Society and solitude: Twelve chapters
of architecture, sculpture, painting, and poetry; of Galileo, of whose
blindness Castelli said, “The noblest eye is darkened that Nature ever
made,--an eye that hath seen more than all that went before him, and
hath opened the eyes of all that shall come after him”; of Newton, who
made an important discovery for every one of his eighty-five years;
of Bacon, who “took all knowledge to be his province”; of Fontenelle,
“that precious porcelain vase laid up in the centre of France to
be guarded with the utmost care for a hundred years”; of Franklin,
Jefferson, and Adams, the wise and heroic statesmen; of Washington, the
perfect citizen; of Wellington, the perfect soldier; of Goethe, the
all-knowing poet; of Humboldt, the encyclopædia of science.
Under the general assertion of the well-being of age, we can easily
count particular benefits of that condition. It has weathered the
perilous capes and shoals in the sea whereon we sail, and the chief
evil of life is taken away in removing the grounds of fear. The
insurance of a ship expires as she enters the harbor at home. It were
strange, if a man should turn his sixtieth year without a feeling of
immense relief from the number of dangers he has escaped. When the
old wife says, ‘Take care of that tumor in your shoulder, perhaps it
is cancerous,’--he replies, ‘I am yielding to a surer decomposition.’
The humorous thief who drank a pot of beer at the gallows blew off the
froth because he had heard it was unhealthy; but it will not add a
pang to the prisoner marched out to be shot, to assure him that the
pain in his knee threatens mortification. When the pleuro-pneumonia
of the cows raged, the butchers said, that, though the acute degree
was novel, there never was a time when this disease did not occur
among cattle. All men carry seeds of all distempers through life
latent, and we die without developing them; such is the affirmative
force of the constitution; but if you are enfeebled by any cause,
some of these sleeping seeds start and open. Meantime, at every stage
we lose a foe. At fifty years, ’tis said, afflicted citizens lose
their sick-headaches. I hope this _hegira_ is not as movable a feast
as that one I annually look for, when the horticulturists assure me
that the rosebugs in our gardens disappear on the tenth of July;
they stay a fortnight later in mine. But be it as it may with the
sick-headache,--’tis certain that graver headaches and heart-aches are
lulled once for all, as we come up with certain goals of time. The
passions have answered their purpose: that slight but dread overweight,
with which, in each instance, Nature secures the execution of her
aim, drops off. To keep man in the planet, she impresses the terror
of death. To perfect the commissariat, she implants in each a certain
rapacity to get the supply, and a little oversupply, of his wants. To
insure the existence of the race, she reinforces the sexual instinct,
at the risk of disorder, grief, and pain. To secure strength, she
plants cruel hunger and thirst, which so easily overdo their office,
and invite disease. But these temporary stays and shifts for the
protection of the young animal are shed as fast as they can be replaced
by nobler resources. We live in youth amidst this rabble of passions,
quite too tender, quite too hungry and irritable. Later, the interiors
of mind and heart open, and supply grander motives. We learn the fatal
compensations that wait on every act. Then,--one after another,--this
riotous time-destroying crew disappear.
I count it another capital advantage of age, this, that a success more
or less signifies nothing. Little by little, it has amassed such a
fund of merit, that it can very well afford to go on its credit when
it will. When I chanced to meet the poet Wordsworth, then sixty-three
years old, he told me, “that he had just had a fall and lost a tooth,
and, when his companions were much concerned for the mischance, he had
replied, that he was glad it had not happened forty years before.”
Well, Nature takes care that we shall not lose our organs forty years
too soon. A lawyer argued a cause yesterday in the Supreme Court, and
I was struck with a certain air of levity and defiance which vastly
became him. Thirty years ago it was a serious concern to him whether
his pleading was good and effective. Now it is of importance to his
client, but of none to himself. It has been long already fixed what he
can do and cannot do, and his reputation does not gain or suffer from
one or a dozen new performances. If he should, on a new occasion, rise
quite beyond his mark, and achieve somewhat great and extraordinary,
that, of course, would instantly tell; but he may go below his mark
with impunity, and people will say, ‘O, he had headache,’ or, ‘He lost
his sleep for two nights.’ What a lust of appearance, what a load of
anxieties that once degraded him, he is thus rid of! Every one is
sensible of this cumulative advantage in living. All the good days
behind him are sponsors, who speak for him when he is silent, pay for
him when he has no money, introduce him where he has no letters, and
work for him when he sleeps.
A third felicity of age is, that it has found expression. The youth
suffers not only from ungratified desires, but from powers untried, and
from a picture in his mind of a career which has, as yet, no outward
reality. He is tormented with the want of correspondence between things
and thoughts. Michel Angelo’s head is full of masculine and gigantic
figures as gods walking, which make him savage until his furious chisel
can render them into marble; and of architectural dreams, until a
hundred stone-masons can lay them in courses of travertine. There is
the like tempest in every good head in which some great benefit for
the world is planted. The throes continue until the child is born.
