What a fuss they make, proclaiming the secret of long life! We must stay
abed till noon, they say; we must take life slowly and comfortably; we
must avoid worry, live moderately, drink wine, smoke cigars, and read
the _Times_. Yes; there is one who, in a letter to the _Times_, boasted
his grandfather sustained life for a hundred and one years by reading
all the leading and special articles of that paper; his father got to
eighty-eight on the same diet; himself follows their footsteps on fare
that is new every morning. Another writer has subscribed to the _Times_
for sixty-seven years, and now is ninety-two on the strength of it.
Avoid worry, fret not yourself because of evildoers, let not indignation
lacerate your heart, take the sensible and solid view of things, read
the _Times_, and you will surpass the Psalmist's limit of threescore
years and ten.
What a picture of beneficent comfort it calls up! The breakfast-room
furniture fit to outlast the Pyramids, the maroon leather of deep
armchairs, the marble clock ticking to half-past nine beneath the bronze
figure with the scythe and hourglass, the boots set to warm upon the
hearthrug, the crisp bacon sizzling gently beneath its silver cover, the
pleasant wife murmuring gently behind the silver urn, the paper set
beside the master's plate. Isaiah knew not of such regimen, else he
would not have cried that all flesh is grass, and all the goodliness
thereof as the flower of the field.
Others there are whom poverty precludes from silver, and the narrow
estate of home from daily sustenance on the _Times_. Some study
diuturnity upon two meals a day, or pursue old age by means of "unfired
food," Others devour roots by moonlight, or savagely dine upon a pocket
of raw beans. These are intemperate on water, or bewail the touch of
salt as sacrilege against the sacrifice of eggs. These grovel for nuts
like the Hampshire hog, or impiously celebrate the fruitage by which man
fell. Some cast away their coats, some their hosen, some their hats.
They go barefoot but for sandals. They wander about in sheepskins and
goatskins, eschewing flesh for their food, and vegetables for their
clothing. They plunge distracted into boiling water. Shudderingly, they
break the frosty Serpentine. They absorb the sun's rays like pigeons
upon the housetops, or shiver naked in suburban chambers that they may
recover the barbaric tang. They walk through rivers fully clothed, and
shake their vesture as a dog his coat; or are hydrophobic for their
skins, fearing to wash lest they disturb essential oils. They shave
their heads as a cure for baldness, or in gentle gardens emulate the
raging lion's mane. One dreads to miss his curdled milk by the fraction
of a minute; another, at the semblance of a cold, puts off his supper
for three weeks and a day. One calculates upon longevity by means of
bare knees, another apprehends the approach of death through the orifice
in the palm of a leather glove.
Of course, it is all right. Life is of inestimable value, and nothing
can compensate a corpse for the loss of it. Falstaff knew that, and,
like the Magpie Moth, wisely counterfeited death to avoid the
irretrievable step of dying. Our prudent livers display an equal wisdom,
not exactly counterfeiting death, but living gingerly--living, as it
were, at half-cock, lest life should go off suddenly with a flash and
bang, leaving them nowhere. Of course, they are quite right. Life being
pleasurable, it is well to spread it out as far as it will go. As to
honour, the hoary head in itself is a crown of glory, and when a man
reaches ninety, people will call him wonderful, though for ninety years
he has been a fool. The objects of living are, for the most part,
obscure and variable, and prudent livers may well ask why for the
obscure and variable objects of life they should lose life
itself--"Propter causas vivendi perdere vitam," if we may reverse the
old quotation.
So they are quite justified in eating the bread of carefulness, and no
one who has known danger will condemn their solicitude for safely. But
yet, in hearing of those devices, or perusing the _Sour Milk Gazette_
and the _Valetudinarian's Handbook_, somehow there come to my mind the
words, "Insanitas Sanitutum, omnia Insanitas!" And suddenly the picture
of those woeful islanders whom Gulliver discovered rises before me. For,
as we remember, in the realm of Laputa, he found a certain number of
both sexes (about eleven hundred) who were called Struldbrugs, or
Immortals, because, being born with a certain spot over the left
eyebrow, they were destined never to know the common visitation of
death. We remember how Gulliver envied them, accounting them the
happiest of human beings, since they had obtained in perpetuity the
blessing of life, for which all men struggle so hard that whoever has
one foot in the grave is sure to hold back the other as strongly as he
can. But in the end, he concluded that their lot was not really
enviable, seeing that increasing years only brought an increase of their
dullness and incapacity:
"They were not only opinionative," he writes, "peevish,
covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friendship,
and dead to all natural affections, which never descended below
their grandchildren. Envy and impotent desires are their
prevailing passions. But those objects against which their
envy seems principally directed are the vices of the younger
sort, and the deaths of the old. By reflecting on the former
they find themselves cut off from all possibility of pleasure;
and whenever they see a funeral they lament and repine that
others have gone to a harbour of rest, to which they themselves
never can hope to arrive."
