middle-aged people are too much inclined to speak of youth as a
sort of spiritual play. They forget that youth feels that it itself has
the serious business of life, the real crises to meet. To youth it is
middle age that seems trivial and playful. It is after the serious work
of love-making and establishing one’s self in economic independence
is over that one can rest and play. Youth has little time for that
sort of recreation. In middle age, most of the problems have been
solved, the obstacles overcome. There is a slackening of the lines,
a satisfied taking of one’s reward. And to youth this must always
seem a tragedy, that the season of life when the powers are at their
highest should be the season when they are oftener turned to material
than to spiritual ends. Youth has the energy and ideals, but not the
vantage-ground of prestige from which to fight for them. Middle age has
the prestige and the power, but too seldom the will to use it for the
furtherance of its ideals. Youth has the isolation, the independence,
the disinterestedness so that it may attack any foe, but it has not
the reserve force to carry that attack through. Middle age has all the
reserve power necessary, but is handicapped by family obligations, by
business and political ties, so that its power is rarely effective for
social or individual progress.
The supreme virtue of middle age will be, then, to make this difficult
fusion,--to combine devotion to one’s family, to one’s chosen work,
with devotion to the finer idealism and impersonal aims that formed
one’s philosophy of youth. To keep alive through all the twistings
and turnings of life’s road the sense of a larger humanity that needs
spiritual and material succor, of the individual spiritual life of
ideal interests, is a task of virtue that will tax the resources of
any man or woman. Yet here lies the true virtue of middle age,--to use
its splendid powers to enhance the social and individual life round
one, to radiate influence that transforms and elevates. The secret
of such a radiant personality seems to be that one, while mingling
freely in the stress of everyday life, sees all its details in the
light of larger principles, against the background of their social
meaning. In other words, it is a virtue of middle life to be socially
self-conscious. And this spirit is the best protector against the
ravages of the tough material world. Only by this social consciousness
can that toughness be softened. The image of the world the way it ought
to be must never be lost sight of in the picture of the world the way
it is.
This conservation of the spirit is even more necessary for the woman
than for the man. The active life of the latter makes it fairly
certain that he, while he may become hard and callous, will at least
retain some sort of grip on the world’s bigger movements. There is
no such certainty for the mother. Indeed, she seems often to take a
real pleasure in voluntarily offering up in sacrifice at the time of
marriage what few ideal interests and tastes she has. The spectacle
of the young mother devoting all her time and strength to her children
and husband, and surrendering all other interests to the interests of
the home, is usually considered inspiring and attractive, especially by
the men. Not so attractive is she thirty years later, when, her family
cares having lapsed and her children scattered, she is left high and
dry in the world. If she then takes a well-earned rest, it seems a
pity that that rest should be so generally futile and uninteresting.
Without interests and tastes, and with no longer any useful function in
society, she is relegated to the most trivial amusements and pursuits.
Idle and vapid, she finds nothing to do but fritter away her time. The
result is a really appalling waste of economic and social energy in
middle age. Now it is the virtue of this season of life to avoid all
this. The woman as well as the man must realize that her home is not
bounded by the walls of the house, that it has wider implications,
leading out into all the interests of the community and the state. That
women of this age have not yet learned to be good mothers and good
citizens at the same time, does not show that it is impossible, but
that it is a virtue that requires more resolution than our morality
has been willing to exhibit. The relish of right and wrong must be a
relish of social right and wrong as well as of individual.
As middle age passes on into old age, however, one earns a certain
right of relaxation. If there is no right to let go the sympathy
for the virtues of youth and the conservation of its spirit, there
comes the right to give over some of the aggressive activity. To
youth belongs the practical action. At no other age is there the same
impulse and daring. The virtue of later middle age is to encourage
and support, rather than actively engage. It is true we have never
learned this lesson. We still surrender to semi-old men the authority
to govern us, think for us, act for us. We endow them with spiritual
as well as practical leadership, and allow them to strip youth of
its opportunities and powers. We permit them to rule not only their
own but all the generations. If we could be sure that their rule
meant progress, we could trust them to guide us. But, in these times
at least, it seems to mean nothing so much as a last fight for a
discredited undemocratic philosophy that modern youth are completely
through with. From this point of view one of the virtues of this middle
season of life will be the imaginative understanding of youth’s
purposes and radical ideals. At that age, one no longer needs the same
courage to face the battles of life; they are already most of them
irrevocably won or lost. There is not the same claim of temperance; the
passions and ambitions are relaxed. The sense of justice and democracy
will have become a habit or else they will have been forever lost. Only
the need of wisdom remains,--that unworldly wisdom which mellowing
years can bring, which sees through the disturbance and failure of life
the truth and efficacy of youth’s ideal vision.
