CONTEMPORARIES.
-,‘ATHEN we say of some one that he is a contemporary of ours we ought, of course, merely to mean that he was born about the same time as ourselves, and when we are com- paring ages we often mean no more than that. Commonly, however, we use the word in a much less simple sense. We apply it to some one we have known since we were young, but who is not exactly a friend ; some one with whom we have traditions in common, but not much else. When we think of him it is the tie of early familiarity rather than of affection which is present to our minds. We seldom speak of a life- long friend as a "contemporary." But if our "contem- porary," in the restricted sense in which we are using the word, does not appear upon our mental list of friendships, neither can he be reckoned among our acquaintances. He stands, if we may be allowed the expression, upon the footing of an intimate stranger. Friendship is an affair of free will ; our connection with our contemporary is due to circumstances. We are not responsible for him in any degree. He partakes of the nature of a gift or an infirmity. To those who pass their whole lives among one set of people, who live with those among whom they were born, the distinction we are making may seem rather fanciful, but to those whose lives lead them far from their original mental environ- ment our meaning will be clear. Perhaps no life is less enviable or more dull than that of the man who owes all his intimates to the circumstances of his birth, whether he be a King or an agricultural labourer. But to be with- out any such intimates is a sad want. It leaves an empty place in the heart, a place not good enough to be occu- pied by a friend, which yet cannot be filled by an acquaint- ance. No doubt we all have some contemporaries whom we End it painful to meet ; but these are a small minority. They serve no purpose but to keep us in mind that we are mortal. They seem to hold an almanac before our eyes, and tell us that we are getting older; that life is short, and the part of it best worth living is shorter still. Sometimes they are anxious to renew an intercourse the fact of which we would rather forget. They may call us by our Christian names, and claim a right to criticise our actions and remark upon our careers, at moments when such ancient rights should be tactfully abandoned. If we snub them we suffer from a sense of guilt and faithlessness ; yet all the while we know we are not really faithless, because between us there is no bond but that of time They will take it for granted that we are still intimate with other contemporaries of whom we have thankfully lost sight. When did we last hear from Tom, Dick, or Harry, they want to know. Perhaps the man whom they mean is no credit to his acquaintance ; perhaps we lent him money when we last saw him, and devoutly hope we shall never see either his face or his handwriting again. From such contemporaries we all desire to be delivered.
But there is a contemporary of another kind, one who is only a contemporary, not a friend, yet who fills an important place in our lives, though we see him but seldom, and who does something for us which the dearest friend of our mature choice can hardly do, •some- thing not essential to our happiness, but, as it were, highly ornamental to it. He helps us to realise afresh the impressions of the far past, impressions which as time goes on become so unreasonably dear to us,—those pictures which were imprinted on a mind still very sensitive, still more or less blank, whose colours are more vivid and whose atmosphere is more golden than any of later date. We could not describe them to a friend; for one thing, we are not certain how far they still represent the truth. There are ny past truths worth remembering which do not accrete to them- selves a certain amount of poetry. We cannot call them up by searching our memories, comparing dates, and weighing evidence. They flash before our eyes in consequence of an
allusion made by a contemporary who is thinking about similar pictures. We could not tell the early chapters of the
story they illustrate. They have so little sequence and so little point. Sometimes the acts of the young hero would
make us in our maturity feel a little ashamed ; sometimes, on the other hand, we are proud of him. To tell what he did might savour of conceit—le .Diable etait bon quand it gtait jeune—and the teller might feel that twinge of self-ridicule
which turns to dross so many golden memories. To the friends of our choice we talk of the present and the future, perhaps also of the nearer past ; but the far past—the past before we knew how to choose or had the luck to be chosen—
we generally keep to ourselves. Then, too, there are old jokes and sayings which belong to an almost prehistoric period of our personal recollections, whose nature depends on many things besides humour. We laugh at them to- gether with some one who has known them always, per- haps when we could laugh at nothing else, but we could not repeat them to some one to whom they would need to be explained. Our friend might laugh ; but it would be out of kindness, and we should probably not increase his estimate of our judgment. There is a certain rest in the society of
one's contemporary. Our friends think too well of us, thank God ! and at the back of our minds there is often an anxious wish that they should continue to do so. At the other end of the scale our enemies think too ill of us, and, such is human nature, we generally hail any little opportunity to make them think worse. Their society may sometimes amuse us, but it often leaves us both resentful and repentant. The
acquaintances who come between these two extremes fatigue us sometimes by the attention to our social duty which their presence demands. With our contemporaries we are strangely at our ease. We can never, whatever we do, efface for good or evil the impression we made upon them when we were both young. They will never judge us by appearances. They do not know how much life has taught us, but they know what we were before we learnt. They do not take into account the things that have become to us second nature, that nature, modified by will, to which belong our struggles, our accom- plishments, our ameliorations. They only know our primary nature—our characteristics—not our character.
Sometimes, however, it is pleasant to be supposed to be just what we were originally, to act again the part of first self, from whom years and experience and the rising generation are dividing us further every day. As we get older we like to see those who knew that somebody who was once ourselves,—somebody into whose being we would not go back, but whose personality never ceases to interest us. Perhaps no writer ever valued the memory of his youth more intensely than Robert Louis Stevenson. Thinking of a day in his boyhood when he sailed among the Hebrides, he writes :—
"Give me again all that was there, Give me the sun that shone; Give me the eyes, give me the soul, Give me the lad that's gone. Billow and breeze, islands and seas, Mountains of rain and sun ; All that was good, all that was fair, All that was me is gone."
Yet bow few of us would really go back. Apart from the gifts of the years, there is a marvellous attraction about the Eight of time. We dread the end, yet we hurry on. The word " pastime " is synonymous with pleasure, and who that has ever awaked in the night but has been glad to find the hour later than he feared ? All the same, when we get to middle age we cast back lingering glances at " the lad that's gone." The better we have succeeded in life, the warmer is our senti- ment towards that youth of the past in whom all our successes were latent., the more sadly do we see him drop out of mind as
the men who knew him become fewer and fewer. Was this the thought in the heart of the old ballad-singer who saw the late fulfilment of his early ambitions ?— " And I line dreamed a dreary dream
Beyont the isle o' Skye,
I saw a dead man win a fight I think that man was L"
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