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UPON GROWING OLD.
By J. HAIN FRISWELL.
JOHN FOSTER, (he who sprung into celebrity from
one essay, Popular Ignorance,) had a diseased feeling
against growing old, which seems to us to be very prevalent.
He was sorry to lose every parting hour. “I have seen a
fearful sight to-day,” he would say, — “I have seen a buttercup.”
To others the sight would only give visions of the
coming spring and future summer; to him it told of the
past year, the last Christmas, the days which would never
come again, — the so many days nearer the grave. Thackeray
continually expressed the same feeling. He reverts
to the merry old time when George the Third was king.
He looks back with a regretful mind to his own youth.
The black Care constantly rides behind his chariot. “Ah,
my friends,” he says, “how beautiful was youth! We are
growing old. Spring-time and summer are past. We near
the winter of our days. We shall never feel as we have
felt. We approach the inevitable grave.” Few men, indeed,
know how to grow old gracefully as Madame de Staël
very truly observed. There is an unmanly sadness at leaving
off the old follies and the old games. We all hate fogeyism.
Dr. Johnson, great and good as he was, had a touch
of this regret, and we may pardon him for the feeling. A
youth spent in poverty and neglect, a manhood consumed
in unceasing struggle, are not preparatives to growing old in
day, the evening should have a sunset glow, and, when
the night sets in, look back with regret at the “gusty, babbling,
and remorseless day”; but if we do so, we miss the
supporting faith of the Christian and the manly cheerfulness
of the heathen. To grow old is quite natural; being
natural, it is beautiful; and if we grumble at it, we miss
the lesson, and lose all the beauty.
Half of our life is spent in vain regrets. When we are
boys we ardently wish to be men; when men we wish as
ardently to be boys. We sing sad songs of the lapse of
time. We talk of “auld lang syne,” of the days when we
were young, of gathering shells on the sea-shore and throwing
them carelessly away. We never cease to be sentimental
upon past youth and lost manhood and beauty. Yet
there are no regrets so false, and few half so silly. Perhaps
the saddest sight in the world is to see an old lady,
wrinkled and withered, dressing, talking, and acting like a
very young one, and forgetting all the time, as she clings to
the feeble remnant of the past, that there is no sham so
transparent as her own, and that people, instead of feeling
with her, are laughing at her. Old boys disguise their foibles
a little better; but they are equally ridiculous. The
feeble protests which they make against the flying chariot
of Time are equally futile. The great Mower enters the
field, and all must come down. To stay him would be impossible.
We might as well try with a finger to stop
Ixion's wheel, or to dam up the current of the Thames with
a child's foot.
Since the matter is inevitable, we may as well sit down
and reason it out. Is it so dreadful to grow old? Does old
age need its apologies and its defenders? Is it a benefit or
a calamity? Why should it be odious and ridiculous? An
old tree is picturesque, an old castle venerable, an old cathedral
inspires awe, — why should man be worse than his
works?
Let us, in the first place, see what youth is. Is it so
blessed and happy and flourishing as it seems to us?
Schoolboys do not think so. They always wish to be
older. You cannot insult one of them more than by telling
him that he is a year or two younger than he is. He
fires up at once: “Twelve, did you say, sir? No, I 'm
fourteen.” But men and women who have reached twenty-eight
do not thus add to their years. Amongst schoolboys,
notwithstanding the general tenor of those romancists who
see that everything young bears a rose-colored blush, misery
is prevalent enough. Emerson, Coleridge, Wordsworth,
were each and all unhappy boys. They all had their rebuffs,
and bitter, bitter troubles; all the more bitter because
their sensitiveness was so acute. Suicide is not unknown
amongst the young; fears prey upon them and terrify them;
ignorances and follies surround them. Arriving at manhood,
we are little better off. If we are poor, we mark the difference
between the rich and us; we see position gains all the
day. If we are as clever as Hamlet, we grow just as philosophically
disappointed. If we love, we can only be sure of
a brief pleasure, — an April day. Love has its bitterness.
“It is,” says Ovid, an adept in the matter, “full of anxious
fear.” We fret and fume at the authority of the wise
heads; we have an intense idea of our own talent. We
believe calves of our own age to be as big and as valuable
as full-grown bulls; we envy whilst we jest at the old.
We cry, with the puffed-up hero of the Patrician's Daughter
—
You are the elder man; but 't is the sun
Of knowledge on the mind's dial shining bright,
And chronicling deeds and thoughts, that makes true time.”
And yet life is withal very unhappy, whether we live
amongst the grumbling captains of the clubs, who are ever
seeking and not finding promotion; amongst ths struggling
the young men who are full of riches, titles, places, and
honor, who have every wish fulfilled, and are miserable
because they have nothing to wish for. Thus the young
Romans killed themselves after the death of their emperor,
not for grief, not for affection, not even for the fashion of
suicide, which grew afterwards prevalent enough, but from
the simple weariness of doing everything over and over
again. Old age has passed such stages as these, landed on
a safer shore, and matriculated in a higher college, in a
purer air. We do not sigh for impossibilities; we cry
not —
In the delusion of life's infancy;
I was not happy, but I knew not then
That happy I was never doomed to be.”
