"The Abbé, in spite of his fifty-eight years..." I was reading a
story of De Maupassant in a railway-train, when this bitter
reflection on my age pulled me up with a slight shock. I was on my
way to a cricket-match--my annual cricket-match; my team against the
village team--and this suggestion that I was an obsolescent old
fellow cast a momentary shadow over my spirit. But I remembered that
De Maupassant died in the thirties or early forties and that he could
not be expected to know that fifty-eight is about the time when a man
ought to be getting his second wind.
It is the habit of youth to antedate old age in this offensive way.
Jane Austen, who died, I think, when she was under forty, was
accustomed in her twenties to write of people who had passed forty as
if they had come out of the Ark, and Addison speaks in his essay on
the "Widows' Club" of a man of sixty as if the fact was sufficient to
show that he was in the last stages of senile decay. I had the
curiosity to look up Addison's age at his death and found it was
forty-six. It gave me a curious sensation to discover that that
grave and elderly spirit had died when he was twelve years my junior.
He had always seemed to me so much older than I could ever hope to be
that it had never occurred to me to measure my years with his.
It is one of the humbling experiences we have as we grow older to
find that, in years, we have left behind so many of those who filled
the world with the sound of their name without having ourselves yet
done anything to boast about. Alexander only lived half my lifetime;
Shelley and Keats when they died were young enough to be the sons of
a man of fifty-eight; Napoleon was the first man in Europe at
twenty-seven and had reached Waterloo at forty-six; all the vast
world of Shakespeare had been created when he was in the early
forties; the younger Pitt was Prime Minister twenty years and died at
an age when Mr. Lloyd George was still a private member. And so on.
The explanation, I suppose, is that modern conditions have put old
age off ten or twenty years. When Jane Austen wrote of elderly men
of forty she did so because they were elderly men at forty. What
with their weakness for port wine--both Addison and Pitt were
notorious for the amount of liquor they carried--and the rudimentary
knowledge of disease and its causes, life was a much briefer affair
than it is now. Whatever grievance we may have against the age of
science, it has made our days long in the land, and what is more
important, it has made them healthier. The average man of sixty
to-day is, counting age in real values, younger than the average man
of fifty in the eighteenth century. That is no doubt one of the
reasons why youth does not cut quite such a dash in the world as it
did when Napoleon was the first soldier in Europe at twenty-seven,
and Pitt the first statesman in Europe at twenty-six. The old
fellows go on living and insisting on being young and keeping their
jobs.
They even go on playing cricket and watching cricket. When I got on
the village playground, I found among the spectators a gay old
gentleman of ninety-three, of whom I have written before in these
articles, who never misses a match, and who looks on a man of
fifty-eight as a person who has hardly yet come to years of
discretion. His genial greeting blew away the slight shadow cast
over me by Maupassant's unkind cut, and "in spite of my fifty-eight
years" I succeeded in giving the scorer a bit of trouble, so much so
that I thought it worth while when I was out to go and look over his
shoulder at the nice little procession of "ones" and "twos" that
followed my name. I should have liked Jane Austen and Maupassant and
Addison to have looked over the scorer's shoulder with me. They
would have changed their tune about old fellows of fifty-eight.