LIV Old Age and Usefulness
The Glory of Brave Men and Women
Dear Lord! I thank thee for a life of use;
Dear Lord! I do not pine for any truce.
Peace, peace has always come from duty done;
Peace, peace will so until the end be won.
Thanks, thanks! a thankful heart is my reward;
Thanks, thanks befit the children of the Lord.
Wind, wind! the peaceful reel must still go round;
Wind, wind! the thread of life will soon be wound.
The worker has no dread of growing old;
First, years of toil, and then the age of gold!
For lo! he hopes to bear his flag unfurled
Beyond the threshold of another world.
John Foster, he who sprang into celebrity from one essay, Popular Ignorance, had a diseased feeling against growing old, which seems to us to be very prevalent. He was sorry to lose every parting hour. “I have seen a fearful sight to-day,” he would say—“I have seen a buttercup.” To others the sight would only give visions of the coming Spring and future Summer; to him it told of the past year, the last Christmas, the days which would never come again—the so many days nearer the grave. Thackeray continually expressed the same feeling. He reverts to the merry old time when George the Third was king. He looks back with a regretful mind to his own youth. The black Care constantly rides, behind his chariot. “Ah, my friends,” he says, “how beautiful was youth! We are growing old. Spring-time and Summer are past. We near the Winter of our days. We shall never feel as we have felt. We approach the inevitable grave.” Few men, indeed, know how to grow old gracefully, as Madame de Stael very truly observed. There is an unmanly sadness at leaving off the old follies and the old games. We all hate fogyism. Dr. Johnson, great and good as he was, had a touch of this regret, and we may pardon him for the feeling. A youth spent in poverty and neglect, a manhood consumed in unceasing struggle, are not preparatives to growing old in peace. We fancy that, after a stormy morning and a lowering day, the evening should have a sunset glow, and, when the night sets in, look back with regret at the “gusty, babbling, and remorseless day;” but, if we do so, we miss the supporting faith of the Christian and the manly cheerfulness of the heathen. To grow old is quite natural; being natural, it is beautiful; and if we grumble at it, we miss the lesson, and lose all the beauty.
Half of our life is spent in vain regrets. When we are boys we ardently wish to be men; when men we wish as ardently to be boys. We sing sad songs of the lapse of time. We talk of “auld lang syne,” of the days when we were young, of gathering shells on the sea-shore and throwing them carelessly away. We never cease to be sentimental upon past youth and lost manhood and beauty. Yet there are no regrets so false, and few half so silly. Perhaps the saddest sight in the world is to see an old lady, wrinkled and withered, dressing, talking, and acting like a very young one, and forgetting all the time, as she clings to the feeble remnant of the past, that there is no sham so transparent as her own, and that people, instead of feeling with her, are laughing at her. Old boys disguise their foibles a little better; but they are equally ridiculous. The feeble protests which they make against the flying chariot of Time are equally futile. The great Mower enters the field, and all must come down. To stay him would be impossible; We might as well try with a finger to stop Ixion’s wheel, or to dam up the current of the Thames with a child’s foot.
Since the matter is inevitable, we may as well sit down and reason it out. Is it so dreadful to grow old? Does old age need its apologies and its defenders? Is it a benefit or a calamity? Why should it be odious and ridiculous? An old tree is picturesque, an old castle venerable, an old cathedral inspires awe—why should man be worse than his works?