The explorer further discovered that, after the age of eighty, the
marriages of the Struldbrugs were dissolved, because the law thought it
a reasonable indulgence that those who were condemned, without any fault
of their own, to a perpetual continuance in the world, should not have
their misery doubled by the load of a wife; also that they could never
amuse themselves with reading, because their memory would not serve to
carry them from the beginning of a sentence to the end; and after about
two hundred years, they could not hold conversation with their
neighbours, the mortals, because the language of the country was always
upon the flux.
It is a pity that the laws of Laputa stringently forbade the export of
Struldbrugs, else, Gulliver tells us, he would gladly have brought a
couple to this country, to arm our people against the fear of death.
Had he only done so, what a lot of letters to the _Times_,
advertisements of patent medicines; and Eugenic discussions we should
have been spared! If earthly immortality were known to be such a curse,
we could more easily convince the most scrupulous devotee of health that
old age was little better than immortality.
It is not, therefore, as though great age were such a catch that it
should demand all these delicate manipulations of diet, sleep,
rest-cures, health-resorts, scourings, and temperatures, for its
attainment. How refreshing to escape from this hospital atmosphere into
the free air, blowing whither it lists, and to fling oneself carelessly
upon existence, as Sir George Birdwood, for instance, has done! He also
wrote to the _Times_, but in a very different tone. Like another
Gulliver, he pictured the calamity of millionaires living on till their
heirs are senile. It is all nonsense, he said, to prescribe rules for
life. One of his oldest friends drank a bottle of cognac a day, and, as
for himself--well, we know that he is eighty, has lived a varied and
dangerous life in many lands, has written on carrots, chestnuts,
carpets, art, scholarship, all manner of absorbing subjects, and yet he
heartily survives:
"I attribute my senility--let others say senectitude," he
shouts in his cheery way, "to a certain playful devilry of spirit,
a ceaseless militancy, quite suffragettic, so that when I left the
Indian Office on a bilked pension I swore by all the gods I
would make up for it by living on ten years, instead of one,
which was all an insurance society told me I was worth."
That sounds the true note, blowing the horn of old forests and battles.
"A playful devilry of spirit," "a ceaseless militancy"--how stirring to
the stagnant lives of prudent regularity! "Lie in bed till noon-day!"
he goes on; "I would rather be some monstrous flat-fish at the bottom of
the Atlantic than accept human life on such terms." Who in future will
hear of rest-cures, retirements, retreats, nursings, comforts, and
attention to health, without beholding in his mind that monstrous
flat-fish, blind and deaf with age, rotting at ease upon the Atlantic
slime? Life is not measured by the ticking of a clock, and it is no new
thing to discover eternity in a minute. "I have not time to make money,"
said the naturalist, Agassiz, when his friends advised some pecuniary
advantage; and, in the same way, every really fortunate man says he has
no time to bother about living. So soon as a human being does anything
simply because he thinks it will "do him good," and not for pleasure,
interest, or service, he should withdraw from this present world as
gracefully as he can. Of course, we all want to live, but even in death
there can hardly be anything so very awful, since it is so common.
"The Kingdom of Heaven is not meat and drink." "He that loses his life
shall find it," said one Teacher. "Live dangerously," said another; and
"Try to be killed" is still the best advice for a soldier who would
rise. For life is to be measured by its intensity, and not by the
tapping of a death-watch beetle. "I've lost my appetite. I can't eat!"
groaned the patient whom Carlyle knew. "My dear sir, that is not of the
slightest consequence," replied the good physician; and how wise are
those scientists who deny to invalids the existence of their pain! Sir
George Birdwood recalled the saying of Plato that attention to health is
one of the greatest hindrances to life, and I vaguely remember Plato's
commendation of the working-man, who, in illness, just takes a dose, and
if that doesn't cure him, remarks, "If I must die, I must die," and
dies accordingly. That is how the working-man dies still; though
sometimes he is now buoyed up by the thought of his funeral's grandeur.
"A certain playful devilry of spirit," "a ceaseless militancy"--for life
or death those are the best regulations.