[35]. Literary Leaves, by D. L. Richardson.
CONSOLATION IN GROWING OLD.
Montaigne said of Cicero On Old Age, “It gives one an appetite for old age.” Its persuasive eloquence is the inspiration of an elevated philosophy. Flourens has cleverly said, “The moral aspect of old age is its best side. We cannot grow old without losing our physique, nor also without our morale gaining by it. This is a noble compensation.”
M. Reveillé-Parise says: “In a green old age, when from fifty-five to seventy-five years, and sometimes more, the life of the mind has a scope, a consistence, and remarkable solidity, man having then truly attained to the height of his faculties.”
Patience is the privilege of age. A great advantage to the man who has lived is, that he knows how to wait. Again, experience is an old man’s memory.
Buffon was seventy years of age (this was young for Buffon, he lived to eighty-one) when he wrote The Epochs of Nature, in which he calls old age a prejudice. Without our arithmetic we should not, according to Buffon, know that we were old. “Animals,” he says, “do not know it; it is only by our arithmetic that we judge otherwise.”
Buffon having settled on his estate at Montbard, in Burgundy, there pursued his studies with such regularity that the history of one day seems to have been that of all the others through a period of fifty years. After he was dressed, he dictated letters, and regulated his domestic affairs; and at six o’clock he retired to his studies in a pavilion in his garden, about a furlong from the house. This pavilion was only furnished with a large wooden secretary and an arm-chair; and within it was another cabinet, ornamented with drawings of birds and beasts. Prince Henry of Prussia called it the cradle of natural history; and Rousseau, before he entered it, used to fall on his knees, and kiss the threshold. Here Buffon composed the greater number of his works. At nine o’clock he usually took an hour’s rest; and his breakfast, a piece of bread and two glasses of wine, was brought to him. When he had written two hours after breakfast, he returned to the house. At dinner he enjoyed the gaieties and trifles of the table. After dinner he slept an hour in his room; took a solitary walk; and during the rest of the evening he either conversed with his family or guests, or examined his papers at his desk. At nine o’clock he went to bed, to prepare himself for the same routine of judgment and pleasure. He had a most fervid imagination; and his anxious solicitude for a literary immortality, “that last infirmity of noble minds,” continually betrayed him to be a vain man.
“Every day that I rise in good health,” said Buffon to a conceited young man, “have I not the enjoyment of this day as fully as you? If I conform my actions, my appetites, my desires, to the strict impulses of wise nature, am I not as wise and happy as you are? And the view of the past, which causes so much regret to old fools, does it not afford me, on the contrary, the pleasures of memory, agreeable pictures of precious images, which are equal to your objects of pleasure? For these images are sweet; they are pure; they leave upon the mind only pleasing remembrances; the uneasiness, the disappointments, the sorrowful troop which accompanies your youthful pleasures, disappear from the picture which presents them to me. Regrets must disappear also; they are the last sparks of that foolish vanity that never grows old.
“Some one asked Fontenelle, when ninety-five years old, which were the twenty years of his life he most regretted. He replied that he had little to regret; but the age at which he had been most happy was that from forty-five to seventy-five. He made this avowal in sincerity, and he proved what he said by natural and consoling truths. At forty-five, fortune is established; reputation made; consideration obtained; the condition of life established; dreams vanished or fulfilled; projects miscarried or matured; most of the passions calmed, or at least cooled; the career in the work that every man owes to society nearly completed; enemies, or rather the enemies, are fewer, because the counterpoise of merit is known by the public voice,” &c.