the Thomas Parr of the twentieth or twenty-first century. It is more
important to live right (and there, indeed, is a job for anybody!) than
to live long; and old age, like young love, is often oversentimentalized.
Mr. Boswell, I think, oversentimentalized it when he asked his
long-suffering friend, "But, sir, would you not know old age?... I mean,
sir, the Sphinx's description of it--morning, noon, and night. I would
know night as well as morning and noon." And the doctor restored the
subject to its proper place when he answered: "Nay, sir, what talk is
this? Would you know the gout? Would you have decrepitude?" He might,
indeed, have gone further. "Do you suppose, sir" (he might have added),
"you will know night when you see it? Why, sir, what does a baby know
about morning?"
So with Pantaloon: we comparative youngsters have only an external and
objective idea of him--his slippers, his stockings, his peevish and
morose humors, his feeble mirth and empty garrulity. What living is
really like to him we cannot know until we are pantaloons ourselves, and
then, mayhap, we shall have forgotten what living is like to us now; let
it suffice that we shall probably be far less bothered by our shrunk
shanks and piping voices than we now believe possible. At the same time,
it will do no harm for some of us to "watch our step." Already I--and
there must be many another like me--am sometimes a little peevish and a
little morose; a mere _soupçon_ reasonably explainable by natural
causes--but there it is! I am hardly aware of it myself. Yet when it is
called to my attention by those nearest and dearest to me, I experience
an odd, perverse inclination to be more peevish and more morose than
before. I _enjoy_, I take a queer, twisted, unnatural, hateful,
demoniac pleasure, like Mr. Hyde when Dr. Jekyll turned into him, in the
idea of being more peevish and more morose. Here indeed is something to
look out for: resist that inclination, and we are laying the foundation
of a serene and respected old age; obey that impulse, and we comfort the
Devil, and run the risk of some day becoming, not only old men, but old
nuisances. I do not know, though I very much doubt, that one old fly is
ever more peevish and morose than another old fly; but with mankind,
whose superior intelligence so often makes trouble for his associates,
the variations are visible. Savages, unhampered by the conventions of an
artificial civilization, have efficiently knocked their elders on the
head in consequence.
Let us, then, do our best to beat the Devil, and prepare for that Indian
summer, which, with all respect to Shakespeare, is the true sixth age
of man. And they reach it best (to judge by some who have got there) who
do their daily work with a good conscience, share their incidental joys
with others, and meet their troubles in the spirit of that stout old
seaman, Sir Andrew Barton, as I the other day saw his ballad quoted with
reference to R. L. Stevenson:--
A little Ime hurt, but yett not slaine;
Ile but lye downe and bleede a while,
And then Ile rise and fight againe.
VII
THE OLDE, OLDE, VERY OLDE MAN
_Now concernynge the Soule, it is a Queer Thynge consydering that it
lives in the Bodie yett dieth nott; and so I conclude that the Soule was
made separate, and thys Bodie for its brief use and tenement; and how it
gets in and gets oute I cannot tell you. And belyke there bee all sortes
and condiciones of Soules, some goode, some bad, some so-so; but because
Goode is better than Evil, and because they lyve in Eternity, the bad
Soules will finde itt oute in time, and become goode; and the so-so
Soules will learn wisdome, and cease of their foolishnesse. But why they
were nott alle made alyke to start, that I cannot tell you; nor juste
how they was made._--THE SAGE'S OWNE BOKE.
It was a poetess, I am glad to say, and not a poet, who wrote the once
popular lines:--
Backward, flow backward, O tide of the years!
I am so weary of toil and of tears,--
Toil without recompense, tears all in vain,--
Take them, and give me my childhood again.
Many a voice no doubt sagged under this load of pathos as it read "Rock
Me to Sleep, Mother" to a little group of sympathetic listeners; but if
such melancholies are to be set on paper, and circulated in print, I am
unchivalrous enough to wish that joyless occupation on the gentler sex.
Most of us perform prodigies of toil, which seem to receive scant
recompense, and shed figuratively many a bucket of seemingly useless
tears. But I do not imagine that this sad poetess was half as badly off
as she seemed to think; and, more than that, she had only to wait long
enough, and keep alive long enough, to get her childhood back without
asking for it. Time, the Groceryman, in due season would hand her a
second childhood in many respects "just as good" as the first; for we
who are betwixt and between can observe an unintelligent ignorance of
later troubles in one condition, neatly balanced by an unintelligent
forgetfulness of them in the other. Our lugubrious poetess, one might
say, was neither more nor less than asking the tide of the years
obligingly to assist her to commit suicide. Had her request been
granted, there would have been one more child in the world--and one less
poetess.