We know that we are not happy. We know that life
perhaps was not given us to be continuously comfortable
and happy. We have been behind the scenes, and know
all the illusions; but when we are old we are far too wise to
throw life away for mere ennui. With Dandolo, refusing a
crown at ninety-six, winning battles at ninety-four; with
Wellington, planning and superintending fortifications at
eighty; with Bacon and Humboldt, students to the last
gasp; with wise old Montaigne, shrewd in his gray-beard
wisdom and loving life, even in the midst of his fits of gout
and colic, — Age knows far too much to act like a sulky
child. It knows too well the results and the value of
things to care about them; that the ache will subside, the
pain be lulled, the estate we coveted be worth little; the
titles, ribbons, gewgaws, honors, be all more or less worthless.
“Who has honor? He that died o' Wednesday!”
Such a one passed us in the race, and gained it but to fall.
We are still up and doing; we may be frosty and shrewd,
but kindly. We can wish all men well; like them, too, so
and turmoil, which they make about matters which to us are
worthless dross. The greatest prize in the whole market —
in any and in every market — success, is to the old man
nothing. He little cares who is up and who is down; the
present he lives in and delights in. Thus, in one of those
admirable comedies in which Robson acted, we find the son
a wanderer, the mother's heart nearly broken, the father
torn and broken by a suspicion of his son's dishonesty, but
the grandfather all the while concerned only about his gruel
and his handkerchief. Even the pains and troubles incident
to his state visit the old man lightly. Because Southey sat
for months in his library, unable to read or touch the books
he loved, we are not to infer that he was unhappy. If the
stage darkens as the curtain falls, certain it also is that the
senses grow duller and more blunted. “Don't cry for me,
my dear,” said an old lady undergoing an operation; “I do
not feel it.”
It seems to us, therefore, that a great deal of unnecessary
pity has been thrown away upon old age. We begin at
school reading Cicero's treatise, hearing him talk with Scipio
and Lælius; we hear much about poor old men; we are
taught to admire the vigor, quickness, and capacity of youth
and manhood. We lose sight of the wisdom which age
brings even to the most foolish. We think that a circumscribed
sphere must necessarily be an unhappy one. It is
not always so. What one abandons in growing old is perhaps
after all not worth having. The chief part of youth is
but excitement; often both unwise and unhealthy. The
same pen which has written, with a morbid feeling, that
“there is a class of beings who do grow old in their youth
and die ere middle age,” tells us also that “the best of life is
but intoxication.” That passes away. The man who has
grown old does not care about it. The author at that period
has no feverish excitement about seeing himself in print;
is content to wait; he knows what fame is worth. The
obscure man of science, who has been wishing to make the
world better and wiser; the struggling curate, the poor and
hard-tried man of God; the enthusiastic reformer, who has
watched the sadly slow dawning of progress and liberty;
the artist, whose dream of beauty slowly fades before his
dim eyes — all lay down their feverish wishes as they
advance in life, forget the bright ideal which they cannot
reach, and embrace the more imperfect real. We speak not
here of the assured Christian. He, from the noblest pinnacle
of faith, beholds a promised land, and is eager to reach
it; he prays “to be delivered from the body of this death”;
but we write of those humbler, perhaps more human souls,
with whom increasing age each day treads down an illusion.
All feverish wishes, raw and inconclusive desires,
have died down, and a calm beauty and peace survive;
passions are dead, temptations weakened or conquered;
experience has been won; selfish interests are widened
into universal ones; vain, idle hopes, have merged into a
firmer faith or a complete knowledge; and more light
has broken in upon the soul's dark cottage, battered and
decayed, “through chinks which Time has made.”
Again, old men are valuable, not only as relics of the
past, but as guides and prophets for the future. They know
the pattern of every turn of life's kaleidoscope. The colors
merely fall into new shapes; the groundwork is just the
same. The good which a calm, kind, and cheerful old man
can do is incalculable. And whilst he does good to others,
he enjoys himself. He looks not unnaturally to that which
should accompany old age — honor, love, obedience, troops
of friends; and he plays his part in the comedy or tragedy
of life with as much gusto as any one else. Old Montague
or Capulet, and old Polonius, that wise maxim-man, enjoy
themselves quite as well as the moody Hamlet, the perturbed
Friar Lawrence, who is a good old man, is perhaps the
happiest of all in the dramatis personæ, — unless we take
the gossiping, garrulous old nurse, with her sunny recollections
of maturity and youth. The great thing is to have
the mind well employed, to work whilst it is yet day. The
precise Duke of Wellington, answering every letter with
“F. M. presents his compliments”; the wondrous worker
Humboldt, with his orders of knighthood, stars, and ribbons,
lying dusty in his drawer, still contemplating Cosmos, and
answering his thirty letters a day, — were both men in exceedingly
enviable, happy positions; they had reached the
top of the hill, and could look back quietly over the rough
road which they had travelled. We are not all Humboldts
or Wellingtons; but we can all be busy and good. Experience
must teach us all a great deal; and if it only teaches
us not to fear the future, not to cast a maundering regret
over the past, we can be as happy in old age — ay, and far
more so — than we were in youth. We are no longer the
fools of time and error. We are leaving by slow degrees
the old world; we stand upon the threshold of the new;
not without hope, but without fear, in an exceedingly natural
position, with nothing strange or dreadful about it; with
our domain drawn within a narrow circle, but equal to our
power. Muscular strength, organic instincts, are all gone;
but what then? We do not want them; we are getting
ready for the great change, one which is just as necessary
as it was to be born; and to a little child perhaps one is not
a whit more painful, — perhaps not so painful as the other.
The wheels of Time have brought us to the goal; we are
about to rest while others labor, to stay at home while
others wander. We touch at last the mysterious door, —
are we to be pitied or to be envied?
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