GETTING ALONG IN YEARS.
"Does your husband think a full beard becoming to him?" asked I of a
young wife.
Her twenty-three-year-old lord, whose good-looking face had been
adorned and made positively handsome by a sweeping brown moustache,
had, since our last meeting, "raised" an uneven crop of reddish
whiskers that shortened a face somewhat too round, and altogether
vulgarized what had been refined.
"No, indeed! He knows, as I do, that it disfigures him. It is a
business necessity to which he sacrificed vanity. The appearance of
maturity carries weight in the commercial world. His beard adds ten
years to his real age."
Being in an audience collected to hear an eminent clergyman last
summer, I heard an astonished gasp behind me, as the orator arose:
"Why he has shaved off his beard! How like a round oily man of God he
looks!"
"True," said another, "but fifteen years younger. He is getting along
in years, you see, and wants to hide the fact."
The last speaker sat opposite to me at the hotel table that day, and
in discussing the leader of the morning service, repeated the phrase
that had jarred upon my ear.
"It is fatal to a clergyman's popularity and to a woman's hopes to be
suspected of getting along in years."
I told the story of my bearded youth and asked:
"Where then is the safe ground? When is it altogether reputable for
one to declare his real age?"
"Oh, anywhere from thirty to forty-five! Before and after that term
life can hardly be said to be worth the living."
I smiled, as the rattler meant I should. But the words have stayed by
me, the more persistently that observation bears me out in the
suspicion that the merry speaker only uttered the thought of many
others.
"The years of man's life are three-score-and-ten," says the Word of
Him who made man and knew what was in man. The wearer of a body that,
with tolerably good treatment ought to last for seventy years, must
then, according to popular judgment, spend nearly half of that time in
learning how to play his part in the world, barely a fifth in carrying
out God's designs in and for him, and then remain for a quarter of a
century a cumberer of the home and earth. Such waste of strength, time
and accumulated capital would be cried out upon as wretched
mismanagement were the scheme of human devising.
The French proverb that "a woman" (and presumably a man) "is just as
old as she chooses to be," comes so much nearer what I believe was our
Creator's wise and merciful purpose in giving us life, that I turn
thankfully and hopefully to this side of the subject.
The best way to avoid growing old is not to be afraid of getting along
in years. To come down to "hard pan"--whence originates this
unwholesome dread of ripeness and maturity? It surely is not a fear of
death that makes us blanch and shrink back at the oft-recurring
mile-stones in the journey of life that brings all of us nearer the
goal towards which we are bound.
I once heard a young woman say, seriously:
"I hope that when I am forty-five, I may quietly die. I do not dread
death, but I do shudder at the idea of being laid on the shelf."
I do not mean to be severe when I assert that, nine times out of ten,
it is the victim's own fault that she is pushed out of the way, or, as
our slangy youth of to-day put it, "is not in it." It is your business
and mine to _be_ in it, heart, soul, and body, and to keep our places
there by every effort in our power. A fear of that which is high, or
mental or physical inertia, or, to be less euphemistic and more exact,
laziness--should not deter us. This object is not to be accomplished
by adopting juvenile dress and kittenish ways. We should beautify old
age, not accentuate it by artificial means. When your roadster,
advanced in years and woefully stiff in the joints, makes a lame
attempt to imitate a gamboling colt, and feebly elevates his hind
legs, and pretends to shy at a piece of paper in the road, you smile
with contemptuous amusement and say:
"The old fool is in his dotage!"
But if he keeps on steadily to his work, doing the best he can, your
comment is sure to be somewhat after this fashion:
"This is truly a wonderful horse! He is just as good as on the day I
bought him, fifteen years ago!"
Let us determine to face the situation, when it is necessary, calmly
and sensibly. For, unlike the aforesaid horse, we do not expect to be
knocked on the head with a club, or quietly chloroformed out of
existence at a stated period. We would do well to follow our
optimistic principles, and look at the many benefits which, in the
words of the old catechism, "do accompany and flow from" this state.
If you have lived well, fifty is better than thirty, as the
sun-and-frost-kissed (not bitten) Catawba grape is better than the
tiny green sphere of June, and as maturity is nearer perfection than
crude youth. The tedious routine of the life-school, the hours spent
in acquiring knowledge for which you had no immediate use, are past.
The wisdom that must come with time and experience is yours.
Another of the great advantages in being near the top of the mountain
is that you can speak from superior knowledge words of comfort and
encouragement to those beneath you, who are still toiling over the
path you have trod. Such help from you who have "been there," and have
now successfully passed the most trying places, will do more to keep
up others' hearts than many sermons preached by one who knows it all
only in theory.
Since old age is inevitable, do not let us try to pretend that it is
not, and let us never act as if there were any hope of shunning it.
On the other hand, neither should we wish that it were possible for us
to evade it. It is just as much of a God-ordained period as youth, and
we ought to grow old in the manner in which God meant we should. He
meant us to keep heart and soul young by constant occupation and by
unselfish interest in the affairs of others.
I know one woman, past the fifties, who is, the young people declare,
"much more fun than any girl." Their enjoyments are hers, and she
laughs as heartily over their fun, sympathizes as sincerely in their
disappointments, as if she were thirty years younger than she is. In
fact, her sympathy is more genuine, for her age puts her completely
beyond the faintest suspicion of rivalry, and it is easier to tell of
one's defeats and triumphs when the listener is too far along in years
to be jealous or envious.
It should not be necessary for us to call courage into use to
reconcile us to our lost youth. Plain common sense is all that is
requisite. We have gained much on life in the past century. As science
has taught us how to ward off death, so has it instructed us in the
art of preserving youth far beyond middle age. Over my fireplace
hangs a portrait of my grandmother, one of the loveliest women of her
time.
She died at the age of fifty, and in it she wears a mob-cap and an old
woman's gown. For years before her death, she felt that she belonged
to the past generation, did not join in the younger people's
occupations, and claimed her place in the chimney-corner. In her day
the "dead-line" in a man's life was drawn at fifty. Now we know that
to be out of all reason. If the years of a man's life are
three-score-and-ten let us determine to move the dead-line on to
seventy, and claim that we are not old until we have reached that
point. And if, by reason of strength we can hold on to four-score, let
us push it on the ten years farther, and, taking courage, thank God
for this new lease of life.
We do not belong to the past generation, but to the acting, working,
living present. Our juniors are the rising generation, and no one
belongs to the past except those who have laid aside the burden of
life--light to some, wearisome to others--forever. They are the only
ones who have any excuse for stepping out of the ranks. They have done
so by their Captain's order. Let us, who remain, stand bravely in our
places, that we may be present or accounted for when the roll-call
containing our names is read.