An impressive parallel may, indeed, be drawn between these two
childhoods--the first a period of dependence upon its elders, and the
second of dependence upon its youngers, and each, to the reflective
observer, a pretty evenly balanced reversal of the other. It is as if,
in the beginning, the whole family of recognizable human
characteristics, Curiosity, Memory, Affection, Dislike, Ambition, Love,
Hate, Good Nature, Bad Temper, and all the rest of them, were moving,
one after another, into a new house; and as if, in the end, the whole
family, one after another, were leaving an old one. The very youngest
and the very oldest men in the world seem equally equipped for living in
it--"sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything"; and Baby, a
little older, when he goes out in his perambulator is much like ancient
Thomas Parr being conveyed to London as a human curiosity in a "litter
and two horses (for the more easy carriage of a man so enfeebled and
worn with age).... And to cheere up the olde man and make him merry,
there was an antique-faced fellow, called Jacke, or John the Foole."
Why, I myself, meeting a baby in a perambulator, have made such antic
faces that I might fairly have been called Jacke, or John the Foole, by
anybody who saw me, and all to cheere up the younge man and make him
merry. A little older yet, the child will run and play, rolling his
hoop, spinning his top, enjoying the excitement of tag and
hide-and-go-seek; and I dare say that the old man, a little younger than
before, would be just as happy with hoop and top (if he were again
introduced to them), and would have a grand, good time at tag and
hidey-go if he had other old men and old women to play with, and his
youngers would let him. I do not mean that he would do any of these
things as well as the child; but it would please him as much to do them
to the top of his aged bent, though now and then a flicker of remembered
convention, which the child has never known and considered, would make
him self-consciously abandon these simple pleasures. Even as an old cat,
caught trying to catch its tail, will sit up with dignity and pretend
that it wasn't.
There was once a custom of including a skeleton, or perhaps a mummy, in
the festivity of a banquet, to remind the diners of their mortality,
and, for all I know, the after-dinner speakers of the shortness of time;
though very likely they soon got used to their silent companion, and
took their mortality as lightly as most people do at dinner. An "Olde,
Olde, very Olde Man," as a contemporary writer called the unpicturesque
human ruin I have just referred to, would, it seems to me, have answered
the same purpose, and answered it better. Human nature takes neither the
skeleton nor the mummy with continuous seriousness, and proves by its
attitude that, if we instinctively fear death at one moment, we
instinctively ridicule our fear at another. I have read it argued that
man with his clothes on is nevertheless naked,--such arguments seem to
amuse the philosophers,--and by the same entertaining process of
reasoning we are all skeletons together, though some may worry lest
others consider them too fat for romantic admiration. Or, again, to the
man who believes that death snuffs him out like a candle, this skeleton
at the feast might easily become an urgent reminder that he is still
living, and he would most unwisely stuff himself out like a toy balloon
while he still had a chance. But your olde, olde, very olde man is a
reality: he is both dead and alive; his presence, to say nothing of his
table manners, should tend to make each guest regard death as a friend
rather than an enemy, and his state of mind and body prove such a
warning against pride in either, that even the after-dinner speakers
would take notice and modestly shorten their speeches.
Let it not be imagined that I lack respect for age. I tell you frankly,
ageing and respected Reader, that so long as you can intelligently read
even this essay, you are _not_ seriously old; and when you cannot, you
won't know the difference, and no respect of mine will be of any value
to you. Your time has not come to sit propped up at table as the latest
modern improvement on the skeleton at the feast; and if ever it does,
you, my friend, will not be there. Where you will be, I cannot faintly
imagine, and neither churchmen nor philosophers help me, for the
churchmen are too objective and the philosophers too abstract; the best
I can do is to take John Fiske's word for it, who knew far more about
both science and metaphysics than I can hope to, when he says the
materialistic theory that the life of the soul ends with the life of the
body is "perhaps the most colossal instance of baseless assumption that
is known to the history of philosophy." But when its house has become a
ruin, my soul will certainly have sense enough to look for something
more habitable, and may conceivably depart while there are still a few
embers burning in the furnace, leaving the fire to die out when it will.
Man is a conventional being, and perhaps his most astonishing convention
is a funeral.
