Why should youth be modest? Youth believes it can do all things, and has had no proof to the contrary. But age,—age which has tried many times and been met by failure; age, which has learned its limitation by repeated blows, and become content with hard-worn compromise,—why should age be so proud?
In itself it is no distinction, being but the common lot of man. Those who do not attain to it are by general consent of superior merit. "Whom the gods love die young."
Age is not desired and striven for,—not won by honourable effort. It comes gradually upon us all, falling like rain upon the just and the unjust. Taken simply in itself, it proves no more than that the aged individual, if a man, has had sufficient strength and ingenuity to keep himself alive; and, if a woman, that she has been sufficiently pleasing and well-behaved to be kept alive by others.
In very early times, when the world was young and life more exciting and precarious than now, perhaps the above qualities were a sufficient distinction. The constitution which survived the rigours of a crude and uncertain diet and of an undiluted climate was a thing to be proud of; and the visible proof that one had survived one's enemies did indicate some superiority.
But in a civilisation which takes special care of the infirm,—where green young cripples grow to a ripe old age, and a bed-ridden pauper may outlive many muscular labourers,—mere prolongation of existence is no self-evident proof of either power or wisdom. Of two men born in the same year, the more valuable man, doing more valuable work, is quite as likely to die as an innocuous, futile, low-grade person, paddling feebly with the tide. Of two women, one may smilingly repeat herself by the dozen, and drift sweetly on from amiable juvenility to as amiable senility; while another, working strenuously and effectively, dies in her earnest youth or middle age.
Survival is no longer a fair test of value. The wisdom of the ancients is not the standard of our time. We do not think that a previous century knows more than ours, but rather less; and, if Methuselah were with us yet,—and retained his faculties,—he would be too much confused between the things he used to believe and what he was learning now to be a valuable authority. When learning was but accumulated tradition, the old had an advantage over the young, and improved it. Now that learning is discovery, the young have an advantage over the old.
If wisdom consisted merely in the accumulation of facts, the long-time observer would assuredly have more of them than the new-comer. But the wisdom that consists in a free and unbiassed judgment—a new perception of the relation of things—comes better from a fresher brain. This is not to say that age may not coexist with superiority, but that age, per se, is not superiority.
There are many aged persons in the work-house who are quite visibly inferior to many young persons in the House of Commons. This suggests a painful antithesis which is better omitted. Granting the origin of this arrogance of the aged to have had some basis in primitive time, it is easy to see how it has descended to us by the same principle that maintains the fag system.
Humanity has always its overlapping generations; and the child who is crushed by the incontrovertible statement, "I am older than you are!" waits to recoup himself on children yet to be. In his subordinate position in youth he has no chance to escape from this injustice or to retaliate; and he strikes a balance with fate by assuming the same superiority over the new-comer. It is probable that we should never outgrow the assumption until we have a generation of children taught to respect conduct for its merits, not for simple duration, holding a wise, strong, good person, however young, to be superior to an ignorant or vicious one, however old. When the sense of justice and the sense of logic of the child are not outraged in youth, we shall find more modesty as well as more wisdom in old age.
It is always interesting to see our psychic development following the laws of nature, like any other growth. Under the law of inertia the human mind, starting under a given concept, continues to enlarge in that direction, unless arrested or diverted in some other force. So this conception of age as essential superiority, naturally enough begun, has been followed to strange and injurious extremes. And under the law of conservation of energy—following the line of least resistance—the aged naturally encroached upon the young, who were able to make no resistance whatever.