EARLY RETIREMENTS.

MR. GLADSTONE'S very partial retirement at the age of sixty-five from public responsibilities, a retirement which, if he remains in Parliament, as probably he will, will leave upon him more than the ordinary responsibilities of ordinary Members,—heavy correspondences, eager literary work, and the position of the chief political consultee of a great party,—will probably make a great many people consider afresh the compara- tive advantages of reserving a retired leisure for their latter days, or of "dying in harness." Charles Lamb thought a retirement so gpmplete that he boasted in his glee of not knowing the day of the month or of the week, and of having no occasion to know it. by no means too early or too complete at the age of fifty. Mr. Glad- stone is fifteen years older, and " retires " only from that excess of work which makes the difference between a public post of a very laborious, and one of a comparatively easy character. However, all retirements are relative, and it is likely enough that relatively to his vitality and powers of production, Mr. Gladstone is laying down what will give him almost as much sense of re- gained freedom at sixty-five, as Charles Lamb at fifty. Except, however, for very short periods of time, the man who retires judiciously, has almost as much to do after his retirement as before, and probably hardly more sense of a large personal discretion as to the distribution of his tasks than he had before. He has different things to do, but they seem to him just as incumbent on him as the tasks he has escaped. At least, if he has not, it is pretty certain that he must have made a blunder in not preferring to " die in harness." How often do we hear of men dying just because they have given up the only thing they could do, and found no other stimulus to exertion in its place, like the horse whose case interested Mr. Pickwick so much, which was kept up by the shafts in which it worked, and collapsed when removed from them. It may fairly be laid down as a good general rule that unless there are a great many alternative duties waiting for a man who retires from his wonted occupations,— duties which directly they succeed to their place in the inherit- ance of his time, will seem to him almost as peremptory and engrossing as their predecessors,—he is making a mistake in retiring at all. Of course we do not mean that the aged ought to try and do as much as they did in middle-life. As a rule, it will be found that the approach of age shows itself in the comparative slowness with which the judgment is concentrated and the intellect applied. There are few men who can do equally well half as much at seventy-five as they could have done at forty- five. We mean only that it is the greatest possible mistake to suppose that life without engagements, and engagements which we feel obliged to undertake, is rest. There is very often real rest in the exchange of one class of engagements for another,— in exchanging, for instance, engagements which consist in tran- sacting business, or at all events, in influencing people's actions directly, for engagements which consist chiefly in reconsidering the premisses or data of action, i.e., chiefly in influencing people's thoughts ; or, to take a more common case of retirement, in exchanging the duties which chiefly affect strangers,—such as commercial duties,—for duties which chiefly affect one's own intimates and family. Almost all practical men's lives in- volve a good deal of business which cannot by its very nature interest them deeply, except so far as every right-minded man has a healthy pride in thorough work, and every ambitious man a pleasure in successful work, and every needy man an interest in profitable work ; and it may well happen that, towards the latter part of life, duties of this kind, which are not intrinsic- ally fascinating, may be exchanged for duties of another kind, which are. No doubt it is some feeling of this sort which has actuated Mr. Gladstone. He has enjoyed politics, but never without a feeling that he could enjay thorough research on one or two great subjects,—on theology, and on Homer,— even more. The notion may be a mistaken one, because a mind that has once acquired, in its highest intensity, the habit of turning all its mental stores into moral, or social, or political in- fluence, is very apt to find the very difficult and embarrassed, and often indeterminate field, of pure intellectual research, compara- tively tame and flat. But be that as it may, the only legitimate motive for retiring from work which you are still competent to do, is, that there is other work which you are even more or equally competent to do, and from which you have been debarred by the engrossing claims of your regular calling. Even so, unless it be work on which you feel sure you can leave a mark useful for those who are to come after you, indeed one even more useful for purposes of guidance, than you can on that of your main calling, we doubt the policy of early retirements. People with many interests who have passed by with regret, from sheer want of time, many courses of study and lines of investigation for which they feel themselves not without capacity, are apt to for- get that the chances are very much against their taking up, with much effect for the world at large, at a late stage of

life, a study to which others have devoted themselves from the very first. No doubt they say to themselves that it is not for the purpose of teaching others, but for the purpose of making up their own minds, that they desire to enter at the tenth or eleventh hour on these studies. But that has always seemed to us a ques- tionable motive. Those who believe in personal immortality must feel the most perfect confidence either that they will obtain much more completely in a future state the knowledge they crave, or else that the significance of that knowledge will be merged in that of other and larger knowledge, so that the value of 'it will be superseded ;—while those who do not believe in a personal immortality, must feel that it matters exceedingly little

whether they die with a little more or a little less knowledge on a subject which they cannot hope to make completely their own. A then, a man has the choice between doing what few or none

can do so well for the benefit of the present world, and acquiring for himself some small accession of speculative knowledge which

is not very likely to benefit any one but himself, we suspect the former is the nobler choice. If, on the contrary, his calling be of

a kind which many another can discharge as well, while that for which he deserts it is one for which he has great qualifications not easily supplied by others,—and this, no doubt, would be, and must be, the case in multitudes of instances, were not money- making regarded as so eminently obligatory and meritorious a pursuit by Englishmen,—the latter is the nobler choice. But it is never to be forgotten that men are apt to be very bad judges

of their own power of giving themselves to really new modes of life. It seems pretty certain, in spite of his humorous essay, that if Charles Lamb could have taken half work, instead of being com- pletely superannuated at the age of fifty, he would have been a much happier and a more productive man in his latter years than he actu-

ally was. For in his case it needed the contrast between drudgery and literature, and the gentle tonic to his energies which fixed habits of work gave him, to bring out the full play of his humour and literary talent. Retired men, even with the amplest claims

on their time, are seldom able to work at their new occupations -without a considerable quantity of the old kind of work to make them feel busy. Merchants or lawyers who retire early should