But the custom has long gone out of thus poignantly reminding diners
that a time is coming when they will have no stomachs; and olde, olde,
very olde men will get no invitations out to dine for any suggestion of
mine. Fortunately there are other uses for them. They are, for example,
a source of innocent pride to their families. "Grandpa was eighty-nine
his last birthday, and he still has a tooth." They interest the million
readers of the morning newspaper. "Friends from far and near gathered
yesterday to celebrate the 101st birthday of Mr. John Doe, 17 Jones
Avenue. The venerable patriarch, who can still walk unaided from his
place of honor by the steam radiator to his cushioned chair in the
dining-room, when asked to what he attributes his ripe old age, replied
with astonishing intelligence that the winters are longer than they used
to be. Mr. Doe was surrounded by 247 living children, grandchildren, and
great-grand-children." These are visible uses; but this olde, olde, very
olde man may have, invisibly, a more important function; and the
helplessness of age, like that of infancy, may well have been a
necessary factor in the slow conversion of our ape-like ancestor into
you and me.
I have commented elsewhere on the natural astonishment of the first
parents who realized, with their inefficient prehistoric minds, that
_this_ baby belonged to _them_, and how, in the considered opinion of
able scientists, the little hitherto missing link joined father and
mother into the first human family. Tending and providing for Baby made
the cave a home; but I suspect it was a long time before tending and
providing for Grandpa added another motive for the cultivation of those
higher qualities that distinguish man from all other animals. Why, there
were savages who ate him! Yet in due time the olde, olde, very olde man
became such a motive, and to-day man is the only animal that takes care
of its grandfather. When you think of the differences between men to-day
and men then, between men then and the ape-men before them, and between
men now as they go about their various occupations, it seems quite
possible that ape-men had no souls at all, and that some men to-day have
rudimentary ones, millions of years behind others in evolution. It
explains much. And so, wherever there is an olde, olde, very olde man, I
dare say the care his youngers take of him is doing them good; they
might even reverse the parental platitude of punishment, and say,
"Grandpa, this does me more good than it does you."
But this proud possession of an olde, olde, very olde man does not
always work visibly toward such beneficent ends. His obstreperous
infancy, masquerading in mature garments, sometimes exhausts the
patience of his youngers; and his permanent conviction (often the only
sign of intelligence left) that he knows more than they do, and perhaps
more than anybody else, makes their task difficult: it is one thing, so
to speak, to take care of a baby when it is growing up, and another
thing to take care of a baby when it is growing down. Then, indeed, one
needs the assurance of immortality, the conviction that Grandpa is,
little as one might think it, still growing up, and that this simulacrum
of Grandpa that still remains to be looked after, must not be taken too
seriously. These olde, olde, very olde men are not all just alike: there
are grandpas whom anybody might be proud to take care of, and grandpas
whom anybody might be excused for wishing (as the brisk, modern phrase
has it) to sidestep. And the explanation of this diversity, as of much
else that puzzles us in a puzzling world, may be that they were not all
just alike when they were babies. Inside their thin and tiny skulls some
had better brains than others, brains with more of those wonderful
little pyramidal neurones, which, able scientists (unless I get their
message twisted) tell me, correlate, connect, assemble, and unite our
individual ideas, memories, sensations, and intellectual and emotional
what-nots. Men, in short, may be born free, but they are not born equal.
But why worry? If the individual soul is still young, it will keep on
growing in wisdom and experience; nor will it lose touch with other
souls that are akin to it, and, in the measurement of eternity, its
contemporaries; and it will have a better and better house to live in,
with ever more modern improvements in the way of pyramidal neurones. As
the March Hare conclusively replied to Alice, when she asked why the
three little sisters who lived in the treacle-well learned to draw by
drawing everything that began with an M, "Why not?"
So if ever I become like the valetudinarian described by Macaulay, who
"took great pleasure in being wheeled along his terrace, who relished
his boiled chicken and his weak wine and water, and who enjoyed a hearty
laugh over the Queen of Navarre's tales," I hope that somebody will
considerately push my chariot, boil me an occasional chicken, and keep
handy my spectacles and the Queen of Navarre's mirth-provokers. The weak
wine and water I shall have to do without. But my soul, I like to think,
which is the Me for work and play, love, friendship, and all the finer
things of life, already will have closed the door of its house and gone
away. And as it goes, I like to think, also, that it whistles cheerfully
a little tune of its own, the burden of which is "Life is long."
End of Project Gutenberg's The Seven Ages of Man, by Ralph Bergengren