OLD AGE.

IN the very interesting and skilful article on "Old Age" in the Quarterly Review, which shows so intimate an acquaintance with the literature bearing on the praise or censure of the last period of life, there is perhaps, on the

whole, a tendency rather to overrate than underrate the advantages of old age. We cannot, for instance, attach any serious importance to the assertion put by Cicero in his "De Sen.ectute " into the mouth of Cato, that the old enjoy the respect and reverence paid to them. Perhaps they used to Sen.ectute " into the mouth of Cato, that the old enjoy the respect and reverence paid to them. Perhaps they used to

enjoy it in his time. But do the more shrewd and cultivated of our own day take any like enjoyment in the no doubt sincere

regard which is paid to their experience, their long services, and their proved fidelity? Christianity has at least effected this for us, that men are much more sensible of their short- comings than they used to be, and much less easily satisfied with their achievements. This has taken the heart out of the small gratifications which Cato insisted on, if there ever was,—as there no doubt sometimes was,—much heart in them. Wordsworth says that the gratitude of men, far more than their ingratitude, has oftener left him mourning ; and at the close of his noble lines on Burns, he exclaims .— "The beat of what we do and are, Just God, forgive !"

And though that may go beyond the ordinary leeling of average men, we suspect that even Cato himself must have been sensible of rather mixed feelings,—a measure of self-scornmingling with his self-esteem,—when men "gave place and rose up" before him, "attended him on his way and escorted him to his home," to do him honour. Very likely he felt that they were quite right in doing him honour, that he had in some respects and to some extent raised the ideal of his day ; but unless he was a poorer creature than we have any reason to believe, he must have felt, as Socrates felt, though not as a Christian would have felt, that he had fallen far short of what he would willingly have been, and that he could hardly have

risen up in honour of himself if he had given any exact-ex- pressiou to his own feeling about his own career. In our own day, at all events, even those who are not Christians, are far

too much accustomed to a more inward and severer self- criticism, to take much satisfaction in expressions of a kind of regard and reverence which only means at best that the objects of that reverence have not been quite wanting to them- selves in their past lives. Men are perfectly well aware that, for the most part, public praise is a very poor test indeed of public virtue, and is worth little more than evidence that those who receive the praise have not conspicuously failed to come up to the vague standards of the hour. Amongst men who are worth anything. Cato's notion.that old age delights in the tokens of universal deference which it receives, is surely obsolete.

Mr. Gladstone has often expressed the feeling of humiliation with which such demonstrations affect him,—and, we have no doubt, with perfect sincerity. The long plaudits and con- gratulations with which aged statesmen and other benefactors are received, may be legitimate subjects of satisfaction so far as they are a pledge of public support for the future, but they are certainlynot evidence with which to soothe and flatter the conscience of any sane and sober human being. We do not for a moment admit that the deference paid to old age is a set-off of any importance against the pain of that diminished energy and diminished vividness with which the aged certainly have to reckon. In fact, we seriously doubt whether the most discriminating amongst the old do not extract at least as much occasion of suffering out of the external regard paid to them, when they come to compare what men say of them with what they .would say of themselves, as they get occasion of ex- hilaration.

But there is another and deeper aspect of the subject, on which the Quarterly Reviewer seems to us to have made his estimate of old age too favourable. He holds that Wordsworth was guilty of paradox when he said:—

" So fares it still in our decay, And yet the wiser mind Mourns less for what age takes away Than what it leaves behind."

And Wordsworth would have been guilty of paradox if he bad only meant what the Reviewer imputes to him, that the lin-

gering regrets and discontents of old age at its lessened powers are even more to be deplored than those lessened powers themselves. Seeing that these regrets and discontents are the mere consequences of the sense of diminished power, it would be paradoxical and misleading to speak of them as survivals from a time when there was no sense of diminished power at all. But it is perfectly clear that that is not in the least Wordsworth's meaning. He goes on to explain himself by contrasting man's old age with that of the creatures whose old age is "beautiful and free :"—

" The blackbird amid leafy trees, The lark above the hill,

Let loose their carols when they please, Are silent when they will.

With Nature never do they wage A foolish strife ; they see A happy youth, and their old age Is beautiful and free.

But we are pressed by heavy laws, And often, glad no more, We wear a face of joy because We have been glad of yore."

