20 JULY 1918, Page 9

PRAETERIT AETAS.

T HAVE just received a letter from a friend whom I knew I well in the days when the world was young for us both, which shows alarming signs that she is growing old. Her husband is in the Navy ; she had let her house in breezy Hampshire, and gone to a certain hilly country to be temporarily nearer to him. There she was ill ; and she writes lengthily of the delight of at last getting away from those " depressing " hills back to her own Hampshire, " where one sees a full expanse of sky." It had been a " mournful spot," and had a most " blighting effect " on her ; she " had no idea hills could be so depressing."

Was there not (I write on very active service, and cannot verify quotations) a man who said : " There are seven kinds of gout, and I have them all " ? There are at least three kinds of getting old, against which must be set vigilant watch by those determined to avoid the chill, if not the years, of old age ; and I fear that my friend needs to be cured of all three.

There is first the tendency to narrow the number of our zestful tastes. In the skipping time of youth and vital vigour, it is a poor nature that cannot turn full-face to an almost unlimited number of " good joys." We respond with quick sympathy to every interpreter of a new richness open to us ; art and sport, travel and home ramble, Keats and Dickens, the minuet and the Eucharist. How naturally we pass from a gallop in God's glorious oxygen to an afternoon-tea discussion of Gibbon or Robbery under Arms. With what immediate and equal hero-worship did we tell the deeds of General Gordon and W. G. Grace. How gloriously full the world is in our manhood's prime vigour, when no spirit feels waste. There is hardly a preference between joys, hardly a sense of comparison marking oft the beat from the very good ; certainly no such absorption in one as to lead to depreciation of or coldness to another ; least of all a blighting sense of incon- sistency, as if to get the fullest joy, for example, from God's open air demanded a less grateful sigh of satisfaction as we sank int. an armchair by the library fire. They were all beautiful nymphs. those joys of life, and without a jealous pout among them ; and we have ardour enough for all. Sad is the time when we beg'n to select ; to be not at home to this or that one of the inviting com- pany ; to realize that some at least grow wrinkled and a trifle stale, even though others grow but dearer and more intimate. Happy is he who, like David, in Browning's Saul, can still sing se rapturously of the joy of mere living, how fit to employ all the heart and the soul and the senses for ever in joy, while he has already mounted to the thrill of knowing the joys of the soul, and the rap: ure of the revelation of the Infinite and Eternal. Alas ! even David grew old.

The second tendency, more easily curable, is to associate sur- roundings with times of gloom and sickness. As we travel forward in life, times of bodily sickness, and of mind- and soul-sickness also. must inevitably be our lot. So it was (I know her well, and those first symptoms of ageing have emphatically not come to her joyful, healthy nature) with my friend among the hills. And her letter happened to come when I too had passed through a precisely similar experience. I love the cities of the East ; and few are richer in multi-coloured invitation to interest than Cairo. To stand on a hill overlooking the city of Saladin, with the Citadel, the Pyramids, and the Nile full in view ; especially when, as to-day, over Heliopolis, there is the latest of world-wonders to contrast with its earliest, the supreme feats of airmanship close to the anchored, immovable Pyramids ; is surely one of the closest-packed times of interest possible to a seeing, thinking man. But I was ill and depressed.; two years from home—and when will this ghastly war end ? And I conceived such a distaste for Cairo and all its works that I was fain to say : " May I never see you again ! "

Both my friend and I need the warning. This is nothing else but sorrow of heart. I had not aforetimc been sad in its presence. nor she in the face of encircling hills. It is not Cairo or the hills that are in fault ; it is our temporarily sick selves. Is she to forfeit all the pleasure she might get out of hills in the future, by con- ceiving an idea that she does not like hills ? by having come to them blighted, and imagining that it is they which have the blighting effect ? That is to be impoverished indeed. But to grow old, as Ben Ezra knew, can be enrichment, no impoverishment. A healthy " young " person, of whatever tally of years, would not willingly live far from hills. Nothing is so gloriously varied, with every hour of the day and every phase of the weather. I suppose it was old-fashioned advice, but I gave it—take a course of Turner's water-colours, and Ruskin's passionate advocacy of the wonder of the everlasting hills. We must not, at our peril, associate our surroundings permanently with our grumpiness that we suffered amidst them once upon a time. All they did was to fail to delight us when we refused to meet them half-way. For myself, I certainly do not mean to be robbed for life of enjoying Cairo. I will not be cheated before my time, nor confine myself to chimney-corner travels while still the steamboat company advertisements can allure me with passages to Wonderland.

There is finally the danger that, with the insensible decrease of that lithe, strenuous, plenty-to-spare vitality which marks healthy youth, we come to prefer books to open air, quiet gardens to hillsides.

memories and well-tried pleasures to the zest for new experiences., and, in sum, placid enjoyments to thrills, ecstasies, raptures. Far

too early in his life Wordsworth, after a superb tribute to the times of youth and all-aliveness, wrote that that time was past, and all its aching joys are now no more, and all its dizzy raptures. He says he did not mourn for it ; but after all, Wordsworth became a very aged man. Surely he ought to have mourned for it, and clamoured to Hebe that it should be more than a rapturous memory— a present possession, not merely a past step to deeper pleasures. Rabbi Ben Ezra was a doughtier liver than the seer of Tintern

Abbey ; and best of all was old Walt Whitman, with his brays delight in the tumble and turmoil of big causes and glad comrade- ships, a true ever-young life-athlete. His banner for us ! We will grow deeper without growing less young. It can be done; it shall be. Bestir, and fight for youthfulness. Let Nature be still an appetite, a feeling and a love that !lath no need of a remoter charm by thought supplied nor any interest unborrowed from the eye. We will not live on the interest of our hoard ; we will still get and spend.

There is one sure safeguard. Beget children—and take care 14 be fit to be their comrade through their growing years. In how short a time from their puling babyhood will they be growing up, and looking out on the good rich world—be in the stage you were,

a parent, in the days when the world was young. And a fine time will you have if you are not still looking out on that world with fifteen-year-old eyes when he is, that boy of yours ; if you are hopelessly outmatched by him in nimble-footed readiness for •adven- ture in delight ; if you begin telling him to go, not come, for a walk; and airing sage saws that hills are depressing, and such-like discoveries of the tiring years. The truest ambition of a. parent is to be ever at the same stage as every one of his children, chosen playmate and comrade, honoured with the encomium that " father knows." Forfeit it at your peril. The penalty is, to be aged, and to miss the most golden joys life has to give. Hills depressing ! —they are nothing of the kind. It is just that you happened once to be sick, and hills happened to be round you at the time ; and in fine, if you do not take care, you will be growing old. But your boy is tingling with youth and jumpiness. What are you going to do about it ? Part soul-company with him ? or expect him to subside ? or take thought for the morrow that you shall jump too

S. W.