Let us, in the first place, see what youth is. Is it so blessed and happy and flourishing as it seems to us? Schoolboys do not think so. They always wish to be older. You cannot insult one of them more than by telling him that he is a year or two younger than he is. He fires up at once: “Twelve, did you say, sir? No, I’m fourteen.” But men and women who have reached twenty-eight do not thus add to their years. Amongst schoolboys, notwithstanding the general tenor of those romancists who see that every thing young bears a rose-colored blush, misery is prevalent enough. Emerson, Coleridge, Wordsworth, were each and all unhappy boys. They all had their rebuffs, and bitter, bitter troubles; all the more bitter because their sensitiveness was so acute. Suicide is not unknown amongst the young; fears prey upon them and terrify them; ignorances and follies surround them. Arriving at manhood, we are little better off. If we are poor, we mark the difference between the rich and us; we see position gains all the day. If we are as clever as Hamlet, we grow just as philosophically disappointed. If we love, we can only be sure of a brief pleasure—an April day. Love has its bitterness. “It is,” says Ovid, an adept in the matter, “full of anxious fear.” We fret and fume at the authority of the wise heads; we have an intense idea of our own talent. We believe calves of our own age to be as big and as valuable as full-grown bulls; we envy whilst we jest at the old. We cry, with the puffed-up hero of the Patrician’s Daughter:
“It may be by the calendar of years
You are the elder man; but ’tis the sun
Of knowledge on the mind’s dial shining bright,
And chronicling deeds and thoughts, that makes true time.”
And yet withal life is very unhappy, whether we live amongst the grumbling captains of the clubs, who are ever seeking and not finding promotion; amongst the struggling authors and rising artists who never rise; or among the young men who are full of riches, titles, places, and honor, who have every wish fulfilled, and are miserable because they have nothing to wish for. Thus the young Romans killed themselves after the death of their emperor, not for grief, not for affection, not even for the fashion of suicide, which grew afterwards prevalent enough, but from the simple weariness of doing every thing over and over again. Old age has passed such stages as these, landed on a safer shore, and matriculated in a higher college, in a purer air. We sigh not for impossibilities; we cry not:
“Bring these anew, and set me once again
In the delusion of life’s infancy;
I was not happy, but I knew not then
That happy I was never doom’d to be.”
We know that we are not happy. We know that life, perhaps, was not given us to be continuously comfortable and happy. We have been behind the scenes, and know all the illusions; but when we are old we are far too wise to throw life away for mere ennui. With Dandolo, refusing a crown at ninety-six, winning battles at ninety-four; with Wellington, planning and superintending fortifications at eighty; with Bacon and Humboldt, students to the last gasp; with wise old Montaigne, shrewd in his grey-beard wisdom and loving life, even in the midst of his fits of gout and colic—Age knows far too much to act like a sulky child. It knows too well the results and the value of things to care about them; that the ache will subside, the pain be lulled, the estate we coveted be worth little; the titles, ribbons, gewgaws, honors, be all more or less worthless. “Who has honor? He that died o’ Wednesday!” Such a one passed us in the race, and gained it but to fall. We are still up and doing; we may be frosty and shrewd, but kindly. We can wish all men well; like them, too, so far as they may be liked, and smile at the fuss, bother, hurry, and turmoil, which they make about matters which to us are worthless dross. The greatest prize in the whole market—in any and in every market—success, is to the old man nothing. He little cares who is up and who is down; the present he lives in and delights in. Thus, in one of those admirable comedies in which Robson acted, we find the son a wanderer, the mother’s heart nearly broken, the father torn and broken by a suspicion of his son’s dishonesty, but the grandfather all the while concerned only about his gruel and his handkerchief. Even the pains and troubles incident to his state visit the old man lightly. Because Southey sat for months in his library, unable to read or touch the books he loved, we are not to infer that he was unhappy. If the stage darkens as the curtain falls, certain it also is that the senses grow duller and more blunted. “Don’t cry for me, my dear,” said an old lady undergoing an operation; “I do not feel it.”