Now, that is not in the least a complaint of the regrets and

discontents which accompany the loss of youthful powers. On the contrary, it is a complaint of something totally different, of the tenacious perseverance, in the old, of habits of speech, and indeed of habits of thought, which no longer represent the real feelings at the bottom of their hearts,—though they do express the feelings of a time that is gone by. What Wordsworth bemoans is the unreality with which the old often continue, out of mere inertia as it were, to say the things which were appropriate to youth or middle life, and to half-believe that they are still possessed by the thoughts and feelings which these words express, though the substance of the thoughts and feelings themselves has really vanished. This is one of the most painful experiences of age, a con- • sciousness of a kind of moral ventriloquism,—of the utter- ance of feelings which it once had and has no longer, of thoughts which do not continue to represent its actual state of mind, but only the state of mind which it has got into the habit of assuming for itself as actual. The old constantly find themselves talking as they would have talked years ago, but as they are perfectly conscious that they would not talk now if habit had not gained so tyrannical a power over them.

And it is of this overbearing power of habits formed in one period of life, and which assert themselves against the protest of the inner mind in a period when they could never have been first formed, that Wordsworth makes his old friend justly complain. The old are not expert in casting the slough of habits of expression which are no longer appropriate to their inner experiences. There is nothing more painful than this sense that a man often has of talking the language of the past and not of the present, and of hardly knowing how to change it so as to suit his present attitude of feeling. One constantly finds men talking in the light ironic strain of earlier years, though that strain does not in the least represent their present tone of thought. And yet they adhere to that strain, not because they wish to affect a juvenile state of mind, but because their mind has got itself into a groove from which it cannot extricate itself. Yet the newer state of mind may be,

and often is, in every respect the deeper, wider, graver. This reminds us of the finest passage in the Quarterly Reviewer's

paper, in which he indicates what he calls those "intimations of immortality" which belong properly to old age :—

" And if it be true, as Wordsworth says, that the thoughts and feelings of childhood tell us that our birth is but a sleep,' it is even more true that the experiences of old age tell us that death is but a sleep also. If in our earlier days the joys of earth taught us to forget 'the imperial palace whence we came,' memories of that palace—tokens of its real, if far-off, existence—come back upon us as old age takes away those earthly joys one by one. As the bodily frame tends perceptibly to inevitable decay, the human spirit finds in itself a growing conviction that it is not sharing in that decay, but ever rising more and more above it. As the stone walls and iron bars of time and space close ever more narrowly upon us, the spirit becomes more and more conscious that these make no prison for it, but that it is getting ready for a freer action than was ever possible in any earlier and most favourable condition of its former life. Even as regards the material universe, the starry heavens and the mountains and green fields, as the bodily eye grows dim to these we become more fully aware that this eye at its best could see but a very small part of them, and that we have in us a capacity for infinitely wider and deeper sight of all these things, if only the needful conditions were given us. The ideals of literature, of art, or of action, which we have been striving through our lives to realise, and the realising of which we have now to give up as a thing of the past—these ideals, which once seemed to us so lofty and so satisfying, we now perceive to be in themselves, and not merely in their possible realisation, most inadequate and imperfect. In this world we might be able to do nothing better, if we could begin the past work of our lives over again ; but the vision of far nobler—of infinite, not finite—ideals rises before us, for the realisation of which there must be fitting conditions possible."

This seems to us the better aspect of that painful ex- perience of which Wordsworth complained in the lines which, as we believe, the Quarterly Reviewer has misunderstood. The aged lose the art which the young possess, of so choosing

their words and gestures and so moulding the expressions on their countenance as to make their lips and their whole bearing say exactly what they feel. The dramatic period of life is youth, and not age. So far as regards the power of expression, age lives to a great extent on the accumulated capital of earlier days, and does not seem to have the gift of coining afresh the right language and gestures and modes of expression for the thoughts that arise in it. But it is this very knowledge,—that the man is thinking a new class of thoughts, and experiencing a new class of feelings and convictions for which he has no longer the art to find a fitting language, so that he is almost compelled to use the words and, in a certain sense, affect the feelings of a bygone time, which forces upon him the belief that he is approaching a time when his newer attitude of mind and his newer width of feeling will be furnished with new organs of expression which now he lacks.

It is the very consciousness of the painful ventriloquism with which age continues to utter a language which is not its own, while it is nevertheless conscious of a much steadier and truer experience, and a much steadier and truer view of life, for which it can find for the moment no proper utterance, that convinces the old of the approach of a change of state in which a new outward expression will be found for the new inward life.