An Essay on an Old Subject [pp. 172-175]

AN.v ESSAr Ov AN OLD SUByECT.
regenerate the world! They will abolish war
and hand in the millennium! What pictures they
will paint! What poems they will write! One
knows while one listens how it will all end.
But it is Nature's way; she is always sending
on her young generations full of hope. The
Atlantic roller bursts in harmless foam among
the shingle and drift-wood at your feet, but the
next, nothing daunted by the fate of its predecessor, comes on with threatening crest, as if to
carry every thing before it. And so it will be
forever and ever. The world could not get on
else. My experience is of use only to myself.
I can not bequeath it to my son as I can my
cash. Every human being must start untrammeled and work out the problem for himself.
For a couple of thousand years now the
preacher has been crying out vanitas vaniatumn,
but no young man takes him at his word. The
blooming apple must grate in the young man's
teeth before he owns that it is dust and ashes.
Young people will take nothing on hearsay. I
remember when a lad of Todd's Student's
Manual falling into my hands. I perused
therein a solemn warning against novel-reading. Nor did the reverend compiler speak
without authority. He stated that he had read
the works of Fielding, Smollett, Sir Walter
Scott, American Cooper, James, and the rest,
and he laid his hand on his heart and assured
his young friends that in each of these works,
even the best of them, were subtile snares and
gilded baits for the soul. These books they
were adjured to avoid as they would a pestilence, or a raging fire. It was this alarming
passage in the transatlantic divine's treatise
that first made a novel-reader of me. I was
not content to accept his experience. I must
see for myself. Every one must begin at the
beginning, and it is just as well. If a new
generation were starting with the wisdom of
its elders, what would be the consequence?
Would there be any love-making twenty years
after? Would there be any fine extravagance?
Would there be any lending of money? Would
there be any noble friendship, such as that of
Damon and Pythias, or of David and Jonathan,
or even of our own Beaumont and Fletcher,
who had purse, wardrobe, and genius in common? It is extremely doubtful. Vanitas vaniratlur is a bad doctrine to begin life with.
For the plant experience to be of any worth a
man must grow it for himself.
The man of forty-five or thereby is compelled
to own, if he sits down to think about it, that
existence is very different from what it was
twenty years previously. His life is more than
half spent to begin with. He is like one who
has spent seven hundred and fifty pounds of
his original patrimony of a thousand. Then,
from his life, there has departed that "wild
freshness of morning " which Tom Moore sang
about. In his onward journey he is not likely
to encounter any thing absolutely new. He has
already conjugated every tense of the verb to be.
He has been in love twice or thrice. He has
been married-only once let us trust. In all
probability he is the father of a fine family of
children. He has been ill, and he has recovered; he has experienced triumph and failure;
he has known what it is to have money in his
purse, and what it is to want money in his
purse. Sometimes he has been a debtor, sometimes he has been a creditor. He has stood by
the brink of half a dozen graves, and heard the
clod falling on the coffin-lid. All this he has
experienced; the only new thing before him is
death, and even to that he has at various times
approximated. Life has lost most of the unexpectedness, its zest, its novelty, and has become
like a worn shoe, or a threadbare doublet. To
him there is no new thing under the sun.
But then this growing old is a gradual process;
and zest, sparkle, and novelty are not essential
to happiness. The man who has reached fiveand-forty has learned what a pleasure there is
in customariness, and use, and wont-in having
every thing around him familiar, tried, confidential. Life may have become humdrum, but
his tastes have become humdrum, too. Novelty
annoys him, the intrusion of an unfamiliar object puts him out. A pair of newly embroidered
slippers would be much more ornamental than
the well-worn articles which lie warming for
him before the library fire; but then he can not
get his feet into them so easily. He is contented with his old friends-a new friend would
break the charm of the old familiar faces. He
loves the hedgerows, and the fields, and the
brook, and the bridge which he sees every day,
and he would not exchange them for Alps and
glaciers. By the time a man has reached fortyfive he lies as comfortably in his habits as the
silk-worm in its cocoon.
On the whole, I take it that middle age is a
happier period than youth. In the entire circle
of the year there are no days so delightful as
those of a fine October, when the trees are
bare to the mild heavens, and the red leaves
bestrew the road, and you can feel the breath
of Winter morning and evening-no days so
calm, so tenderly solemn, and with such a reverent meekness in the air. The lyrical upburst
of the lark at such a time would be incongruous. The only sounds suitable to the season
are the rusty caw of the homeward sliding
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