Which is the happier case may well be doubtful. Very energetic men fond of activity, who are substantially minded not to let “the vestiges of their earthly days vanish in the æons,” will be disposed to lay the greater value upon a successful manhood; but sunny-natured men need an untroubled youth and likewise a rougher middle period, if they are to be strong enough to exhibit in their age the pattern of a fully ripened life, perfected in every direction, so far as lies in the power of man. Once in his life, at any rate, a man must have it hard and heavy if he is to attain to the right way himself and to gain an understanding of the burdens of others; and on the whole a strong old age is best suited for that. And if the childhood days have been joyous, they afford an afterglow for the whole life, and in the reverse case, a bitter feeling of wrong. It is likewise difficult to be obliged, for the first time, to bear the hardest lot of all in old age.
One can not change the form of this lot; in this respect, at least, a man is surely not the moulder of his own happiness; only, he is not the inert slave of a blind Fate either. That is, if a hard youth predestines him to an old age not quite without care, he can make the best of this destiny by a clear and conscious submission and a courageous endurance; or if he has a beautiful childhood behind him, he can be thankful that it did not continue on thus into that stormy period of later life which is necessary for the steeling of his character. Thus conceived, even in these destinies the bold saying turns out to be exactly true, that to those who love God all the events of life, of whatever sort they may be, must turn out to their advantage. But in the lives of all thinking men the question to be decided is this: whether to choose much sorrow with much help from God, or much sorrow without such help, but with the temporary forgetfulness of momentary pleasure. The impotent Nietzschean revolt against such a fate for men helps nothing.
Finally, one can not make of himself something quite different from the native stuff that is in him. It is not proper that every one should be able to become everything; a very extended many-sidedness comes often only at the expense of depth. At the proper time rightly to criticise oneself in order to correct the many errors of education, which only very rarely estimates a human being quite correctly—this is the chief task of the most decisive point of life. This point, if life has proceeded quite normally, is at the beginning of the thirties, when the man has the last step of education behind him, and now, “in the midway of this our mortal life,” begins his self-training, for good or for bad. At this moment of life some recognize, with deep pain of soul, that they can not become all that to which the dreams of youth or the advantages of birth and education seemed to destine them, and they turn in despair to pleasure or to pretence. But others resolutely seek the point whence they may conquer their special world, and henceforth pursue a destiny which, perhaps, was not sung to them at their cradle, but which shows itself, nevertheless, to be the right one.
On the whole, however, the dreams of youth are not to be despised. In most cases they point to an unconscious native ability and so likewise to the dreamer’s destination, which expresses itself at first in fantastic pictures of the future; that is, in so far as they really come from within and are not the products of a false education or of a mistaken belief in the inheritance of talents. For it is only quite rarely that talents are inherited and that the sons of great men are themselves great. This is, to be sure, often made difficult for them because of comparison with their fathers, and not less because of the jealousy of men, who do not willingly suffer intellectual dynasties to rule among them; in this they are all republicans. On the other hand, men of much consequence seldom have or take the time to busy themselves intently with the bringing up of their children, and in such families, much oftener than in far simpler ones, the children fall into neglect, unless a mother of sufficient intelligence steps in, and is not herself too much busied with her celebrated and often very exacting husband.
It is scarcely necessary to say further that the mothers are the deciding element of the family for the education and the formation of the character of the children, especially the sons, and that the sons, as a rule, take after them more than after the fathers. It is a less familiar fact that the sons often resemble the mother’s brothers in character and natural ability, and that the best though sometimes also the most dangerous moulders of one’s youth are the grandmothers on the mother’s side.
The promise of a curse upon families that have shown themselves egotistical for several succeeding generations surely comes true; and experience shows that a want of love towards one’s parents is avenged through one’s own children, and, vice versa, a peculiar blessing throughout life accompanies those who have shown their parents much love.
There is no need to be anxious about the proper time for entering upon new steps of life, if the earlier ones have been rightly used; they will then do their own announcing through first an inner summons, and finally a definite determination, to advance farther, and without this experience it could not be well for any one to be in a higher plane. We can not stand a task that is yet too great for us; such a task we feel to be too ethereal, and we long for the coarser elements of life. On the other hand, the divinely-led man does not as a rule know very long beforehand what he has to do next or to what he will be called; he could not commonly endure it. But any one who has already really experienced many such instances of being personally guided in life will at last be sure in his faith as to the existence of such a higher guidance even in the life of individual men, while others (by their own fault, to be sure) count only in the mass, not as individuals.
Finally, steps in the inner life are not, of course, for those to whom life means nothing else than eating and drinking and dying to-morrow. The steps of the inner life exist rather only for those who are resolved to struggle out of a merely natural existence common to many others, on through to a really spiritual life.
For these, Thomas à Kempis points out the safest way in the following dialogue:
My Son, the perfect freedom of the spirit thou canst not win nor keep, if thou press not through to the complete renunciation of thyself.