“You know my mother now and then argues very notably; always very
warmly at least. I happen often to differ from her; and we both
think so well of our own arguments, that we very seldom are so happy
as to convince one another. A pretty common case, I believe, in all
_vehement_ debatings. She says, I am _too witty_; Anglicè, _too
pert_; I, that she is _too wise_; that is to say, being likewise put
into English, _not so young as she has been_.”—Miss Howe to Miss
Harlowe, _Clarissa_, vol. ii. Letter xiii.
THERE is a strong feeling in favour of cowardly and prudential proverbs.
The sentiments of a man while he is full of ardour and hope are to be
received, it is supposed, with some qualification. But when the same
person has ignominiously failed and begins to eat up his words, he should
be listened to like an oracle. Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived
for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious
attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity. And since
mediocre people constitute the bulk of humanity, this is no doubt very
properly so. But it does not follow that the one sort of proposition is
any less true than the other, or that Icarus is not to be more praised,
and perhaps more envied, than Mr. Samuel Budgett the Successful Merchant.
The one is dead, to be sure, while the other is still in his
counting-house counting out his money; and doubtless this is a
consideration. But we have, on the other hand, some bold and magnanimous
sayings common to high races and natures, which set forth the advantage
of the losing side, and proclaim it better to be a dead lion than a
living dog. It is difficult to fancy how the mediocrities reconcile such
sayings with their proverbs. According to the latter, every lad who goes
to sea is an egregious ass; never to forget your umbrella through a long
life would seem a higher and wiser flight of achievement than to go
smiling to the stake; and so long as you are a bit of a coward and
inflexible in money matters, you fulfil the whole duty of man.
It is a still more difficult consideration for our average men, that
while all their teachers, from Solomon down to Benjamin Franklin and the
ungodly Binney, have inculcated the same ideal of manners, caution, and
respectability, those characters in history who have most notoriously
flown in the face of such precepts are spoken of in hyperbolical terms of
praise, and honoured with public monuments in the streets of our
commercial centres. This is very bewildering to the moral sense. You
have Joan of Arc, who left a humble but honest and reputable livelihood
under the eyes of her parents, to go a-colonelling, in the company of
rowdy soldiers, against the enemies of France; surely a melancholy
example for one’s daughters! And then you have Columbus, who may have
pioneered America, but, when all is said, was a most imprudent navigator.
His life is not the kind of thing one would like to put into the hands of
young people; rather, one would do one’s utmost to keep it from their
knowledge, as a red flag of adventure and disintegrating influence in
life. The time would fail me if I were to recite all the big names in
history whose exploits are perfectly irrational and even shocking to the
business mind. The incongruity is speaking; and I imagine it must
engender among the mediocrities a very peculiar attitude, towards the
nobler and showier sides of national life. They will read of the Charge
of Balaclava in much the same spirit as they assist at a performance of
the _Lyons Mail_. Persons of substance take in the _Times_ and sit
composedly in pit or boxes according to the degree of their prosperity in
business. As for the generals who go galloping up and down among
bomb-shells in absurd cocked hats—as for the actors who raddle their
faces and demean themselves for hire upon the stage—they must belong,
thank God! to a different order of beings, whom we watch as we watch the
clouds careering in the windy, bottomless inane, or read about like
characters in ancient and rather fabulous annals. Our offspring would no
more think of copying their behaviour, let us hope, than of doffing their
clothes and painting themselves blue in consequence of certain admissions
in the first chapter of their school history of England.
Discredited as they are in practice, the cowardly proverbs hold their own
in theory; and it is another instance of the same spirit, that the
opinions of old men about life have been accepted as final. All sorts of
allowances are made for the illusions of youth; and none, or almost none,
for the disenchantments of age. It is held to be a good taunt, and
somehow or other to clinch the question logically, when an old gentleman
waggles his head and says: “Ah, so I thought when I was your age.” It is
not thought an answer at all, if the young man retorts: “My venerable
sir, so I shall most probably think when I am yours.” And yet the one is
as good as the other: pass for pass, tit for tat, a Roland for an Oliver.
“Opinion in good men,” says Milton, “is but knowledge in the making.”