-accept ' directorships' or arbitrations,' if only to give that ne- cessity for promptness and for compression to their arrangements, which is of the very essence of real efficiency. A task which may be done at any time is done at none. The paradox that only the busy have any leisure is perfectly true. A man who,

-after being accustomed to the screw of heavy business exi- gencies, suddenly finds that the pressure is completely taken off, becomes demoralised, and has no time at all for that which

is now his sole duty. Even Mr. Gladstone himself will pro- bably do twice as much with a seat in Parliament, and a con- sciousness that the heaviest part of his private enterprises must be squeezed into the long vacation, than he would do with the whole year at his disposal. Take but a portion of the weight from behind your horse, and he will make up the difference in speed ; but take nearly all away, and he will soon get saucy, and object to go any faster than before.

However, we suspect that what makes many men look forward so eagerly to an early retirement from their regular labours, is

not so much the craving for time to devote to other pursuits than that of their main calling, as the vague hope that in grater quietness of life they may gain a tranquillity and

clearness of spirit to which English practical life is a stranger, —nay, which in the hurry of petty engagements and a constant necessity for a close packing of small endeavours, there is no room left. In the crowding of our duties, we lose the distinction between the means and the ends of life, and hardly discriminate between the success gained at the cost of qualities which we once valued, and those which we have gained by the steady use and discipline of those qualities.

Matthew Arnold has expressed finely enough in one of his most delicate poems the sense of hurry and confusion which marks our boasted practical life, a sense of confusion which un- questionably engenders a great deal of that vain craving for a breathing-time at the close of life, for which, unfortunately, it so badly prepares us. He is contrasting two peaceful graves, one beside the Mediterranean, one at the foot of the Himalayas, with the din and fret of the lives which ended there :—

" In cities should we English lie

Where cries are rising ever now, And men's incessant stream goes by ! We who pursue

" Our business with unslackening stride, Traverse in troops, with care-filled breast The soft Mediterranean side,

The Nile, the East,

"And see all sights from pole to pole, And glance, and nod, and bustle by, And never once possess our soul Before we die."

And almost every man, however practical, feels this obscurely ; has a notion that his own life is a riddle to him, that he hardly knows where it has failed, and still less why ; where it has succeeded, and whether he has reason to be proud of or humiliated by his success ; and from the oppression of this confused feeling arises, we believe, a great deal of the frequent craving for leisure at the end of life, which disguises itself in the form of some fond and usually false anticipation that the lucidity of vision into the meaning of life which we have never attained during the activity of its eager aims, may be secured when those eager aims have been put aside towards its close. But as a rule, it is then too late, if not too painful, to comprehend all its blunders and its burning heats, even when they have not been forgotten. Besides, the mind is then too much accustomed to be engaged in trivial undertakings of short period, and to give itself up to the interest of promoting the desired event ; and some equivalent for these small efforts must be found, or the worst of all results, vacuity of mind, succeeds to the paltry interests which have been foregone. Thus, instead of new clearness of vision, retirement from active work means, nine times out of ten, a sleepier study of the newspaper, more naps, more indolent reading, less real re- flection, and a great deal more sheer gossip.

We suspect that what is needed for most men is not an early retirement from practical life, under the illusion that leisure will give a new clearness to the mind's vision, but not unfrequent in- tervals of real retirement throughout its busiest part ; that instead of aiming at mere holiday,' and what is called change and recreation, we should aim at securing intervals which will enable us more or less to understand ourselves, and to weigh our aims, as well as the means we are pursuing to gain those aims ; in short, that instead of the constant strain forwards, some of our vacations should be retreats from life to enable us to see how it would appear to us, were it really the end, and how, if a new term of it begins, we should try to mould it anew. That would be infinitely more fruitful than the somewhat hopeless retirement at the real close of active exertion, when all our blunders have been made, and few or none can be, in this life at least, practically repaired ; for this last considera- tion alone is one sufficient to make us shrink from what seem the vain regrets which must follow from sincerely reviewing what there is no longer an opening to mend. There might, indeed, be some real lucidity of vision in the retrospect of the final retire- ment of an aged man from active pursuits, if there had been fre- quent intervals in which this finale had, as it were, been rehearsed, so as to form the data for new Acts in the Drama of Life, with a revised scheme running through them. Hardly any one can hope to possess his soul' perfectly once before he dies who has not aimed at it, not merely more than once, but time after time, as the years pass. -Not even the business of life itself needs more reiterated preparation for it to make it sound and good, than does the retirement from active duties at the close. Indeed, to a con- siderable extent, preparation for the one is, we suppose, preparation for the other also.