THE TWELVE-MONTH SERMON.
The year's end is traditionally the season for moralizing and retrospect. Eheu! fugaces anni is a sigh that even the Latin primer teaches us; and though in schoolbook days calling the years fugacious seems absurd, we catch the meaning as they glide away. To schoolboys the man of fifty is immoderately old: thirty marks a milestone on the downhill of life. People whom we looked upon as of great antiquity, in childhood, turn out to have been mere striplings. I saw "old Kent" yesterday after the lapse of thirty years, and protest he was younger than when he rapped sepulchral silence from his resounding desk. "How are you, Quilibet First?" he said, quite in the ancient way; he seemed once more to brandish the ferrule on his awful throne.
Boys always call schoolmasters and sextons "old," irrespective of their years. Clerks in the shop style their employer "the old gentleman" without meaning to impute antiquity. Gray-haired diggers and pounders speak of their overseer as "the old man," even though he be a rosy-cheeked youth of two-and-twenty. Lexicographers should look to this. "Old" evidently means sometimes "having independent authority," and does not necessarily signify either lack of freshness or being stricken in years. Thus Philip Festus Bailey's dictum, that "we live in deeds, not years," is borne out by common parlance, and future Worcesters and Websters must make a note of it.
Whoever, also, reaches a fixed position of authority, seems (rightly enough, as the world goes) to have achieved success in life. This measurement of success by the kind of occupation one follows begins with us in short clothes. Mary's ambition is to be "either a milliner, a queen, or a cook;" the ideal of Augustus is a woodchopper, killing bears when they attack him at his work, and living in a hut. The sons of confectioners must be marvels if they grow up alike unspoiled in morals by the universal envy of comrades, and unspoiled in teeth by the parental sugar-plums. People of older growth attach childish importance to the trade one plies. Nobs and nabobs (at least on the stage) disinherit daughters offhand for marrying grocers, and groan over sons who take to high art. The smug and prudent citizen shudders at the career of the filibuster, while the adventurer would commit suicide rather than achieve a modest livelihood in tape and needles. The mother of Sainte Beuve was sorely distressed at his pursuit of literature, a career that she reckoned mere vagabondage, despite his brilliant feats in it, until the day he was elected to the French Academy, and thereby became entitled to $300 a year. "Then my mother was a little reassured; thenceforth, j'avais une place."
When the close of the year sets us to reckoning up how much we have made of life, pray what is that "success" of which we all talk so glibly? It is plainly a standard varying according to each man's taste and temperament, his humility or vanity, and shifting as his life advances. What to the Bohemian is success to the Philistine is stark failure. The anchoret looks on this sublunary sphere as one of sighing, the attorney as one of suing—there being all that difference betwixt law and gospel. Sixty years cannot see life through the eyes of sixteen. When men, fearing to measure themselves, seek the judgment of their fellows, adulation or affection may lead astray. In the year's retrospect of science, touching the solar eclipse it is said: "Cape Flattery is our northwestern cape, and there occurred the largest obscuration of the sun in the United States." "Cape Flattery," I fear, is the locus of largest obscuration for the United States every year, and was particularly so in the past twelvemonth of jubilee and gratulation; and what the mantle of flattery is for the sunlight of truth in the nation it is in the individual. In politics, at any rate, the centennial year is closing with some reproof of our all-summer conceit. Our frame of government is not so flawless as we fancied; the pharisaic contrast we drew between our politics and those of other nations is no longer so effective.
And with men as with nations, a ray of clear light reveals the shams and shortcomings of what is hastily styled success. The pushing, elbowing fellow gets ahead in the struggle of life, but his success is a questionable one. The bargaining man, who, partly by instinct and partly by practice, judges everything from the point of view, "How is that going to affect me?" will no doubt make money. Even his most disinterested advice pivots on the thought, "What will pay me best?" as the magnet surely wheels to the pole. But when all is done, to have achieved this artistic perfection of self-seeking is a sorry account to give of life.
Thus, the very successes on which we plume ourselves are sometimes badges of disaster, as we ourselves may secretly know if others do not. "When one composes long speeches," says Jarno, "with a view to shame his neighbors, he should speak them to a looking-glass." If not a hypocrite or a vain man, he may find himself blushing at the thought de me fabula narratur. The only alteration that our satire on others may require is to change the name of the folly or fault we lash, and then the stripes will be merited by ourselves. The other day Temple and I listened to a discourse of the Rev. Dr. Waddell of St Magdalen's on the perils of novel-reading. I think the worthy doctor really refrains from that sin; he is certainly severe on those who are given to it. "That fat man," said Temple, as we strolled away from St. Magdalen's sanctuary, "is too greedy, too gluttonous to listen to any cry but that of his own stomach. His god is his belly. His indifference to the sufferings of others amounts to a disease."
"What disease do you call it?" I asked.
"Fatty degeneration of the heart," replied Temple, with a laugh. On the other hand, quite shocked at people who "make pigs" of themselves, is Mrs. Pavanne, who starves her stomach to beautify her back, and who, I assure you, would prefer after three days' fasting a new boiled silk and trimmings to any similarly treated leg of mutton and capers.