All opinions, properly so called, are stages on the road to truth. It
does not follow that a man will travel any further; but if he has really
considered the world and drawn a conclusion, he has travelled as far.
This does not apply to formulæ got by rote, which are stages on the road
to nowhere but second childhood and the grave. To have a catchword in
your mouth is not the same thing as to hold an opinion; still less is it
the same thing as to have made one for yourself. There are too many of
these catchwords in the world for people to rap out upon you like an oath
and by way of an argument. They have a currency as intellectual
counters; and many respectable persons pay their way with nothing else.
They seem to stand for vague bodies of theory in the background. The
imputed virtue of folios full of knockdown arguments is supposed to
reside in them, just as some of the majesty of the British Empire dwells
in the constable’s truncheon. They are used in pure superstition, as old
clodhoppers spoil Latin by way of an exorcism. And yet they are vastly
serviceable for checking unprofitable discussion and stopping the mouths
of babes and sucklings. And when a young man comes to a certain stage of
intellectual growth, the examination of these counters forms a gymnastic
at once amusing and fortifying to the mind.
Because I have reached Paris, I am not ashamed of having passed through
Newhaven and Dieppe. They were very good places to pass through, and I
am none the less at my destination. All my old opinions were only stages
on the way to the one I now hold, as itself is only a stage on the way to
something else. I am no more abashed at having been a red-hot Socialist
with a panacea of my own than at having been a sucking infant. Doubtless
the world is quite right in a million ways; but you have to be kicked
about a little to convince you of the fact. And in the meanwhile you
must do something, be something, believe something. It is not possible
to keep the mind in a state of accurate balance and blank; and even if
you could do so, instead of coming ultimately to the right conclusion,
you would be very apt to remain in a state of balance and blank to
perpetuity. Even in quite intermediate stages, a dash of enthusiasm is
not a thing to be ashamed of in the retrospect: if St. Paul had not been
a very zealous Pharisee, he would have been a colder Christian. For my
part, I look back to the time when I was a Socialist with something like
regret. I have convinced myself (for the moment) that we had better
leave these great changes to what we call great blind forces: their
blindness being so much more perspicacious than the little, peering,
partial eyesight of men. I seem to see that my own scheme would not
answer; and all the other schemes I ever heard propounded would depress
some elements of goodness just as much as they encouraged others. Now I
know that in thus turning Conservative with years, I am going through the
normal cycle of change and travelling in the common orbit of men’s
opinions. I submit to this, as I would submit to gout or gray hair, as a
concomitant of growing age or else of failing animal heat; but I do not
acknowledge that it is necessarily a change for the better—I daresay it
is deplorably for the worse. I have no choice in the business, and can
no more resist this tendency of my mind than I could prevent my body from
beginning to totter and decay. If I am spared (as the phrase runs) I
shall doubtless outlive some troublesome desires; but I am in no hurry
about that; nor, when the time comes, shall I plume myself on the
immunity. Just in the same way, I do not greatly pride myself on having
outlived my belief in the fairy tales of Socialism. Old people have
faults of their own; they tend to become cowardly, niggardly, and
suspicious. Whether from the growth of experience or the decline of
animal heat, I see that age leads to these and certain other faults; and
it follows, of course, that while in one sense I hope I am journeying
towards the truth, in another I am indubitably posting towards these
forms and sources of error.
As we go catching and catching at this or that corner of knowledge, now
getting a foresight of generous possibilities, now chilled with a glimpse
of prudence, we may compare the headlong course of our years to a swift
torrent in which a man is carried away; now he is dashed against a
boulder, now he grapples for a moment to a trailing spray; at the end, he
is hurled out and overwhelmed in a dark and bottomless ocean. We have no
more than glimpses and touches; we are torn away from our theories; we
are spun round and round and shown this or the other view of life, until
only fools or knaves can hold to their opinions. We take a sight at a
condition in life, and say we have studied it; our most elaborate view is
no more than an impression. If we had breathing space, we should take
the occasion to modify and adjust; but at this breakneck hurry, we are no
sooner boys than we are adult, no sooner in love than married or jilted,
no sooner one age than we begin to be another, and no sooner in the
fulness of our manhood than we begin to decline towards the grave. It is
in vain to seek for consistency or expect clear and stable views in a
medium so perturbed and fleeting. This is no cabinet science, in which
things are tested to a scruple; we theorise with a pistol to our head; we
are confronted with a new set of conditions on which we have not only to
pass a judgment, but to take action, before the hour is at an end. And
we cannot even regard ourselves as a constant; in this flux of things,
our identity itself seems in a perpetual variation; and not infrequently
we find our own disguise the strangest in the masquerade. In the course
of time, we grow to love things we hated and hate things we loved.
