YOUTH AND AGE.
THE discussion on Mr. Gladstone's retirement must have brought home to the minds of many persons the convic- tion that ours is a time when influence and fame are, to a pecu- liar extent, the lot of the aged. No prominent figure is youthful. The leaders of our two political Parties—both the living one, and he who has just ceased at once to live and to influence public life—had both passed the allotted age of man ; while their predecess5r spent ten years of his most successful govern- ment as their senior. Literature has just lost its one unques- tioned representative in the person of a man of eighty-six, and Poetry retains an equally emphatic claim to vigorous life among us, as far as now appears, only during the lifetime of two men who are both past seventy. Even in the Scientific world eminence more nearly corresponds to a late period of life than we should have expected, in a pursuit in which youth is so great an advantage. Perhaps the strongest proof of this slow development is the fact which is apt to disguise it, that public men are called young until they are undeniably old ; BO that, like George IV., in Moore's jeering verse, they may " come in the promise and bloom of threescore." Sometimes the description is made in a kindly spirit ; it seems harsh not to call a person young who is still insignificant, and yet has been before the public for some time, but the euphemism would be impossible, if we had many eminent men in the generation below that which is thus accredited with the interest and promise of youth. The close of our century appears to be no less the age of old men than its dawn was that of young men, and what- ever the laws which ordain that some fruit shall ripen early and some late, they are markedly exhibited in the qualities of these two periods.
The fact is much clearer than its explanation, though some explanation may be plausibly suggested in many of the cir- cumstances of our time. The Revolution was a time of rapid development. And though the influences of our own age are less simple, we may, perhaps, say that an age of advanced demo- cracy sets up barriers against the emergence of youth into public notice,—at all events, into political life. No biography of our own day will record the offer of a Peer to bring a young than into Parliament, and the conditions under which he can succeed in making himself audible to the present electorate, are not, under ordinary circumstances, attainable in early life. Nor do we think the scope of this observation is confined, as much as may appear, to the field of politics. However, the dis- cussion of this question would lead us away from our present object, and it is enough here to note the fact that some in- fluences of our own time, whatever they be, keep back the tardy fruit, and set us looking, like the school-boy in Landor's grace- ful verses, for " the dubious apple in the yellow leaves." Such an epoch seems one specially suited for considering the advantages of a time of life of which the disadvantages are obvious. That dim eight, dull hearing, weakened powers of locomotion, and failing memory, are evils, all must allow ; nay, we must concede that long before we receive such telling notice that our mansion here is getting out of repair, and must be shortly abandoned, we have parted with some of the attractiveness and interest of life. We have lost its store of infinite possibility. We know, and our most partial friends and kindred know too, that there are powers and excellences, once hoped for, that are as much beyond our reach as the achievements of genius ; we feel ourselves hemmed in on all sides by walls, partly of our own building, but not, therefore, destructible by us, which make our plot of terrestrial seed-ground look very small, in contrast to the vast estate we portioned out so short a time ago. What can be said for the time of shrinking hopes and growing regrets, of failing powers and increasing compunction? We may plead, on the threshold of our apology, that the advan- tages of the last half of an average life have been obscured, by the fact that in fiction Old Age has been consistently and unscrupu- lously libelled. People who have passed thirty have no vocation or purpose, according to those subservient caterers for youth— the writers of plays and romances—but to watch over the interests of their juniors. Any interest in life for its own sake, any plan that has reference to one's own pleasure, one's own instruction, one's own improvemeut, becomes absurd, almost indecent, as soon as youth is past. The Alcestis of Euripides may be taken as a fair type of all its successors in this respect, and we must confess to a considerable sympathy with the old man who is the object of such stinging and bitter reproaches because he is not eager to give his life for his son. Biography does something to correct the misrepresentations of its seductive sister, but creeping after her with laggard steps, like the Late after Ate, can hardly hope to gain the ear of more than a tithe of those she has deluded, or to make an equal im- pression even upon those. Worst of all, even in the life of persons whose history will never form the theme of the bio- grapher the false theory has taken root, and shows itself in a phraseology adjusted to the views of these abject and powerful flatterers of the young—a phraseology, confined, it is true, to one-half the human race, and confined to their speech. A woman past forty, we observe, never wishes to avoid even small-pox or fever for her own sake ; it is always assumed, and often stated, that her sole motive in not putting herself in the way of these inconveniences is that she might not convey contagion to some young relative. It is possible that this abjuring of all interest in one's own welfare is not so untrue on the lips of most women as it would be on those of most men, but we should be much dis- appointed if we expected the most unselfish of our friends to act up to a declaration, made without conscious insincerity, that " for oneself, of course, one would not care, but the young creature with one has to be cousidered." The French aristocrat who took the part that Pheres refused, and went to the guillotine for his son, on being mistaken for him, did not feel, probably, that the action cost him nothing ; nor could there be a worse preparation for the self-sacrifices which are actually demanded from the old, than the theory that old age makes sacrifice easy. However, perhaps this is not a very dangerous form of the heresy we would suppress, and as it is one which seems to give the heretics much satisfaction, it may be thought harsh in an essay on the advantages of old age to denounce it further.