Old age is such a triumph that it may almost be justly relieved of any
burden of virtues or duties; it is so unique and beautiful that the
old should be given the perfect freedom of the moral city. So splendid
a victory is old age over the malign forces of disease and weakness
and death that one is tempted to say that its virtue lies simply in
being old. Those virtues of youth which grew out of the crises and
temptations, physical and spiritual, of early life, are no longer
relevant. There may come instead the quieter virtues of contentment
and renunciation. Old people have few crises and few temptations; they
live in the past and not in the future, as youth does. They cannot
be required, therefore, to have that scorn for tradition which is the
virtue of youth. They can keep alive for us the tradition that _is_
vital, and from them we can learn many things.
The value of their experience to us is not that it teaches us to avoid
their mistakes, for we must try all things for ourselves. The older
generation, it is true, often flatters itself that its mistakes somehow
make for our benefit, because we learn from their errors to avoid
the pitfalls into which they came. But there is no making mistakes
by the proxy of a former generation. The world has moved on in the
mean time; the pitfalls are new, and we shall only entangle ourselves
the more by adopting the methods of our ancestors in getting out of
the difficulties. But the value of an old man’s experience is that
he has preserved in it the living tradition and hands down to us old
honesties, old sincerities, and old graces, that have been crushed in
the rough-and-tumble of modern life. It is not tradition in itself
that is dangerous, but only dead tradition that has no meaning for the
present and is a mere weight on our progress. Such is the legal and
economic tradition given to us by our raucous, middle-aged leaders of
opinion, adopted by them through motives of present gain, and not
through sincere love of the past.
But old men, looking back over the times in which they have lived,
throw a poetic glamour over the past and make it live again. They see
it idealized, but it is the _real_ that they see idealized. An old man
of personality and charm has the faculty of cutting away from the past
the dead wood, and preserving for us the living tissue which we can
graft profitably on our own growing present. Old men have much of the
disinterestedness of youth; they have no ulterior motive in giving us
the philosophy of their past. The wisest of them instinctively select
what is vital for our present nourishment. It is not old men that youth
has to fear, but the semi-old, who have lost touch with their youth,
and have not lived long enough to get the disinterested vision of their
idealized past. But old men who have lived this life of radical virtue
are the best of teachers; they distill the perfume of the past, and
bring it to us to sweeten our present. Such men grow old only in body.
The radical spirit of youth has the power of abolishing considerations
of age; the body changes, but the spirit remains the same. In this
sense, it is the virtue of old age not to become old.
The besetting sin of this season of life is apathy. Old age should not
be a mere waiting for death. The fact that we cannot reconcile death
with life shows that they ought not to be discussed in the same terms.
They belong to two different orders. Death has no part in life, and in
life there can be no such thing as preparation for death. An old man
lives to his appointed time, and then his life ends; but the life up to
that ending, barring the loss of his faculties, has been all life and
not a whit death. Old men do not fear death as much as do young men,
and this calmness is not so much a result of disillusionment with life
as a recognition that their life has been lived, their work finished,
the cycle of their activity rounded off. One virtue of old age, then,
is to live as fully at the height of one’s powers as strength will
permit, passing out of life serene and unreluctant, with willingness to
live and yet with willingness to die. To know an old man who has grown
old slowly, taking the seasons as they came, conserving the spirit of
his youthful virtues, mellowing his philosophy of life, acquiring a
clearer, saner, and more beautiful outlook on human nature and all its
spiritual values with each passing year, is an education in the virtues
of life. The virtues which produce an old age such as this do not cut
across the grain of life, but enhance and conserve the vital impulses
and forces. Such an old age is the crowning evidence of the excellent
working of the soul. A life needs no other proof than this that each
season has known its proper virtue and healthful activity.
IV
THE LIFE OF IRONY
I could never, until recently, divest myself of the haunting feeling
that being ironical had something to do with the entering of the iron
into one’s soul. I thought I knew what irony was, and I admired it
immensely. I could not believe that there was something metallic and
bitter about it. Yet this sinister connotation of a clanging, rasping
meanness of spirit, which I am sure it has still in many people’s
minds, clung about it, until one happy day my dictionary told me that
the iron had never entered into the soul at all, but the soul into
the iron (St. Jerome had read the psalm wrong), and that irony was
Greek, with all the free, happy play of the Greek spirit about it,
letting in fresh air and light into others’ minds and our own. It
was to the Greek an incomparable method of intercourse, the rub of
mind against mind by the simple use of simulated ignorance and the
adoption, without committing one’s self, of another’s point of view.
Not until I read the Socrates of Plato did I fully appreciate that
this irony,--this pleasant challenging of the world, this insistent
judging of experience, this sense of vivid contrasts and incongruities,
of comic juxtapositions, of flaring brilliancies, and no less
heartbreaking impossibilities, of all the little parts of one’s world
being constantly set off against each other, and made intelligible only
by being translated into and defined in each others’ terms,--that this
was a life, and a life of beauty, that one might suddenly discover
one’s self living all unawares. And if one could judge one’s own feeble
reflection, it was a life that had no room for iron within its soul.