Milton is not so dull as he once was, nor perhaps Ainsworth so amusing.
It is decidedly harder to climb trees, and not nearly so hard to sit
still. There is no use pretending; even the thrice royal game of hide
and seek has somehow lost in zest. All our attributes are modified or
changed; and it will be a poor account of us if our views do not modify
and change in a proportion. To hold the same views at forty as we held
at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank,
not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the
wiser. It is as if a ship captain should sail to India from the Port of
London; and having brought a chart of the Thames on deck at his first
setting out, should obstinately use no other for the whole voyage.
And mark you, it would be no less foolish to begin at Gravesend with a
chart of the Red Sea. _Si Jeunesse savait_, _si Vieillesse pouvait_, is
a very pretty sentiment, but not necessarily right. In five cases out of
ten, it is not so much that the young people do not know, as that they do
not choose. There is something irreverent in the speculation, but
perhaps the want of power has more to do with the wise resolutions of age
than we are always willing to admit. It would be an instructive
experiment to make an old man young again and leave him all his _savoir_.
I scarcely think he would put his money in the Savings Bank after all; I
doubt if he would be such an admirable son as we are led to expect; and
as for his conduct in love, I believe firmly he would out-Herod Herod,
and put the whole of his new compeers to the blush. Prudence is a wooden
juggernaut, before whom Benjamin Franklin walks with the portly air of a
high priest, and after whom dances many a successful merchant in the
character of Atys. But it is not a deity to cultivate in youth. If a
man lives to any considerable age, it cannot be denied that he laments
his imprudences, but I notice he often laments his youth a deal more
bitterly and with a more genuine intonation.
It is customary to say that age should be considered, because it comes
last. It seems just as much to the point, that youth comes first. And
the scale fairly kicks the beam, if you go on to add that age, in a
majority of cases, never comes at all. Disease and accident make short
work of even the most prosperous persons; death costs nothing, and the
expense of a headstone is an inconsiderable trifle to the happy heir. To
be suddenly snuffed out in the middle of ambitious schemes, is tragical
enough at best; but when a man has been grudging himself his own life in
the meanwhile, and saving up everything for the festival that was never
to be, it becomes that hysterically moving sort of tragedy which lies on
the confines of farce. The victim is dead—and he has cunningly
overreached himself: a combination of calamities none the less absurd for
being grim. To husband a favourite claret until the batch turns sour, is
not at all an artful stroke of policy; and how much more with a whole
cellar—a whole bodily existence! People may lay down their lives with
cheerfulness in the sure expectation of a blessed immortality; but that
is a different affair from giving up youth with all its admirable
pleasures, in the hope of a better quality of gruel in a more than
problematical, nay, more than improbable, old age. We should not
compliment a hungry man, who should refuse a whole dinner and reserve all
his appetite for the dessert, before he knew whether there was to be any
dessert or not. If there be such a thing as imprudence in the world, we
surely have it here. We sail in leaky bottoms and on great and perilous
waters; and to take a cue from the dolorous old naval ballad, we have
heard the mer-maidens singing, and know that we shall never see dry land
any more. Old and young, we are all on our last cruise. If there is a
fill of tobacco among the crew, for God’s sake pass it round, and let us
have a pipe before we go!
