XVII
THE SPELL OF THE PAST
I NOTICE that as a man grows old he is more and more fond of quoting his father,—what he said, what he did. It has more and more force or authority with him. It is a tribute to the past. Not until one has reached the meridian of life or gone beyond it, does the spell of the past begin to creep over him.
Said a middle-aged woman to me the other day, “Old people are beginning to look very good to me; I like to be near them and to hear them talk.” It is a common experience. I have seen many a granny on the street whom I felt like kidnapping, taking home, and seating in my chimney corner, for the sake of the fragrance and pathos of the past which hovered about her; for the sake also, I suppose, of the filial yearning which is pretty sure to revive in one after a certain time.
No woman can ever know the depths of her love for her mother until she has become a mother herself, and no man knows the depths of his love for his father until he has become a father. When we have experienced what they experienced, when we have traveled over the road which they traveled over, they assume a new value, a new sacredness in our eyes. They are then our former selves, and a peculiarly tender regard for them awakens in our hearts. There is pathos in the fact that so many people lose their parents before the experiences of life have brought about that final flavoring and ripening of the filial instinct to which I refer.
After one has lived half a century, and maybe long before, his watch begins to lose time; the years come faster than he is ready for them; while he is yet occupied with the old, the new is upon him. How alien and unfriendly seem the new years, strangers whom we reluctantly entertain for a time but with whom we seem hardly to get on speaking terms,—with what uncivil haste they come rushing in! One writes down the figures on his letters or in his journals, but they all seem alien; before one has become at all intimate with them, so that they come to mean anything special to him, they are gone. While he is yet occupied with the sixties, living upon the thoughts and experiences which they brought him, the seventies have come and gone and the eighties have knocked at his door.
The earlier years one took to his heart as he did his early friends. How much we made of them; what varied hues and aspects they wore; how we came to know each other; how rounded and complete were all things! Ah, the old friends and the old years, we cannot separate them; they had a quality and an affinity for us that we cannot find in the new. The new years and the new friends come and go, and leave no impression. Youth makes all the world plastic; it creates all things anew; youth is Adam in Paradise, from which the burdens and the experiences of manhood will by and by cause him to depart with longing and sorrow. “When we were young,” says Schopenhauer, “we were completely absorbed in our immediate surroundings; there was nothing to distract our attention from them; we looked upon the objects about us as though they were the only ones of their kind,—as though, indeed, nothing else existed at all.”
It is perhaps inevitable that a man of sensibility and imagination should grow conservative as he grows old. The new is more and more distasteful to him. Did you ever go back to the old homestead where you had passed your youth or your early manhood, and find the old house, the old barn, the old orchard, in fact all the old landmarks gone? What a desecration, you thought. The new buildings, how hateful they look to you! They mean nothing to you but the obliteration of that which meant so much. This experience proves nothing except that the past becomes a part of our very selves; our roots, our beginnings, are there, and we bleed when old things are cut away.
After a certain age is reached, how trivial and flitting seem the new generations! The people whom we found upon the stage when we came into the world,—the middle-aged and the elderly people who were bearing the brunt of the battle,—they seem important and like a part of the natural system of things. When they pass away what a void they leave! Those who take their places, the new set, do not seem to fill the bill at all. But the chances are that they are essentially the same class of people, and will seem as permanent and important to our children as the old people did to us.
To repeat the experience, go to a strange town and take up your abode. Everybody seems in his proper place, there are no breaks, we miss nothing, the social structure is complete. In a quarter of a century go back to the place again; ruins everywhere, nearly all the old landmarks gone, and a new generation upon the stage. But to the newcomer nothing of this is visible; he finds everything established and in order as we first found it. It is so in life. Our children are the newcomers who do not and cannot go behind the visible scene.