We have not, however, finished our indictment against litera- ture. It is not enough to say that fiction is guilty and biography- feeble, we must carry our complaint even into that domain of the essayist where alone an exhibition of sound doc- trine might be hoped for. The one immortal essay on Old Age is rather a dissertation on its needlessness than on its privileges. " We must struggle against old age, as we do against death," says Cicero. The bitter wind that disrobes beech and elm of their mantle of gold and amber is not so hurtful to the beauty of the waning year, as that precept to the beauty of the waning life ; and we find it difficult to forgive the eloquent preacher for having associated with the stately music in which he sets forth the hopes of the aged man, so false and impossible an ideal of his duties. No remnant of antiquity, so much as the " Cato Major," shows with equal clear- ness at once what Christianity brought mankind, and what it found among them. Nowhere are those yearning desires which transcend the grave, set forth with a nobler simplicity and earnestness ; and if the day is, indeed, about to return when they must be confessed with the same sense of temerity, we may, as the years advance, recur with a peculiar emotion to the declaration of a Heathen that he is transported with joy at the approach of the bright day that shall bring him to the gathering of heavenly souls, whither his dear ones have fled before him. But nowhere, in any expression of antique feeling with which a modern is equally in sympathy, are we so much impressed by the absence of all that makes up one side of our ideal of moral beauty. The recipient spirit which confers the grace alike of childhood and of old age appear mere weakness even to a sympathetic and humane citizen of old Rome. One hemi- sphere of goodness was as much shrouded from his eyes as one hemisphere of the moon, and he has little to say of the time when the other grows dim except that it need not grow dim so soon as we fancy. He thinks that old age should be the culmination of maturity, that the lamp should burn with a steadily increasing brightness till its extinction, that no part
of life should be so little like its dawn as its twilight. Ah, how entirely is the grace of old age missed by one who seeks to strip it of all that is characteristic of itself !
To begin a enlogitun on Old Age by an admission that fiction presents it with the colouring of unjust depreciation, and that history inadequately corrects the misrepresentation, that the language of ordinary life in one-half the human race ad- justs itself to this view, and that the great moral writer who has made it his especial theme seems to dissipate those terrors with which he allows it to be encircled only by the pleading that the exertion of those qualities which it destroys may hold it at bay altogether: this may not appear a hopeful undertaking. And yet the truth is that many of the conventional characteristics of youth and age--or at least, of later life—should often be ex- changed for each other. Youth is often listless, aimless, vacant, a mere hovering on the outside of life. Age (extending the word to include all life past middle age) is often vivid, intense, crowded with interest and hope. Elderly men and women (outside the pages of a novel) may still feel a keen interest in the issues of life for their own sake, and wake up to new interests and new hopes, which are stronger than the old ones. A man fails in his profession,—the dis- appointment and the mortification throw a chill gloom over the morning of his career, and a large part of its afternoon ; but as old age draws near, other interests steal upon him ; he wakes up to discover that life has unsuspected stores of warmth and pleasantness, and he dies a happier man than his successful rival. Something of the kind is true, again, at times, of an un- successful marriage. The chemistry of human relation is so mysterious, that we can never say that the time is past at which two may not become one. Sometimes a great calamity unites two hearts that have beat for a lifetime in married separateness ; sometimes devotion, apparently unfelt for years, seems rewarded in a moment ; sometimes we can only say that a new breath has passed over the two lives, and they blend under its influence. Nowhere is the meaning of the parable of the labourers in the vineyard more fully realised than in the tardy, and yet sudden, changes of human relation. The sum- mons to all that makes the life of life may come at the eleventh hour, and confer a boon which, in its satisfying fullness, shall be indistinguishable from that which is the recompense of a life- time of well-earned success.