Indeed, by the report of our elders, this nervous preparation for old age
is only trouble thrown away. We fall on guard, and after all it is a
friend who comes to meet us. After the sun is down and the west faded,
the heavens begin to fill with shining stars. So, as we grow old, a sort
of equable jog-trot of feeling is substituted for the violent ups and
downs of passion and disgust; the same influence that restrains our
hopes, quiets our apprehensions; if the pleasures are less intense, the
troubles are milder and more tolerable; and in a word, this period for
which we are asked to hoard up everything as for a time of famine, is, in
its own right, the richest, easiest, and happiest of life. Nay, by
managing its own work and following its own happy inspiration, youth is
doing the best it can to endow the leisure of age. A full, busy youth is
your only prelude to a self-contained and independent age; and the muff
inevitably develops into the bore. There are not many Doctor Johnsons,
to set forth upon their first romantic voyage at sixty-four. If we wish
to scale Mont Blanc or visit a thieves’ kitchen in the East End, to go
down in a diving dress or up in a balloon, we must be about it while we
are still young. It will not do to delay until we are clogged with
prudence and limping with rheumatism, and people begin to ask us: “What
does Gravity out of bed?” Youth is the time to go flashing from one end
of the world to the other both in mind and body; to try the manners of
different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see sunrise in town
and country; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the
metaphysics, write halting verses, run a mile to see a fire, and wait all
day long in the theatre to applaud _Hernani_. There is some meaning in
the old theory about wild oats; and a man who has not had his
green-sickness and got done with it for good, is as little to be depended
on as an unvaccinated infant. “It is extraordinary,” says Lord
Beaconsfield, one of the brightest and best preserved of youths up to the
date of his last novel, {3} “it is extraordinary how hourly and how
violently change the feelings of an inexperienced young man.” And this
mobility is a special talent entrusted to his care; a sort of
indestructible virginity; a magic armour, with which he can pass unhurt
through great dangers and come unbedaubed out of the miriest passages.
Let him voyage, speculate, see all that he can, do all that he may; his
soul has as many lives as a cat; he will live in all weathers, and never
be a halfpenny the worse. Those who go to the devil in youth, with
anything like a fair chance, were probably little worth saving from the
first; they must have been feeble fellows—creatures made of putty and
pack-thread, without steel or fire, anger or true joyfulness, in their
composition; we may sympathise with their parents, but there is not much
cause to go into mourning for themselves; for to be quite honest, the
weak brother is the worst of mankind.
When the old man waggles his head and says, “Ah, so I thought when I was
your age,” he has proved the youth’s case. Doubtless, whether from
growth of experience or decline of animal heat, he thinks so no longer;
but he thought so while he was young; and all men have thought so while
they were young, since there was dew in the morning or hawthorn in May;
and here is another young man adding his vote to those of previous
generations and rivetting another link to the chain of testimony. It is
as natural and as right for a young man to be imprudent and exaggerated,
to live in swoops and circles, and beat about his cage like any other
wild thing newly captured, as it is for old men to turn gray, or mothers
to love their offspring, or heroes to die for something worthier than
their lives.
By way of an apologue for the aged, when they feel more than usually
tempted to offer their advice, let me recommend the following little
tale. A child who had been remarkably fond of toys (and in particular of
lead soldiers) found himself growing to the level of acknowledged boyhood
without any abatement of this childish taste. He was thirteen; already
he had been taunted for dallying overlong about the playbox; he had to
blush if he was found among his lead soldiers; the shades of the
prison-house were closing about him with a vengeance. There is nothing
more difficult than to put the thoughts of children into the language of
their elders; but this is the effect of his meditations at this juncture:
“Plainly,” he said, “I must give up my playthings, in the meanwhile,
since I am not in a position to secure myself against idle jeers. At the
same time, I am sure that playthings are the very pick of life; all
people give them up out of the same pusillanimous respect for those who
are a little older; and if they do not return to them as soon as they
can, it is only because they grow stupid and forget. I shall be wiser; I
shall conform for a little to the ways of their foolish world; but so
soon as I have made enough money, I shall retire and shut myself up among
my playthings until the day I die.” Nay, as he was passing in the train
along the Esterel mountains between Cannes and Fréjus, he remarked a
pretty house in an orange garden at the angle of a bay, and decided that
this should be his Happy Valley. Astrea Redux; childhood was to come
again! The idea has an air of simple nobility to me, not unworthy of
Cincinnatus. And yet, as the reader has probably anticipated, it is
never likely to be carried into effect. There was a worm i’ the bud, a
fatal error in the premises. Childhood must pass away, and then youth,
as surely as age approaches. The true wisdom is to be always seasonable,
and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances. To love
playthings well as a child, to lead an adventurous and honourable youth,
and to settle when the time arrives, into a green and smiling age, is to
be a good artist in life and deserve well of yourself and your neighbour.
