MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD
NICOLSON
ON a certain morning during the past week I reached the age of sixty. That is a formidable thing to happen. On the Wednesday night I had retired to rest, a mere stripling of fifty- nine with a promising future before me : but when the grey dawn of Thursday crept through the lattice it brought with it, not a Diamond jubilee feel, but that iron figure LX, setting a grim seal on all my hopes. It is no help at all that my friends should assure me that, honestly speaking, I do not look a day over fifty ; such remarks are kind, they are polite ; but they are not rejuvenating. I remember an octogenarian once saying to me : " Old age would be intolerable did it not arrive so gradually." But there was no gradual- ness at all about Thursday morning ; the thing had come to me suddenly in the passing of a single night : junior fui etenim senui : there was no more to be said. In two or three years from now, in a few months maybe, I shall feel the bony fingers of decrepitude clutching at my frame. Already the first shade of deafness is creep- ing over me ; I find myself saying " Really!" and " Fancy that!" in the hope of avoiding the too constant iteration of that one word " What?" In five years, in six years, I may lose even my gift of curiosity, that happy little bird which has fluttered beside me all these decades. And will my sense of excitement also leave me, so that I cease to care what Tiridates threatens and fail to notice the blackness of the ash-buds in March? Better than that, let death come suddenly and as a blow in the night. For what compensations are there for this irreparable outrage? There are no compensations. I have no desire whatsoever that my passions should be spent ; I liked my passions very much indeed. I do not want to be vener- able ; it seems to me a dull thing to be. It may be that my judge- ments will gain in weight and authority ; but I do not care for judgements that have put on weight ; I prefer them to be slim and mobile. I should not wish to be an elder statesman ; I should like to be a young statesman. I see no advantage in being sixty : I wish I wasn't.
There is however one thin line of comfort which I can derive. I calculate that, had I not reached the age of sixty on November 21st, 1946, I should not have been born on November 21st, 1886: and that, had I not arrived during the reign of Queen Victoria, I should not have experienced the intricate changes which have rendered these sixty years the most interesting of all periods of transition. It is not merely that I have been privileged to witness many important transformations ; it is that those who were born before the invention of the internal combustion engine inherited the atmosphere of the past ; whereas those who were born after that unfortunate event can possess only a sense of the present and the future. My parents, when I was a little boy, lived in Morocco. There was no electric light in our small town, there were no wheeled vehicles ; I would return from some Christmas festival, mounted upon a horse with a servant preceding me with a lantern. The beams of this flickering light would fall, now upon some iron- studded door in a blank wall, now upon a street fountain spluttering upon coloured tiles, and now upon a rat creeping from an open sewer. My horse would pick his way carefully through the mud and garbage ; suddenly a door would open in the silent street, disclosing a small courtyard, with a lamp hanging from the colon- nade, its wick smoking angrily across the arches. The lamp was shaped as are the lamps of Pompeii.
* * * * It is not the glamour of the East which that smoking lamp recalls to me, it is the life of Rome and Athens. Around the outer courtyard there would be square bare rooms, with a small light upon the window- ledge and, upon the floor, matting and embroidered cushions. A negro slave would be stewing little white beans over a charcoal brazier; from the inner courtyard would come the giggling of the women. Someone would throw a sprig of dried sage upon the brazier, and its smoke would mingle blue and pungent with the black smoke of the hanging lamp. My host had all the gratritas of the Roman patrician, his gestures were deliberate ; at moments, with a slow and accustomed movement, he would sweep the folds of his toga back from his fore- arm ; in his hand he held a small ebony phial of spice. Even so, through silent redolent streets, would Atticus have been carried to the house of Cicero, and even so did Socrates, " fresh from the bath and wearing his best pair of slippers," walk slowly towards the house of Agathon. In those streets today electric bulbs beat harshly upon the little walls, the hoot of motor horns drowns the laughter in the harem. But I have taken part in the Symposium : I know exactly what sort of pattern the lantern of Alcibiades swung crazily along the walls. What understanding have our children, born in the machine age, of the way that people travelled when there were no trains, or motor-cars, or aeroplanes or even roads? The long desert track winds slowly, and when evening comes the dust-devils cease their whirling and the mirages no longer glimmer with their lakes and palms. One knows the crumbling caravanserai, the smell of camel-thorn burning, the little group of tents under the stars ; one knows how Marco Polo eased his tired limbs, and lay awake thinking of the Giudecca and listening to the camels grunting to each other in the dark.
Even if it were possible for our young men to escape the fumes of petrol, to plunge deep into the Yemen or the Hadramaut, and thus to touch beneath their fingers the texture of another age ; even if this be possible, they will never see the eighteenth and the seventeenth centuries re-enacting themselves before their eyes. They will not watch, as I have watched, a King bend down to wash the feet of twelve beggars, with priests around him swinging golden censers and chanting latin hymns. They will not run, as I have run, beside the carriage of an old lady, crouched deep among the cushions of her barouche, of an old Queen-Empress whose eyes were cross and tired behind her silver spectacles, and who had been born before Byron died. They will not see a Tsar of Russia walk hurriedly from the Winter Palace and bless the waters of the Neva, seeming so small, so small, among the scarlet giants of his Cossack guard. They will not meet people who had bowed to Napoleon's widow or who had driven in their own yellow carriages from Calais to Rome. They will not remember, even, when the first six London taxis, shaped like cabriolets, were parked in Knightsbridge ; in their ears will never echo the happy jingle of a hansom cab. They will not be able to recall, as I can recall, the first time that they rode in a motor-car, or how the people rushed to the doors to watch this strange mechanical dog-cart clatter by. To them such words as " mutoscope " or " bioscope " will be meaningless, nor will they remember the day when the first faint notes of the wireless spluttered in the ear-phones. Nor will they be able, as I was able, to scribble in the margin of a book : " It was at this moment that I saw my first aeroplane." Now that the world has become too wonderful, they will lose their sense of wonder. Now that everything has become possible, the impossible has lost its glamour.
* * * * I should have been denied these curious experiences had I not lived for sixty years. It is certainly some comfort in my affliction to remind myself that I knew the world before the internal combustion engine came to spoil it. But this slight solace is marred for me by the reflection that the twentieth century is more interesting than the nineteenth. It was in no way stimulating to wear a top hat on Sundays and to leave cards in Grosvenor Square. I do not really believe that the present generation are to be pitied because they will never see four Court Chamberlains walking downstairs backwards with lighted candelabra in their hands. It gives me a mild pleasure to realise that I understand the past better than they ever will. But what I most desire is to see this social revolution discover its own formula ; I want to watch the lava cool ; and since that will take twenty years at least, I regret that the figure LX should have stamped itself upon me so suddenly, so soon.
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