OLD AND YOUNG.
WE have often wondered that a single personal anti- thesis—the relation between young men and young women—should have engrossed the whole attention of writers of fiction. No doubt that is the most interesting relation of life, but it is now also the relation on which there is least that is new to be said ; and it is not, to the extent that any one would fancy who took his ideas from literature, the key- note of life. Another antithesis, only second to this in importance and interest, and perhaps not second in width of range, has had as yet no adequate literary representation. There are many men and women who know little or nothing of the emotion which makes up the business of life in novels, and not a few who would say at its close, that no contrast summed up so much of its interest for them as that between old and young.
Every contrast is both uniting and dividing. When novelists paint the relation of men and women, they forget the last half of this truth. When they paint the relations of old and young, they forget the first. They take it for granted that there is nothing but attraction in difference of sex ; nothing but repulsion in difference of age. Both assumptions are baseless. The last male retreat, we believe, which will be invaded by female tread is the Club, although there is no reason whatever, except the distaste of some men for female society, why men and women should not share their clubs ; the repulsion being mutual to a certain extent, though that illustration would not suit the other side. Absorbed in the contrast of sex, our romance-writers have neglected every- thing in the contrast of age that is not either tragic or comic, and all that is most characteristic is neither. Their error illustrates a chapter of history. When first the interest of individual relation dawned on the mind of Europe—a change, it is significant to notice, contemporary with that whereby the word " catholic" lost its proper meaning, and came to designate a sect—the peak first illumined had its brightness enhanced by deep shadow. Shakespeare's classical forerunners knew the emotion of Romeo and Juliet only in its grossest form, and passed it by. The Cordelia of Sophocles cares so little for her betrothed that the commentators dispute whether the only tender expression by which he is greeted be from her lips or her sister's; the Hamlet of Aschylus has no betrothed, and seeks none. And there were reasons why the interests of age should be as much neglected in the literature of the Renaissance as the interests of youth were exaggerated. Men were constantly in the presence of those who either yielded or claimed subjection, and age was on the side which made the claim. We do not say that that was either a better or a worse state of things than what prevails now, on the whole; but it was certainly less favourable to the right understanding of old age, which is never seen in its best aspect when it makes any attempt to regulate other lives. Decision falls naturally to the undimmed memories of maturity, and an ideal age would be almost as yielding as an ideal youth. When, then, the associations of age were with this unsuitable claim, the attractiveness of old age was hidden. " Honour, love, obedience, troops of friends," are described by Shakespeare as its fitting adjuncts ; but its picture, on his page, is such as to sanction the notion that "crabbed age and youth cannot live together;" it is always associated with something pitiable, harsh, or despicable. Perhaps Shakespeare did not often see old age without some tinge of these qualities. Youth, on the other hand, was probably seen by him under a more graceful aspect than it is by our contemporaries. When old gentlemen find the school- boys of the house occupying all the arm-chairs and leaving all the doors open behind them, they are apt to vary the quotation, and decide that age and crabbed youth cannot live together. A prejudice and a strong reaction against it, have, indeed, often the same effect.
However, it is high time to get over the effect of both, and we see no signs of our writers of fiction doing so. Where is the novel that deals with the relation of old and young ? The nearest approximation we can call to mind is the picture of the uncle and nephew, ranged on opposite sides of the revo- lutionary war, in Victor Hugo's " Quatre-vingt Treize,"—a very far-off approximation, where the lurid light that falls on every figure obliterates all individual distinctions, and where the two men who are separated by half-a-century, and who do typify the relation of the past and future to the stormy present, might, as far as all their personal character- istics go, be twin-brothers. Yet we remember no other novel which comes even as near as this to a study of those relations which have occupied more of the atten- tion of many people than any thoughts about marriage. The aged person who has never felt the attraction of those who stand as near the beginning of life as he stands near its end, is a rarer being, we believe, than the man who has never felt the love of woman. We are inclined to call him also a poorer one. From some points of -view, delusive and prejudiced no doubt, but connected with large and important experience, we might be tempted to say that man's love for woman has brought the race as much of pain as joy. Its successor brings the zephyr in place of the hurricane, and refreshment in place of desolation. Of course we must compare the love of age for youth, with "love that never found its earthly close." This love has no earthly close ; it is almost always an unmutual feeling, and if it create any adequate response, it is apt to pass out of the realm to which our words chiefly apply. But if it has no fruition, it has no disappointment ; it seeks no response, and fears no possible rival. It renews a large part of what was sweet in the earlier and more vivid emotion, but mirrors nothing of its bitterness ; owning no kindred with jealousy or shame, and greeting only with welcome all who would share its wealth. The smooth skin, the flowing locks, the bright eyes of youth, have for the aged the same kind of charm that the beauty of women has for men; but with that superfi- cial admiration blends a feeling that is far more deeply uniting..