These remarks apply rather to the fictitious brilliancy attached to youth, than to the fictitious shadow cast on age, but the two are part of the same delusion. And yet, in some respects, the advantages of youth are also the advantages of age. We have allowed ourselves to apply the misleading epithet of "second childhood" to a condition that is as unlike childhood as possible, but the later stages of life correspond in many respects to its earlier ones. What we miss, in the noonday of our career, is that definiteness of relation which enriches alike its morning and its evening. It is not the selfishness of human beings which keeps them separate, so much as their blindness to each other's needs. The simplicity of the claim of childhood is a great part of its beneficent influence. Life takes its start in relation ; the father and mother, brother and sister, make up the world of the child ; he is the constant recipient of service that he must accept, and of direction that he must follow ; and where the ideal of childhood is not flagrantly out- raged, the mere position in which he stands to his parents is enough to supply all that life needs of duty and of hope. And something of the same kind may be true, and often is true, of the end of life. The distrusted heir, who has read in the grudg- ing looks of father or uncle the constant question of Henry IV., " Dost thou so hunger for mine empty chair ?" finds that a time is come when his is the hand most willingly accepted, when his eyes are permitted to do duty for those that are grown dim, and when jarring views and incompatible tastes give way to the blessed simplicity of service. It is the absence of all sense of this opportunity which is so marked in the treatise of Cicero. He knew well the influences of weakness on the baser side of our nature. " Every offence is more keenly felt when it is combined with infirmity," is one of those sentences, at least in the terseness of the original, which recur to one as summing up years of experience. But he knew not that the influences which quicken distaste are capable of a ready inversion, by which they bear us far beyond the reach of distaste; he knew not how readily the pole of the magnet might be changed, and the object of revulsion might become the object of reverence. This is the great revolution which we may or may not connect with Christianity, but which all must recognise as separating us from one who lived before Christ. We have learnt to know the might in all things feeble. We know the power of dependence. For us, even the nature that has not much other charm becomes attractive, if once it accepts the feebleness and the dependence of advanced life. Only the endeavour to conceal or defy weakness can baffle that reverence for weakness which has become an instinct of humanity.
To regard Old Age as a period of regret is the same kind of illusion as to suppose that distant hills are blue. We must pass through much regret before we reach old age, no doubt. It would be too much to assert that no life ever fulfilled all that it seemed to promise, and there are some lives, no doubt, that fulfil much more ; still, on the whole, there are not many who would deny, in looking back on life, that it has been both more painful and more futile than they expected. It has brought much they did not venture to hope for, but it has withheld more that they made almost sure of. To wake up to the fact that our life is to be a poorer thing than we thought it would be, is a dreary experience, but it is passed long before we reach the close of our career. The main circumstances of life have then been accepted as a part of the scenery through which the pilgrimage has lain. Its mistakes have borne fruit, but the fruit has been less bitter at last than at first, and mistake and mis- fortune are blended to the eye of the aged as planet and. constellation on the midnight sky. Nor must this be regarded as a part of the weakness of age ; it is a poor and morbid vanity that refuses to let past mistake become present mis- fortune, and time does for us in this respect what reason might do at once, if feeling were always under its control. We speak of course of real mistake, and not of wrong-doing,—the sense of which is a thing so hidden and sacred that one can hardly say whether it is keener at one time of life or another,—and perhaps• we overrate the importance of the fact that it is not likely to find much expression after a certain time of life. At any rate,. it is an advantage to escape from the regrets that are wholly unmoral.
