Stevenson, it will be remembered, once assigned his birthday to a little
girl--or was it a boy?--of his acquaintance. The child was fond of
birthdays, while he had reached a time of life when they had ceased to have
any interest for him. Most of us, if we live long enough, experience that
indifference. The birthday emotion vanishes with the toys that awaken it. I
remember when life was a journey from one birthday to another, the tedium
of which was only relieved by such agreeable incidents as Christmas,
Easter, and the school holidays. But for many years I have stumbled up
against my birthday, as it were, with a shock of surprise, have given it a
nod of recognition as one might greet an ancient acquaintance with whom one
has lost sympathy, and have passed on without a further thought about the
occasion.
But to-day it is different. One cannot pass over one's fiftieth birthday
without feeling that an event has happened. Fifty! Why, the Psalmist's
limit is only seventy. Fifty from seventy. An easy sum, but what an
impressive answer! Twenty years, and they the years of the sere, the yellow
leaf. Only twenty more times to hear the cuckoo calling over the valley and
see the dark beech woods bursting into tender green. I look back twenty
years, and it seems only a span. And yet how remote fifty seemed in those
days! It was so remote as to be hardly worth thinking about. To be fifty
was to be among the old fellows, to be on the shelf, to have become an
antiquity.
And now here am I at fifty, and so far from feeling like an antiquity, I
feel as much of a young fellow as at any time of my life. I had feared that
when middle age overtook me I should feel middle-aged and full of sad
longings for the old toys and the old pleasures. How would life be
tolerable when cricket, for example, had ceased to play an important part
in it? Never again to have the ecstasy of a drive along "the carpet" to the
boundary or, with a flash of the arm, snapping an opponent in the slips.
What a dreary desolation life must be, stripped of those joys! And on the
contrary I find that the spirit of youth is no more dependent on cricket
than it is on the taste for lollipops. It consists in the contented
acceptance of the things that are possible to us. Do not suppose, young
fellow, that you are any younger than I am because you can jump five feet
eight and I have ceased to want to jump at all. The feeling of youth is
something much deeper and more enduring than the ability to jump five feet
eight. It may be as vigorous at eighty as it is at eighteen. It is only its
manner of expression which is changed. Holmes never admitted that he had
grown old. "I am eighty-three young to-day," he would say. And Johnson,
with his old age and his infirmities, still insisted that he was "a young
fellow"--as, indeed, he was, for where shall we find such freshness of
spirit, such a defiance of the tooth of Time as in that grand old boy?
Youth, in fact, is not a physical affair at all, but an affair of the soul.
You may be spiritually bald-headed at twenty-five or a romping young blade
at eighty. Byron was only thirty-four when he wrote:--
I am ashes where once I was fire.
And the soul in my bosom is dead;
What I loved I now merely admire,
And my heart is as grey as my head.
Perhaps there was some affectation in this, for Byron was always
dramatising himself. But that he died an old man at thirty-six is as
indisputable as that Browning died a young man at seventy-seven, with that
triumphant envoi of _Asolando_ as his last expression of the eternal youth
of the soul.
In thinking of old age, the mistake is to assume that the spirit must decay
with the body. Of course, if the body is maltreated it will react on the
spirit. But the natural decline of the physical powers leaves the healthy
spirit untouched with age, should indeed leave it strengthened--glowing not
with passion but with a steadier fire. When we are young in years our eager
spirit cries for the moon.
We look before and after,
And pine for what is not.
But as we get older we learn to be satisfied with something nearer than the
moon. The horizon of our hopes and ambitions narrows, but the sky above is
not less deep, and we make the wonderful discovery that the things that
matter are very near to us. It is the homing of the spirit. We have been
avid of the "topless grandeurs" of life, and we return to find that the
spiritual satisfactions we sought were all the time within very easy reach.
And in cultivating those satisfactions intensively we make another
discovery. We find that this is the true way to the "topless grandeurs"
themselves, for those topless grandeurs are not without us but within.
But I am afraid I am sermonising, and I do not want to sermonise, though if
ever a man may be allowed to sermonise it is when he is completing his
half-century. Let me as an antidote recall a little story which the present
Bishop of Chester once told me over the dinner table, for it contains a
practical recipe for keeping the heart young. He was in his earlier days
associated with Archdeacon Jones of Liverpool. The Archdeacon, then over
eighty, had been tutor to Gladstone, and one day the future Bishop turned
the conversation into a reminiscent channel, and sought to evoke the
Archdeacon's memories of the long past. Presently the Archdeacon abruptly
changed the subject by asking, "What was the concert of the Philharmonic
like last night?" And then, in answer to the obvious surprise which the
question had aroused, he added, "Although I am an old man, I want to keep
my heart young, and the best way of doing that is not to let one's thoughts
live in the past, but to keep them in tune with the life around one."
The truth is that every stage of the journey has its own interests.
Probably none is better than another, but my own preference has always been
for that stage which I happen to be doing at the time. When I was twenty I
thought there was no age like twenty, and now I am fifty I have transferred
my enthusiasm to fifty. There is no age like it, I feel, for all-round
enjoyment. And I have a strong conviction that if I have the good fortune
to reach sixty I shall be found declaring that there is no age like sixty.
And why not? It is pleasant to see the sun on the morning hills, but it is
not less pleasant to walk home when the shadows are lengthening and the
cool of the evening has come.