" I, who so long with tongue and pen
Have worked among my fellow-men, Am weary, thinking of your load,"
says Longfellow, addressing a group of children in one of his latest utterances, and well fulfils in that simple utterance his function of expressing gracefully the feelings of all the world. This young creature, beginning the journey we are ending, has to exchange hopes for realities, to find ideal schemes shrink into their meagre fulfilment, to feel warm love turn chill, and dim misgivings congeal into the icy burden that he will cease, at last, to endeavour to shake off. These things are not the whole of life ; but, as we look back towards youth, they seem to tinge it all, and we feel for those who have to discover that they -are woven into its very web, a compassion one touch of which heals enmity, extinguishes resentment, and passes a wash of oblivion over those memories which poison life more than any other ill, except enduring physical pain.
This gain of old age is often hidden from us by the distorted forms of expression and assumption which it has itself created.. Among women, at all events, one is accustomed to an unreal phraseology, as if all anxieties and precautions were solely taken on account of the young, and apart from their welfare the dangers and discomforts of life were matters of indifference to all who had reached a not very advanced time of life. Any- body who looks at life sees that to be untrue. Physical ease, we fear, grows more and not less important as time goes on. The sympathies are certainly not active while any one is taking precautions to avoid a draught or a dazzle, and it is sometimes disappointing to find the amount of engrossing interest put into these endeavours by some persons whom one has reckoned, during long years, among the most unselfish of one's. acquaintance. But the barriers which old age sets up are very trivial compared with those which it takes down. Youth is self-occupied, rightly and inevitably to a certain extent, wrongly yet almost inevitably to an extent not very much smaller. It is the best of men and women, not the worst, whose youth is clouded and entangled with speculations about their own place in life, and while these are going on, self shuts. in the circle of observation. " On me disait dans ces jours," says Edgar Quinet, " Tu ne vois pas ce qui est an devant de toi.' Rien n'etait plus vrai, je n'y voyais qae moi." That is the experience of youth among the unselfish to an extent which we may almost say is not reached in age among the selfish. A preference of one's own comfort to that of other persons is checked by nothing but difficult self-discipline.. But that speculation about self, that interest in the drama of which self is the central figure, which is far more engrossing and blinding than desire for mere comfort, withers away of itself in life's autumn.
Surely we should surrender with more equanimity the pleasures and the capacities of youth, if we knew that the years were to bring us in their stead a new sense of kindred,—to reveal, in the mere fact of our being fellow-travellers along the way common to all flesh, a new significance as the journey draws to its close, and its different stages are foreshortened into close approximation. Something of this we have felt when life lay before us, for youth, like age, sees life as a whole. But it is a very dim and superficial feeling in comparison with its later phase ; overcome in a moment by distaste or preference, and not in the same way illuminative of another mind. There is deep consolation in the thought that the mere flight of time brings us to a stage where commonplace human beings inspire in others of their kind, equally commonplace, such an unselfish interest as is felt in earlier life only by the pre-eminently good, or inspired only by the pre-eminently gifted. Nothing exceptional is needed to create this glow of sympathy ; some- thing exceptional is needed to prevent it when its season has come. It is as if our spirits were permitted in this single relation to emerge into a sense of our common life, which, in the change so soon awaiting them, they will discover to be as much a part of the original construction of our nature as the sense of individuality itself,—a fundamental instinct, revealed by the falling away of what is temporary, and ready to expand into a larger scope when those barriers disappear.
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