You need repent none of your youthful vagaries. They may have been over
the score on one side, just as those of age are probably over the score
on the other. But they had a point; they not only befitted your age and
expressed its attitude and passions, but they had a relation to what was
outside of you, and implied criticisms on the existing state of things,
which you need not allow to have been undeserved, because you now see
that they were partial. All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of
stating that the current truth is incomplete. The follies of youth have
a basis in sound reason, just as much as the embarrassing questions put
by babes and sucklings. Their most antisocial acts indicate the defects
of our society. When the torrent sweeps the man against a boulder, you
must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is
sometimes a theory. Shelley, chafing at the Church of England,
discovered the cure of all evils in universal atheism. Generous lads
irritated at the injustices of society, see nothing for it but the
abolishment of everything and Kingdom Come of anarchy. Shelley was a
young fool; so are these cocksparrow revolutionaries. But it is better
to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream in the shape
of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities
of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. Some
people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the
world, like smiling images pushed from behind. For God’s sake give me
the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself! As for
the others, the irony of facts shall take it out of their hands, and make
fools of them in downright earnest, ere the farce be over. There shall
be such a mopping and a mowing at the last day, and such blushing and
confusion of countenance for all those who have been wise in their own
esteem, and have not learnt the rough lessons that youth hands on to age.
If we are indeed here to perfect and complete our own natures, and grow
larger, stronger, and more sympathetic against some nobler career in the
future, we had all best bestir ourselves to the utmost while we have the
time. To equip a dull, respectable person with wings would be but to
make a parody of an angel.
In short, if youth is not quite right in its opinions, there is a strong
probability that age is not much more so. Undying hope is co-ruler of
the human bosom with infallible credulity. A man finds he has been wrong
at every preceding stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing
conclusion that he is at last entirely right. Mankind, after centuries
of failure, are still upon the eve of a thoroughly constitutional
millennium. Since we have explored the maze so long without result, it
follows, for poor human reason, that we cannot have to explore much
longer; close by must be the centre, with a champagne luncheon and a
piece of ornamental water. How if there were no centre at all, but just
one alley after another, and the whole world a labyrinth without end or
issue?
I overheard the other day a scrap of conversation, which I take the
liberty to reproduce. “What I advance is true,” said one. “But not the
whole truth,” answered the other. “Sir,” returned the first (and it
seemed to me there was a smack of Dr. Johnson in the speech), “Sir, there
is no such thing as the whole truth!” Indeed, there is nothing so
evident in life as that there are two sides to a question. History is
one long illustration. The forces of nature are engaged, day by day, in
cudgelling it into our backward intelligences. We never pause for a
moment’s consideration but we admit it as an axiom. An enthusiast sways
humanity exactly by disregarding this great truth, and dinning it into
our ears that this or that question has only one possible solution; and
your enthusiast is a fine florid fellow, dominates things for a while and
shakes the world out of a doze; but when once he is gone, an army of
quiet and uninfluential people set to work to remind us of the other side
and demolish the generous imposture. While Calvin is putting everybody
exactly right in his _Institutes_, and hot-headed Knox is thundering in
the pulpit, Montaigne is already looking at the other side in his library
in Perigord, and predicting that they will find as much to quarrel about
in the Bible as they had found already in the Church. Age may have one
side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain
than that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong. Let them
agree to differ; for who knows but what agreeing to differ may not be a
form of agreement rather than a form of difference?
I suppose it is written that any one who sets up for a bit of a
philosopher, must contradict himself to his very face. For here have I
fairly talked myself into thinking that we have the whole thing before us
at last; that there is no answer to the mystery, except that there are as
many as you please; that there is no centre to the maze because, like the
famous sphere, its centre is everywhere; and that agreeing to differ with
every ceremony of politeness, is the only “one undisturbed song of pure
concent” to which we are ever likely to lend our musical voices.