Society and solitude: Twelve chapters
innocent girl buoyant with fine purposes of duty, in all the street
full of eager and rosy faces, but a cynic can chill and dishearten with
a single word. Despondency comes readily enough to the most sanguine.
The cynic has only to follow their hint with his bitter confirmation,
and they check that eager courageous pace and go home with heavier step
and premature age. They will themselves quickly enough give the hint he
wants to the cold wretch. Which of them has not failed to please where
they most wished it? or blundered where they were most ambitious of
success? or found themselves awkward or tedious or incapable of study,
thought, or heroism, and only hoped by good sense and fidelity to do
what they could and pass unblamed? And this witty malefactor makes
their little hope less with satire and scepticism, and slackens the
springs of endeavor. Yes, this is easy; but to help the young soul, add
energy, inspire hope, and blow the coals into a useful flame; to redeem
defeat by new thought, by firm action, that is not easy, that is the
work of divine men.
We live on different planes or platforms. There is an external life,
which is educated at school, taught to read, write, cipher, and trade;
taught to grasp all the boy can get, urging him to put himself forward,
to make himself useful and agreeable in the world, to ride, run, argue,
and contend, unfold his talents, shine, conquer, and possess.
But the inner life sits at home, and does not learn to do things, nor
value these feats at all. ’Tis a quiet, wise perception. It loves
truth, because it is itself real; it loves right, it knows nothing
else; but it makes no progress; was as wise in our first memory of
it as now; is just the same now in maturity and hereafter in age, it
was in youth. We have grown to manhood and womanhood; we have powers,
connection, children, reputations, professions: this makes no account
of them all. It lives in the great present; it makes the present great.
This tranquil, well-founded, wide-seeing soul is no express-rider, no
attorney, no magistrate: it lies in the sun, and broods on the world.
A person of this temper once said to a man of much activity, “I will
pardon you that you do so much, and you me that I do nothing.” And
Euripides says that “Zeus hates busybodies and those who do too much.”
OLD AGE.
OLD AGE.
On the anniversary of the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, in 1861,
the venerable President Quincy, senior member of the Society, as well
as senior alumnus of the University, was received at the dinner with
peculiar demonstrations of respect. He replied to these compliments
in a speech, and, gracefully claiming the privileges of a literary
society, entered at some length into an Apology for Old Age, and,
aiding himself by notes in his hand, made a sort of running commentary
on Cicero’s chapter “De Senectute.” The character of the speaker, the
transparent good faith of his praise and blame, and the _naïveté_ of
his eager preference of Cicero’s opinions to King David’s, gave unusual
interest to the College festival. It was a discourse full of dignity,
honoring him who spoke and those who heard.
The speech led me to look over at home--an easy task--Cicero’s famous
essay, charming by its uniform rhetorical merit; heroic with Stoical
precepts; with a Roman eye to the claims of the State; happiest,
perhaps, in his praise of life on the farm; and rising at the
conclusion to a lofty strain. But he does not exhaust the subject;
rather invites the attempt to add traits to the picture from our
broader modern life.
Cicero makes no reference to the illusions which cling to the element
of time, and in which Nature delights. Wellington, in speaking of
military men, said, “What masks are these uniforms to hide cowards!”
I have often detected the like deception in the cloth shoe, wadded
pelisse, wig, spectacles, and padded chair of Age. Nature lends herself
to these illusions, and adds dim sight, deafness, cracked voice, snowy
hair, short memory and sleep. These also are masks, and all is not Age
that wears them. Whilst we yet call ourselves young, and our mates
are yet youths with even boyish remains, one good fellow in the set
prematurely sports a gray or a bald head, which does not impose on
us who know how innocent of sanctity or of Platonism he is, but does
deceive his juniors and the public, who presently distinguish him with
a most amusing respect: and this lets us into the secret, that the
venerable forms that so awed our childhood were just such impostors.
Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders,
and then a young heart beating under fourscore winters.
For if the essence of age is not present, these signs, whether of Art
or Nature, are counterfeit and ridiculous: and the essence of age is
intellect. Wherever that appears, we call it old. If we look into the
eyes of the youngest person, we sometimes discover that here is one who
knows already what you would go about with much pains to teach him;
there is that in him which is the ancestor of all around him: which
fact the Indian Vedas express when they say, “He that can discriminate
is the father of his father.” And in our old British legends of Arthur
and the Round Table, his friend and counsellor, Merlin the Wise, is a
babe found exposed in a basket by the river-side, and, though an infant
of only a few days, speaks articulately to those who discover him,
tells his name and history, and presently foretells the fate of the
by-standers. Wherever there is power, there is age. Don’t be deceived
by dimples and curls. I tell you that babe is a thousand years old.
