YOUTH AND OLD AGE
"The Abbé, in spite of his fifty-eight years..." I was reading a story of De Maupassant in a railway-train, when this bitter reflection on my age pulled me up with a slight shock. I was on my way to a cricket-match—my annual cricket-match; my team against the village team—and this suggestion that I was an obsolescent old fellow cast a momentary shadow over my spirit. But I remembered that De Maupassant died in the thirties or early forties and that he could not be expected to know that fifty-eight is about the time when a man ought to be getting his second wind.
It is the habit of youth to antedate old age in this offensive way. Jane Austen, who died, I think, when she was under forty, was accustomed in her twenties to write of people who had passed forty as if they had come out of the Ark, and Addison speaks in his essay on the "Widows' Club" of a man of sixty as if the fact was sufficient to show that he was in the last stages of senile decay. I had the curiosity to look up Addison's age at his death and found it was forty-six. It gave me a curious sensation to discover that that grave and elderly spirit had died when he was twelve years my junior. He had always seemed to me so much older than I could ever hope to be that it had never occurred to me to measure my years with his.
It is one of the humbling experiences we have as we grow older to find that, in years, we have left behind so many of those who filled the world with the sound of their name without having ourselves yet done anything to boast about. Alexander only lived half my lifetime; Shelley and Keats when they died were young enough to be the sons of a man of fifty-eight; Napoleon was the first man in Europe at twenty-seven and had reached Waterloo at forty-six; all the vast world of Shakespeare had been created when he was in the early forties; the younger Pitt was Prime Minister twenty years and died at an age when Mr. Lloyd George was still a private member. And so on.
The explanation, I suppose, is that modern conditions have put old age off ten or twenty years. When Jane Austen wrote of elderly men of forty she did so because they were elderly men at forty. What with their weakness for port wine—both Addison and Pitt were notorious for the amount of liquor they carried—and the rudimentary knowledge of disease and its causes, life was a much briefer affair than it is now. Whatever grievance we may have against the age of science, it has made our days long in the land, and what is more important, it has made them healthier. The average man of sixty to-day is, counting age in real values, younger than the average man of fifty in the eighteenth century. That is no doubt one of the reasons why youth does not cut quite such a dash in the world as it did when Napoleon was the first soldier in Europe at twenty-seven, and Pitt the first statesman in Europe at twenty-six. The old fellows go on living and insisting on being young and keeping their jobs.
They even go on playing cricket and watching cricket. When I got on the village playground, I found among the spectators a gay old gentleman of ninety-three, of whom I have written before in these articles, who never misses a match, and who looks on a man of fifty-eight as a person who has hardly yet come to years of discretion. His genial greeting blew away the slight shadow cast over me by Maupassant's unkind cut, and "in spite of my fifty-eight years" I succeeded in giving the scorer a bit of trouble, so much so that I thought it worth while when I was out to go and look over his shoulder at the nice little procession of "ones" and "twos" that followed my name. I should have liked Jane Austen and Maupassant and Addison to have looked over the scorer's shoulder with me. They would have changed their tune about old fellows of fifty-eight.
THE GOLDEN AGE
I see that Dean Inge has been lamenting that he did not live a couple of generations ago. He seems to think that the world was a much more desirable place then, that it has been going to the dogs ever since, and that the only comfortable thought that we can cultivate in this degenerate time is that we shall soon be out of it. Assuming for the moment that the world was a happier place fifty or sixty years ago, I doubt whether it follows that the Dean would have been happier in it than he is in our world to-day. The measure of personal happiness is fortunately not dependent on external circumstances. It is affected by them, of course. Most of us are more agreeable people when we have dined than when we are hungry, when we have slept well than when we have not slept at all, when our horse or our party has won than when it has lost, when things go right than when things go wrong. No philosophy is an anodyne for the toothache, and the east wind plays havoc with the feelings of the best of us. In these and a thousand other ways we are the sport of circumstance, but in this respect we are no better and no worse off than our forbears fifty years ago or five hundred years ago, or than our descendants will be fifty or five hundred years hence.