We sum up the advantages of age in trite, but yet significant words, when we speak of it as showing us the events of life under the influence of time. Time, it has been said, is no agent, but we should be driven to cumbrous and misleading paraphrase if we refused to speak of its work. The objects of the external world and the events of experience bear witness- with a wonderful harmony to the softening, healing influences- that come with the mere rhythm of the seasons,—the mere succession of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. As we wander over a ruined castle, and reflect that where the ivy flings its shining mantle and the wallflower lavishes its gold, was once a charred and blackened mass, speaking only of the- horror of massacre and conflagration, we have a type of the- change that comes over much experience, as we look back upon it through the vista of years. It is not merely that all things are brought into proportion, though this is much.. We should be startled, even at a time of life when youth is past, if we could look into the future, and see how changed an aspect would be taken by those events which seem to leave all their neighbourhood blackened and charred. We should refuse to believe in the wonderful transmuting power which is measured by the beat of the pendulum and the great clock of the heavens, and which, at times, seems chronicled by moments and defied by years. It is not that these things grow dim. That is often true, no doubt, but we would not reckon the loss of feeling among the advantages of old age. It is not that we feel the great emotions of life less in age than in youth, but that we feel rather their meaning than their mere poignancy. A change has come over our apprehension of them, and the far-off storm reaches the ear as music. The antithesis between pain and pleasure is often lost; we turn coldly from days in which every moment seemed golden as it passed, and seek to revive every moment that, as it passed, seemed a barbed dart. This is not .a description of all recollected experience; there is some pain that never loses its painfulness. But it is true of much that we could not believe time had any power to transmute, till we have left it far behind us.
We have lately set before our readers the striking and eloquent passage in which Mr. W. R. Greg contrasts the different colouring taken by the hopes of the future beyond the grave, in youth and age, and seems to allow that as it comes nearer, it is the less ardently desired. The desire of the old man, he would seem to
imply, is not for a fresh start amid new conditions of being, but simply for a blank of all exertion and suffering. We wonder in writing that passage whether he remembered the closing words of the " De Senectute " with their ardent anticipation, their thrill of confident hope. Perhaps he would have said that they are not the utterance of the person in whose lips they are placed, but of one who was destined to know nothing of old age ; and that were the actual Cato speaking instead of the dramatising Cicero, we should not hear anything of those yearning desires which must have remained with all readers, as the most stirring of all Heathen testimony to the impulse within us that points to immortality, and which is thus cited by one as little depend- ent on heathen testimony as the poet Dante. It is true that Cicero wrote in the fullness of a maturity which he deemed that a resolute energy of will could render coeval with life, and his thirst for "the life which alone deserves the name of life" affords no testimony that that longing is characteristic of the last period of our sojourn here ; nor is it from the lips of the aged that the hope receives much encouragement, in ordinary circumstances. As death draws near, men become disinclined for any contemplation of the experience that lies beyond it ; they are weary, and shrink from every effort that involves emotion, even if the emotion be one of joy. And yet surely recollections must be present to the minds of most of our readers of some old age which they could least adjust to the belief that the end of this life was the end of all life,—of the closing years of some long 'careerthat affect the ear of memory like a noble modulation bring- ing in a new key, and inevitably suggesting a much richer melody than that which it opened in this world. As the windows were -darkened, and the grasshopper became a burden, and as desire failed, have we not all witnessed a revelation of new possibilities, within a character long familiar, rendering the notion that it
should cease to be as impossible as that a picture to which we have seen the master-hand setting its last touches was just about to be committed by him to the flames ? It is in the memories bequeathed by old age, no less than in the visions of ohildhood, that we find a glimpse of those
"Obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings, Blank misgivings of a creature Moving about in worlds not realised ; High instincts, before which our mortal nature Did tremble, like a guilty thing surprised."
We must not look for these in conscious utterance ; the time for anything requiring so much effort is in earlier life, when the spirit can face emotion and the intellect retains its spring. But they will come as stars in the twilight, to the eye that has watched the evening of mortal life ; in memories of new patience, new tenderness, new strength, when all outward sources of strength were drying up. They will linger as a lesson of courageous hope not only for the shortening future that is bounded by old age, but for one of which they have helped us to regard many an old age, in its newness of harmonious beauty, as the almost audible promise.
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