It seems to us, therefore, that a great deal of unnecessary pity has been thrown away upon old age. We begin at school reading Cicero’s treatise, hearing Cato talk with Scipio and Lælius; we hear much about poor old men; we are taught to admire the vigor, quickness, and capacity of youth and manhood. We lose sight of the wisdom which age brings even to the most foolish. We think that a circumscribed sphere must necessarily be an unhappy one. It is not always so. What one abandons in growing old is, perhaps, after all not worth having. The chief part of youth is but excitement; often both unwise and unhealthy. The same pen which has written, with a morbid feeling, that “there is a class of beings who do not grow old in their youth and die ere middle age,” tells us also that “the best of life is but intoxication.” That passes away. The man who has grown old does not care about it. The author at that period has no feverish excitement about seeing himself in print; he does not hunt newspapers for reviews and notices. He is content to wait; he knows what fame is worth. The obscure man of science, who has been wishing to make the world better and wiser; the struggling curate, the poor and hard-tried man of God; the enthusiastic reformer, who has watched the sadly slow dawning of progress and liberty; the artist, whose dream of beauty slowly fades before his dim eyes—all lay down their feverish wishes as they advance in life, forget the bright ideal which they can not reach, and embrace the more imperfect real. We speak not here of the assured Christian. He, from the noblest pinnacle of faith, beholds a promised land, and is eager to reach it; he prays “to be delivered from the body of this death;” but we write of those humbler, perhaps more human souls, with whom increasing age each day treads down an illusion. All feverish wishes, raw and inconclusive desires, have died down, and a calm beauty and peace survive; passions are dead, temptations weakened or conquered; experience has been won; selfish interests are widened into universal ones; vain, idle hopes, have merged into a firmer faith or a complete knowledge; and more light has broken in upon the soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed, “through chinks which Time has made.”
Again, old men are valuable, not only as relics of the past, but as guides and prophets for the future. They know the pattern of every turn of life’s kaleidoscope. The colors merely fall into new shapes; the ground-work is just the same. The good which a calm, kind, and cheerful old man can do is incalculable. And whilst he does good to others, he enjoys himself. He looks not unnaturally to that which should accompany old age—honor, love, obedience, troops of friends; and he plays his part in the comedy or tragedy of life with as much gusto as any one else. Old Montague, or Capulet, and old Polonius, that wise maxim-man, enjoy themselves quite as well as the moody Hamlet, the perturbed Laertes, or even gallant Mercutio or love-sick Romeo. Friar Lawrence, who is a good old man, is perhaps the happiest of all in the dramatis personae—unless we take the gossiping, garrulous old nurse, with her sunny recollections of maturity and youth. The great thing is to have the mind well employed, to work whilst it is yet day. The precise Duke of Wellington, answering every letter with “F.M. presents his compliments;” the wondrous worker Humboldt with his orders of knighthood, stars, and ribbons, lying dusty in his drawer, still contemplating Cosmos, and answering his thirty letters a day—were both men in exceedingly enviable, happy positions; they had reached the top of the hill, and could look back quietly over the rough road which they had traveled. We are not all Humboldts or Wellingtons; but we can all be busy and good. Experience must teach us all a great deal; and if it only teaches us not to fear the future, not to cast a maundering regret over the past, we can be as happy in old age—ay, and far more so—than we were in youth. We are no longer the fools of time and error. We are leaving by slow degrees the old world; we stand upon the threshold of the new; not without hope, but without fear, in an exceedingly natural position, with nothing strange or dreadful about it; with our domain drawn within a narrow circle, but equal to our power. Muscular strength, organic instincts, are all gone; but what then? We do not want them; we are getting ready for the great change, one which is just as necessary as it was to be born; and to a little child perhaps one is not a whit more painful—perhaps not so painful as the other. The wheels of Time have brought us to the goal; we are about to rest while others labor, to stay at home while others wander. We touch at last the mysterious door—are we to be pitied or to be envied?
The desert of the life behind,
Has almost faded from my mind,
It has so many fair oases
Which unto me are holy places.
It seems like consecrated ground,
Where silence counts for more than sound,
That way of all my past endeavor
Which I shall tread no more forever.
And God I was too blind to see,
I now, somewhat from blindness free,
Discern as ever-present glory,
Who holds all past and future story.
Eternity is all in all;
Time, birth and death, ephemeral—
Point where a little bird alighted,
Then fled lest it should be benighted.