We should speak not of the Socratic method but of the Socratic life.
For irony is a life rather than a method. A life cannot be taken
off and put on again at will; a method can. To be sure, some people
talk of life exactly as if it were some portable commodity, or some
exchangeable garment. We must live, they cry, as if we were about to
begin. And perhaps they are. Only some of us would rather die than live
that puny life that they can adopt and cover themselves with. Irony is
too rich and precious a thing to be capable of such transmission. The
ironist is born and not made. This critical attitude towards life, this
delicious sense of contrasts that we call irony, is not a pose or an
amusement. It is something that colors every idea and every feeling of
the man who is so happy as to be endowed with it.
Most people will tell you, I suppose, that the religious conviction
of salvation is the only permanently satisfying coloring of life. In
the splendid ironists, however, one sees a sweeter, more flexible and
human principle of life, adequate, without the buttress of supernatural
belief, to nourish and fortify the spirit. In the classic ironist of
all time, irony shows an inherent nobility, a nobility that all ages
have compared favorably with the Christian ideal. Lacking the spur of
religious emotion, the sweetness of irony may be more difficult to
maintain than the mood of belief. But may it not for that very reason
be judged superior, for is it not written, He that endureth unto the
end shall be saved?
It is not easy to explain the quality of that richest and most
satisfying background of life. It lies, I think, in a vivid and intense
feeling of aliveness which it gives. Experience comes to the ironist in
little darts or spurts, with the added sense of contrast. Most men, I
am afraid, see each bit of personal experience as a unit, strung more
or less loosely on a string of other mildly related bits. But the
man with the ironical temperament is forced constantly to compare and
contrast his experience with what was, or what might be, or with what
ought to be, and it is the shocks of these comparisons and contrasts
that make up his inner life. He thinks he leads a richer life, because
he feels not only the individual bits but the contrasts besides in all
their various shadings and tints. To this sense of impingement of facts
upon life is due a large part of this vividness of irony; and the rest
is due to the alertness of the ironical mind. The ironist is always
critically awake. He is always judging, and watching with inexhaustible
interest, in order that he may judge. Now irony in its best sense is an
exquisite sense of proportion, a sort of spiritual tact in judging the
values and significances of experience. This sense of being spiritually
alive which ceaseless criticism of the world we live in gives us,
combined with the sense of power which free and untrammeled judging
produces in us, is the background of irony. And it should be a means to
the truest goodness.
Socrates made one mistake,--knowledge is not goodness. But it is a step
towards judging, and good judgment is the true goodness. For it is on
judgment impelled by desire that we act. The clearer and cleaner our
judgments then, the more definite and correlated our actions. And the
great value of these judgments of irony is that they are not artificial
but spring naturally out of life. Irony, the science of comparative
experience, compares things not with an established standard but with
each other, and the values that slowly emerge from the process, values
that emerge from one’s own vivid reactions, are constantly revised,
corrected, and refined by that same sense of contrast. The ironic
life is a life keenly alert, keenly sensitive, reacting promptly with
feelings of liking or dislike to each bit of experience, letting none
of it pass without interpretation and assimilation, a life full and
satisfying,--indeed a rival of the religious life.
The life of irony has the virtues of the religious life without its
defects. It expresses the aggressive virtues without the quiescence of
resignation. For the ironist has the courageous spirit, the sympathetic
heart and the understanding mind, and can give them full play,
unhampered by the searching introspection of the religious mind that
often weakens rather than ennobles and fortifies. He is at one with the
religious man in that he hates apathy and stagnation, for they mean
death. But he is superior in that he attacks apathy of intellect and
personality as well as apathy of emotion. He has a great conviction
of the significance of all life, the lack of which conviction is the
most saddening feature of the religious temperament. The religious
man pretends that every aspect of life has meaning for him, but in
practice he constantly minimizes the noisier and vivider elements. He
is essentially an aristocrat in his interpretation of values, while the
ironist is incorrigibly a democrat. Religion gives a man an intimacy
with a few selected and rarified virtues and moods, while irony makes
him a friend of the poor and lowly among spiritual things. When the
religious man is healing and helping, it is at the expense of his
spiritual comfort; he must tear himself away from his companions and go
out grimly and sacrificingly into the struggle. The ironist, living his
days among the humbler things, feels no such severe call to service.
And yet the ironist, since he has no citadel of truth to defend, is
really the more adventurous. Life, not fixed in predestined formulas or
measurable by fixed, immutable standards, is fluid, rich and exciting.
To the ironist it is both discovery and creation. His courage seeks
out the obscure places of human personality, and his sympathy and
understanding create new interests and enthusiasms in the other minds
upon which they play. And these new interests in turn react upon his
own life, discovering unexpected vistas there, and creating new insight
into the world that he lives in. That democratic, sympathetic outlook
upon the feelings and thoughts and actions of men and women is the life
of irony.