Well and good, if it is and we feel like it; but may be it isn't, and we don't. Youth is largely a habit. So is romance. And, unless we allow ourselves to be influenced by musty conventions and superstitions, both habits may be prolonged far beyond the moping limits of custom, and need never be abandoned unless we become sincerely and unregretfully tired of them. I can well conceive of an old age like that of Sophocles, as reported by Plato, who likened the fading of the passions with the advance of age to "being set free from service to a band of madmen."
When a man feels so, all is well and comfortable with him. He has retired of his own free will from the banquet of life, having had his fill, and is content. Our image of the last call does not apply to him, but rather to those who, with appetites still keen, are sternly warned that for them, willy-nilly, the banquet must soon end, and the prison fare of prosaic middle age be henceforth their portion. No more ortolans and transporting vintages for them. Nothing but Scotch oatmeal and occasional sarsaparilla to the end of the chapter. No wonder that some, hearing this dread sentence, go half crazy in a frenzied effort to clutch at what remains, run amok, so to say, in their despairing determination to have, if need be, a last "good time" and die. Their efforts are apt to be either distasteful or pathetically comic, and the world is apt to be cynically contemptuous of the "romantic" outbursts of aging people. For myself, I always feel for them a deep and tender sympathy. I know that they have heard that last fearful call to the dining-car of life—and, poor souls, they have probably found it closed. Their mistake has been in waiting so long for the call. From various causes, they have mismanaged their lives. They have probably lived in a numbing fear of their neighbours, who have told them that it is bad manners to eat one's cake in public, and wicked to eat it in private; and any one who is fool enough to allow his neighbours to live his life for him instead of living it himself deserves what he gets, or rather doesn't get.
A wholesome oblivion of one's neighbours is the beginning of wisdom. Neighbours, at the best, are an impertinent encroachment on one's privacy, and, at the worst, an unnatural hindrance to our development. Generally speaking, it is the man or woman who has lived with least fear of his neighbours, who is least likely to hear that last call. Nothing in retrospect is so barren as a life lived in accordance with the hypocrisies of society. For those who have never lived, and are now fain to begin living when it is too late, that last call comes indeed with a ghastly irony. But for those who have fearlessly lived their lives, as they came along, with Catullus singing their vivamus atque amemus, and practising it, too; for those, if indeed the last call must come, they will be able to support it by the thought that, often as in the past life has called to them, it has never called to them in vain. We are apt sometimes to belittle our memories, but actually they are worth a good deal; and should the time come when we have little to look forward to, it will be no small comfort to have something to look back on. And it won't be the days when we didn't that we shall recall with a sense of possession, but the days and nights when we most emphatically did. Thank God, we did for once hold that face in our hands in the woodland! Thank God, we did get divinely drunk that wild night of nights in the city!
Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? But these thou
shalt not take,
The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breast of the
nymphs in the brake.
It is the fine excesses of life that make it worth living. The stalks of the days are endurable only because they occasionally break into flower. It is our sins of omission alone that we come in the end to regret. The temptations we resisted in our youth make themselves rods to scourge our middle age. I regret the paradoxical form these platitudes have unconsciously taken, for that they are the simplest truth any honest dying man would tell you. And that phrase recalls a beautiful poem by "E. Nesbit" which has haunted me all my life, a poem I shall beg leave to quote here, because, though it is to be found in that poet's volume, it is not, I believe, as well known as it deserves to be by those who need its lesson. I quote it, too, from memory, so I trust that the length of time I have remembered it may be set to my credit against any verbal mistakes I make.
"If, on some balmy summer night,
You rowed across the moon path white,
And saw the shining sea grow fair
With silver scales and golden hair,
What would you do?"
"I would be wise
And shut my ears and shut my eyes,
Lest I should leap into the tide
And clasp the seamaid as I died."
"But if you thus were strong to flee
From sweet spells woven of moon and sea,
Are you quite sure that you would reach,
Without one backward look, the beach?"
"I might look back, my dear, and then
Row straight into the snare again,
Or, if I safely got away—
Regret it to my dying day."
He who liveth his life shall live it. It is a grave error to give ourselves grudgingly to our experiences. Only in a whole-hearted surrender of ourselves to the heaven-sent moment do we receive back all it has to give us, and by the active receptivity of our natures attract toward us other such moments, as it were, out of the sky. An ever-ready romantic attitude toward life is the best preservative against the ennui of the years. Adventures, as the proverb says, are to the adventurous, and, as the old song goes:
He either fears his fate too much
Or his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch
To gain or lose it all.
And the spirit of the times is happily growing more clement toward a greater fulness and variety of life. The world is growing kinder toward the fun and foolishness of existence, and the energetic pursuit of joy is no longer frowned down by anaemic and hypocritical philosophies. The old gods of energy and joy are coming to their own again, and the lives of strong men and fair women are no longer ruled over by a hierarchy of curates and maiden aunts; in fact, the maiden aunt has begun to find out her mistake, and is out for her share of the fun and the foolishness with the rest. Negative morality is fast becoming discredited, and many an old "Thou shalt not" is coming to seem as absurd as the famous Blue Laws of Connecticut. "Self-development, not self-sacrifice,"—a favourite dictum of Grant Allen's,—is growing more and more to be the formula of the modern world; and, if a certain amount of self-sacrifice is of necessity included in a healthy self-development, the proportion is being reduced to a rational limit. One form of self-sacrifice, at all events, is no longer demanded of us—the wholesale sacrifice of our own opinions. The possibility that there may be two opinions or a dozen or a hundred on one matter, and that they may be all different, yet each one of them right in its proper application, has dawned forcibly on the world, with the conception of the relativity of experience and the modification of conditions. Nowadays we recognize that there are as many "rights" and as many "wrongs" as there are individuals; and to be happy in our own way, instead of somebody else's, is one of the first laws of nature, health, and virtue. Many an ancient restriction on personal vitality is going the way of the old sumptuary laws. We have all of us amusing memories of those severe old housekeepers who for no inclemency of the weather would allow a fire in the grate before the first of October, and who regarded a fire before that date as a positive breach of the moral law. Such old wives are a type of certain old-fashioned moralists whose icy clutch on our warm-blooded humanity we no longer suffer. Nowadays we light our fires as we have a mind to, and if we prefer to keep them going all the year round, it is no one's business but our own. Happy is the man who, when the end comes, can say with Landor:
I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks and I am ready to depart.