Time is, indeed, the theatre and seat of illusion: nothing is so
ductile and elastic. The mind stretches an hour to a century, and
dwarfs an age to an hour. Saadi found in a mosque at Damascus an old
Persian of a hundred and fifty years who was dying, and was saying to
himself, “I said, coming into the world by birth, ‘I will enjoy myself
for a few moments.’ Alas! at the variegated table of life I partook
of a few mouthfuls, and the Fates said, ‘_Enough!_’” That which does
not decay is so central and controlling in us, that, as long as one
is alone by himself, he is not sensible of the inroads of time, which
always begin at the surface-edges. If, on a winter day, you should
stand within a bell-glass, the face and color of the afternoon clouds
would not indicate whether it were June or January; and if we did not
find the reflection of ourselves in the eyes of the young people, we
could not know that the century-clock had struck seventy instead of
twenty. How many men habitually believe that each chance passenger with
whom they converse is of their own age, and presently find it was his
father, and not his brother, whom they knew!
But not to press too hard on these deceits and illusions of Nature,
which are inseparable from our condition, and looking at age under
an aspect more conformed to the common sense, if the question be
the felicity of age, I fear the first popular judgments will be
unfavorable. From the point of sensuous experience, seen from the
streets and markets and the haunts of pleasure and gain, the estimate
of age is low, melancholy, and sceptical. Frankly face the facts,
and see the result. Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid,
strychnine, are weak dilutions: the surest poison is time. This cup,
which Nature puts to our lips, has a wonderful virtue, surpassing
that of any other draught. It opens the senses, adds power, fills us
with exalted dreams, which we call hope, love, ambition, science:
especially, it creates a craving for larger draughts of itself.
But they who take the larger draughts are drunk with it, lose their
stature, strength, beauty, and senses, and end in folly and delirium.
We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to
write, and we one day discover that our literary talent was a youthful
effervescence which we have now lost. We had a judge in Massachusetts
who at sixty proposed to resign, alleging that he perceived a certain,
decay in his faculties; he was dissuaded by his friends, on account
of the public convenience at that time. At seventy it was hinted to
him that it was time to retire; but he now replied, that he thought
his judgment as robust, and all his faculties as good as ever they
were. But besides the self-deception, the strong and hasty laborers of
the street do not work well with the chronic valetudinarian. Youth is
everywhere in place. Age, like woman, requires fit surroundings. Age
is comely in coaches, in churches, in chairs of state, and ceremony,
in council-chambers, in courts of justice, and historical societies.
Age is becoming in the country. But in the rush and uproar of Broadway,
if you look into the faces of the passengers, there is dejection or
indignation in the seniors, a certain concealed sense of injury,
and the lip made up with a heroic determination not to mind it. Few
envy the consideration enjoyed by the oldest inhabitant. We do not
count a man’s years, until he has nothing else to count. The vast
inconvenience of animal immortality was told in the fable of Tithonus.
In short, the creed of the street is, Old Age is not disgraceful, but
immensely disadvantageous. Life is well enough, but we shall all be
glad to get out of it, and they will all be glad to have us.
This is odious on the face of it. Universal convictions are not to
be shaken by the whimseys of overfed butchers and firemen, or by the
sentimental fears of girls who would keep the infantile bloom on their
cheeks. We know the value of experience. Life and art are cumulative;
and he who has accomplished something in any department alone deserves
to be heard on that subject. A man of great employments and excellent
performance used to assure me that he did not think a man worth
anything until he was sixty; although this smacks a little of the
resolution of a certain “Young Men’s Republican Club,” that all men
should be held eligible who were under seventy. But in all governments,
the councils of power were held by the old; and patricians or _patres_,
senate or _senes_, _seigneurs_ or seniors, _gerousia_, the senate of
Sparta, the presbytery of the Church, and the like, all signify simply
old men.
The cynical creed or lampoon of the market is refuted by the universal
prayer for long life, which is the verdict of Nature, and justified by
all history. We have, it is true, examples of an accelerated pace by
which young men achieved grand works; as in the Macedonian Alexander,
in Raffaelle, Shakspeare, Pascal, Burns, and Byron; but these are rare
exceptions. Nature, in the main, vindicates her law. Skill to do comes
of doing; knowledge comes by eyes always open, and working hands; and
there is no knowledge that is not power. Béranger said, “Almost all
the good workmen live long.” And if the life be true and noble, we
have quite another sort of seniors than the frowzy, timorous, peevish
dotards who are falsely old,--namely, the men who fear no city, but
by whom cities stand; who appearing in any street, the people empty
their houses to gaze at and obey them: as at “My Cid, with the fleecy
beard,” in Toledo; or Bruce, as Barbour reports him; as blind old
Dandolo, elected Doge at eighty-four years, storming Constantinople
at ninety-four, and after the revolt again victorious, and elected at
the age of ninety-six to the throne of the Eastern Empire, which he
declined, and died Doge at ninety-seven. We still feel the force of
Socrates, “whom well-advised the oracle pronounced wisest of men”; of
Archimedes, holding Syracuse against the Romans by his wit, and himself
better than all their nation; of Michel Angelo, wearing the four crowns