"Margaret Fuller's father was thirty-two when she was born," writes
Katharine Anthony in her biography of the great feminist. "A self-made
man, he had been obliged to postpone marriage and family life to a
comparatively advanced age."
The paragraph came to us like a blow in the face. For years and years we
had been going along buoyed up by the comments of readers who wrote in
from time to time to say: "Of course, you are still a young man. You
will learn better as you grow older." And now we find that we have grown
older. We have reached a comparatively advanced age, and the problem of
whether or not we have learned better is present and persistent. It can
no longer be put off as something which will work out all right in time.
"Some day," says the young man to himself, "I'm going to sit down and
write a novel, or the great American drama, or an epic poem." Then some
day comes and the young man finds that his joints are stiff and he can't
sit down.
However, we are not quite prepared to admit that thirty-two is the
deadline. It seemed old age to us for a long time. When we were
reporting baseball the players used to call Roy Hartzell, over on third
base, "the old man," because he was all of twenty-nine, and veterans of
thirty were constantly dropping out because of advancing age and the
pressure of recruits of nineteen and twenty. Yes, thirty-two was a
comparatively advanced age at that time. But then we got on to plays and
books, and Bernard Shaw was doing all the timely hitting in the pinches,
and, to mix the metaphor, breaking loose and running the length of the
field, putting a straight arm into the faces of all who would tackle
him. De Morgan started to blaze at the age of fifty, and James Huneker
was the keenest of all the critics to hail anything in any art which was
new and hitherto unclassified. And he, too, wrote his first novel,
_Painted Veils_, long after fifty. It was a novel which we did not like
very much, but all its faults were those of youth. Some of it actually
sophomoric. It was more like the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald than any
living author. We felt that it was a first novel by a "promising" man,
and thirty and twenty-nine and all those ages seemed to us mere verdant
days in the hatchery.
We remember a sweet girl reporter going to Major General Sibert,
commander of the First Division in its early days in France, and asking:
"General, don't you think this is a young man's war?" Sibert grinned
behind his gray mustache, and said: "When I was in West Point I used to
bear in mind that Napoleon won some of his greatest victories while he
was in his thirties, but now I find my attention turning more and more
to the fact that Hindenburg is seventy-two and Joffre is seventy."
Time, we know, is fleeting, but there is always a little more left for
the man who can look senility and destruction and all that sort of
business straight in the eye and remark calmly, "I'm too busy this
afternoon; drop around to-morrow." Thirty-two isn't a comparatively
advanced age. Some day we are going to write that epic poem, and the
novel, and the great American drama.
Turning to _The Art of Lawn Tennis_, by William Tilden, 2nd, we find the
comforting information that "William A. Larned won the singles at past
forty. Men of sixty are seen daily on the clubs' courts of England and
America enjoying their game as keenly as any boy. It is to this game, in
great measure, that they owe the physical fitness which enables them to
play at their advanced age."
Yet after all this is not quite so comforting. We know one or two of
these iron athletes who have outlived their generation and they are
among the bores of the world. After one of them has captured the third
set by dashing to the net and volleying your shot off at a sharp angle
he invariably rubs it in by asking you to guess how old you think he is.
We always answer, "Ninety-six," but there is no discouraging him or
stopping him before he has gone on to tell you about breaking the ice
in the tub for his morning plunge.
There is an unearthly air about these men whom God has forgotten. They
are like those Prussian soldiers of Frederick who continued to stand
after swords and bullets had gone through them and required the services
of some one to go about the field and push them over so that they might
be decently buried. There were men like that in one of the lands which
Gulliver visited. They never died and probably they played a sharp game
of tennis and later in the clubhouse they were accustomed to sit around
and say how much better the actors used to be fifty years ago. Everybody
hated them and stayed away from their company in droves.
No, we set no store of hope on being a sixty-year-old prodigy at lawn
tennis. We dodder about the court already. We had just as soon be gray
and bald and all the rest of it if only we can ever grow young enough to
write a bold and slashing novel and be suppressed by Mr. Sumner.