CHAPTER XXII.
Literary old age still learning.—Influence of late studies in life.— Occupations in advanced age of the literary character.—Of literary men who have died at their studies.
The old age of the literary character retains its enjoyments, and usually its powers—a happiness which accompanies no other. The old age of coquetry witnesses its own extinct beauty; that of the "used" idler is left without a sensation; that of the grasping Croesus exists only to envy his heir; and that of the Machiavel who has no longer a voice in the cabinet, is but an unhappy spirit lingering to find its grave: but for the aged man of letters memory returns to her stores, and imagination is still on the wing amidst fresh discoveries and new designs. The others fall like dry leaves, but he drops like ripe fruit, and is valued when no longer on the tree.
The constitutional melancholy of JOHNSON often tinged his views of human life. When he asserted that "no man adds much to his stock of knowledge, or improves much after forty," his theory was overturned by his own experience; for his most interesting works were the productions of a very late period of life, formed out of the fresh knowledge with which he had then furnished himself.
The intellectual faculties, the latest to decline, are often vigorous in the decrepitude of age. The curious mind is still striking out into new pursuits, and the mind of genius is still creating. ANCORA IMPARO!—"Even yet I am learning!" was the concise inscription on an ingenious device of an old man placed in a child's go-cart, with an hour-glass upon it, which, it is said, Michael Angelo applied to his own vast genius in his ninetieth year. Painters have improved even to extreme old age: West's last works were his best, and Titian was greatest on the verge of his century. Poussin was delighted with the discovery of this circumstance in the lives of painters. "As I grow older, I feel the desire of surpassing myself." And it was in the last years of his life, that with the finest poetical invention, he painted the allegorical pictures of the Seasons. A man of letters in his sixtieth year once told me, "It is but of late years that I have learnt the right use of books and the art of reading."
Time, the great destroyer of other men's happiness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor. A learned and highly intellectual friend once said to me, "If I have acquired more knowledge these last four years than I had hitherto, I shall add materially to my stores in the next four years; and so at every subsequent period of my life, should I acquire only in the same proportion, the general mass of my knowledge will greatly accumulate. If we are not deprived by nature or misfortune of the means to pursue this perpetual augmentation of knowledge, I do not see but we may be still fully occupied and deeply interested even to the last day of our earthly term." Such is the delightful thought of Owen Feltham; "If I die to-morrow, my life will be somewhat the sweeter to-day for knowledge." The perfectibility of the human mind, the animating theory of the eloquent De Staël, consists in the mass of our ideas, to which every age will now add, by means unknown to preceding generations. Imagination was born at once perfect, and her arts find a term to their progress; but there is no boundary to knowledge nor the discovery of thought.
How beautiful in the old age of the literary character was the plan which a friend of mine pursued! His mind, like a mirror whose quicksilver had not decayed, reflected all objects to the last. Pull of learned studies and versatile curiosity, he annually projected a summer-tour on the Continent to some remarkable spot. The local associations were an unfailing source of agreeable impressions to a mind so well prepared, and he presented his friends with a "Voyage Littéraire," as a new-year's gift. In such pursuits, where life is "rather wearing out than rusting out," as Bishop Cumberland expressed it, scarcely shall we feel those continued menaces of death which shake the old age of men of no intellectual pursuits, who are dying so many years.
Active enjoyments in the decline of life, then, constitute the happiness of literary men. The study of the arts and literature spreads a sunshine over the winter of their days. In the solitude and the night of human life, they discover that unregarded kindness of nature, which has given flowers that only open in the evening, and only bloom through the night-season. NECKER perceived the influence of late studies in life; for he tells us, that "the era of threescore and ten is an agreeable age for writing; your mind has not lost its vigour, and envy leaves you in peace."
The opening of one of LA MOTHE LE VAYER'S Treatises is striking: "I should but ill return the favours God has granted me in the eightieth year of my age, should I allow myself to give way to that shameless want of occupation which all my life I have condemned;" and the old man proceeds with his "Observations on the Composition and Reading of Books." "If man be a bubble of air, it is then time that I should hasten my task; for my eightieth year admonishes me to get my baggage together ere I leave the world," wrote VARBO, in opening his curious treatise de Re Rustica, which the sage lived to finish, and which, after nearly two thousand years, the world possesses. "My works are many, and I am old; yet I still can fatigue and tire myself with writing more." says PETRARCH in his "Epistle to Posterity." The literary character has been fully occupied in the eightieth and the ninetieth year of life. ISAAC WALTON still glowed while writing some of the most interesting biographies in his eighty-fifth year, and in the ninetieth enriched the poetical world with the first publication of a romantic tale by Chalkhill, "the friend of Spenser." BODMER, beyond eighty, was occupied on Homer, and WIELAND on Cicero's Letters.[A]
[Footnote A: See "Curiosities of Literature," on "The progress of old age in new studies.">[