Every faculty new to each man thus goads him and drives him out into
doleful deserts, until it finds proper vent. All the functions of
human duty irritate and lash him forward, bemoaning and chiding, until
they are performed. He wants friends, employment, knowledge, power,
house and land, wife and children, honor and fame; he has religious
wants, æsthetic wants, domestic, civil, humane wants. One by one,
day after day, he learns to coin his wishes into facts. He has his
calling, homestead, social connection, and personal power, and thus,
at the end of fifty years, his soul is appeased by seeing some sort
of correspondence between his wish and his possession. This makes the
value of age, the satisfaction it slowly offers to every craving. He
is serene who does not feel himself pinched and wronged, but whose
condition, in particular and in general, allows the utterance of his
mind. In old persons, when thus fully expressed, we often observe a
fair, plump, perennial, waxen complexion, which indicates that all
the ferment of earlier days has subsided into serenity of thought and
behavior.
The compensations of Nature play in age as in youth. In a world so
charged and sparkling with power, a man does not live long and actively
without costly additions of experience, which, though not spoken, are
recorded in his mind. What to the youth is only a guess or a hope, is
in the veteran a digested statute. He beholds the feats of the juniors
with complacency, but as one who, having long ago known these games,
has refined them into results and morals. The Indian Red Jacket, when
the young braves were boasting their deeds, said, “But the sixties have
all the twenties and forties in them.”
For a fourth benefit, age sets its house in order, and finishes its
works, which to every artist is a supreme pleasure. Youth has an excess
of sensibility, before which every object glitters and attracts. We
leave one pursuit for another, and the young man’s year is a heap of
beginnings. At the end of a twelvemonth, he has nothing to show for
it,--not one completed work. But the time is not lost. Our instincts
drove us to hive innumerable experiences, that are yet of no visible
value, and which we may keep for twice seven years before they shall
be wanted. The best things are of secular growth. The instinct of
classifying marks the wise and healthy mind. Linnæus projects his
system, and lays out his twenty-four classes of plants, before yet he
has found in Nature a single plant to justify certain of his classes.
His seventh class has not one. In process of time, he finds with
delight the little white _Trientalis_, the only plant with seven petals
and sometimes seven stamens, which constitutes a seventh class in
conformity with his system. The conchologist builds his cabinet whilst
as yet he has few shells. He labels shelves for classes, cells for
species: all but a few are empty. But every year fills some blanks, and
with accelerating speed as he becomes knowing and known. An old scholar
finds keen delight in verifying the impressive anecdotes and citations
he has met with in miscellaneous reading and hearing, in all the years
of youth. We carry in memory important anecdotes, and have lost all
clew to the author from whom we had them. We have a heroic speech from
Rome or Greece, but cannot fix it on the man who said it. We have an
admirable line worthy of Horace, ever and anon resounding in our mind’s
ear, but have searched all probable and improbable books for it in
vain. We consult the reading men: but, strangely enough, they who know
everything know not this. But especially we have a certain insulated
thought, which haunts us, but remains insulated and barren. Well,
there is nothing for all this but patience and time. Time, yes, that
is the finder, the unweariable explorer, not subject to casualties,
omniscient at last. The day comes when the hidden author of our story
is found; when the brave speech returns straight to the hero who
said it; when the admirable verse finds the poet to whom it belongs;
and best of all, when the lonely thought, which seemed so wise, yet
half-wise, half-thought, because it cast no light abroad, is suddenly
matched in our mind by its twin, by its sequence, or next related
analogy, which gives it instantly radiating power, and justifies the
superstitious instinct with which we have hoarded it. We remember our
old Greek Professor at Cambridge, an ancient bachelor, amid his folios,
possessed by this hope of completing a task, with nothing to break his
leisure after the three hours of his daily classes, yet ever restlessly
stroking his leg, and assuring himself “he should retire from the
University and read the authors.” In Goethe’s Romance, Makaria,
the central figure for wisdom and influence, pleases herself with
withdrawing into solitude to astronomy and epistolary correspondence.
Goethe himself carried this completion of studies to the highest point.
Many of his works hung on the easel from youth to age, and received
a stroke in every month or year. A literary astrologer, he never
applied himself to any task but at the happy moment when all the stars
consented. Bentley thought himself likely to live till fourscore,--long
enough to read everything that was worth reading,--“_Et tunc magna
mei sub terris ibit imago._” Much wider is spread the pleasure which
old men take in completing their secular affairs, the inventor his
inventions, the agriculturist his experiments, and all old men in
finishing their houses, rounding their estates, clearing their titles,
reducing tangled interests to order, reconciling enmities, and leaving
all in the best posture for the future. It must be believed that there
is a proportion between the designs of a man and the length of his
life: there is a calendar of his years, so of his performances.
America is the country of young men, and too full of work hitherto for
leisure and tranquillity; yet we have had robust centenarians, and