An old man glances over his shoulder adown the long pathway of receding years hungrily, and muses to himself, "Oh, to be out in the world again as I knew it fifty years ago, with the same sunny people about me; to meet them on the old familiar footing. We had capacious times together; we understood one another and loved one another with kindred hearts and flowing speech. I talk with people nowadays, but these new friends of mine are not responsive. There is a glass screen between us as we talk together; we sit near one another, but we are far apart. I catch a far-off glint in their eye which holds me at arm's-length. Our lips are restrained, our thoughts are bottled up. It seems like sitting together in a room with blinds drawn, talking in the dark. Yes; new friends at best are but amiable strangers, for we met one another only when the flower of life had wilted and the leaf was sere and yellow on the tree. The full, unrestrained days when the sap was rising, the blossoming days of youth, were lived apart. I do not know these good people intimately, and I never can, and they can never know me. We each have a buried past which is sacred ground where the other never treads."
I met recently a grey-haired man who was a schoolboy friend of mine. A wide sundering gap of years lies between us since our previous meeting, but at once we grasped hands and knew each other intimately, although mid-life with each had been filled with a fulness the other knew nothing of. As boys we chummed together, and now we renewed our ancient friendship on olden lines. We had studied the same lessons, slept in the same dormitory, sculled in the same boat, fought in the same playground scrimmages, and, having met again after long intervening years, we had endless youthful reminiscences in common to discuss and life-histories to relate. There was no need to sit on the safety-valve to throttle down the conversation. Talk came, a flowing stream bubbling up from the hot springs of the heart. Our meeting had the perfume of romance clinging to it, which made golden the precious hours in the spending. Two grey-haired men chattering with their heads together for the nonce were merry schoolboys. The present was forgotten; the past was everything to them while the old enthusiasms flared up brightly and shot a warm rosy afterglow athwart life's pleasant evening hour.
Loafing is a privilege of one's declining years. It is an agreeable form of laziness which sits well upon old shoulders. It is that mellow state of stagnant content which pervades the mind when the natural force abates. I do not extol it as a virtue, I claim it as a privilege. It helps to fill gaps in the daily round when business no longer engages your attention and office hours are a dread ordeal done with for ever. Having dropped out of the marching line and become a spectator of the passing show, what more natural than that you manifest a livelier curiosity in other people's activities than in your own sluggish movements. I love to spend a sunny morning lingering on the old garden seat, chatting to a friend, or watching the energetic youngsters at play amongst the roses. I find it enjoyable to take my pitch on the pierhead with the gay summer crowd ambling along, passing and repassing my post of observation, and watch the pretty and well-accoutred girls angling for admiration, and the budding men in spotless flannels flashing answering glances to catch the lasses' eyes; an endless conversation going on without voices whispering a word; they look at each other and laugh, and the incipient mystery of the thing slips into their blood.
I was once reluctant to relinquish youth. Its passions and pleasure made my life intensely joyous in a clean, healthy way. I resented the horrid fact that with encroaching years I was no longer able to wake the old thrill of existence by any of the old methods. The call came to me, but nature responded not to its alluring voice. The spent fires could not be rekindled; and in a tragic moment the truth stood uncovered in its stark nakedness: "I am growing old!" I had to readjust my bearings in life to meet the new situation. I found it better to walk in step with the years and melt into middle life with all the gentle conciliations of an easy mind than to clutch at the hem of the garment of departing youth and hold on frantically to a corpse; and so it came to pass youth, with its frank, jovial, devil-may-care lightheartedness, was surrendered ground, and I put on a splendid face, taking up a new position in the rear as an old fogy, a little moss-grown, but still alive, healthy, happy, and hearty.
II
THE LURE OF HAPPINESS
The joy of living is to grasp life in its fullness just as it comes to us clean and sweet from the hand of God; to eat the grapes that grow in our own vineyard; to feed on the honey captured from our own hives; and to bask in the sunshine blessing our own garden plot. Some people cannot do this. They were born sour and fail to ripen. They remind me of the Church of St. Lorenzo at Florence, built but never finished, and showing a dejected mien to the passer-by. They hold on to life timidly with cold and clammy hands, and smile with glum visage and call it all vanity and vexation of spirit. Happiness frets them like a lump of undigested pickle lying heavy on their chest; they want to throw it off and be at ease in their misery. They consider it wickedness to enjoy things--to wallow in sunshine. They say we ought to content ourselves with bare commodities needful for existence. The primitive man was happy. He had no shirt to wash, no taxes to pay, no barns to fill with plenty. We must be primitive to be happy. Deplete the wealthy of their wealth; sink society to a common ground-level (allow us boots to wear in this muddy climate, if you please), and then everyone will be healthy, happy, and poor. Stepping out of his well-appointed motor-car, the up-to-date man spurns the primitive craze and blazes forth, "Is thy servant a dog that he should house in a kennel?" Surely civilization means creature comfort; everyone wants something larger than bare necessities to embellish life. The Creator rears us on finer lines than He raises cattle on the marshes. Year by year He lavishes before our eyes Nature's prodigal store of ornament. Every yard of hedgerow, "those liberal homes of unmarketable beauty," contradict the crank who would confine us to the needful.
The dusty utilitarian sees the world only as a crowded granary, a chattering marketplace in which to buy and sell and get gain. The Divine Artist enriches the picture by painting in exquisitely the flowering hawthorn and fragrant violets, and by tuning the throat of the skylark to rarest melody; and concurrently He attunes the soul of man, which thrills appreciation, and delights in these manifestations of Sovereign goodness. He not merely appeases the hunger of the human body, but feeds the rarer appetites of the human mind with radiant viands; and the more godlike in stature man grows, the more fully he appreciates God-given art and beauty flung like flowers across his pathway.
Everybody is happy in his own order. The history of many a man's life is the story of a soul's wandering in search of happiness. Some people are happy in their misery. Even when nursing their spleen they do it comfortably. They dilate on their grief with real zest of morbid enthusiasm that it flings a blazing cheerfulness over their cold grey lives. It sets them purring with sweet content when an auditor listens to their woeful outpourings. This is the cheapest form of happiness, and reflects an impoverished mind thrown back upon itself.
Hazlitt, the essayist, gently prods these crazy egoists with a sharp pen and says, "Pure pleasures are in their judgment cloying and insipid; an ounce of sour is worth a pound of sweet." Farquhar, the lively dramatist, mocks their folly when portraying the gushing Lady Constance, who, on finding the miniature of her absent lover lying on the floor, picks it up and exclaims: "Now I am fitted out for sorrow. With this I'll sigh, with this converse, gaze on his image till I grow blind with weeping. It is the only thing could give me joy, because it will increase my grief."