TO ANY GREYBEARD
YOU are now distant many winters from your prime, yet you were once as I am; and I entreat you, pardon me if, foreboding my own declension, I reflect upon your state. How long you have lived! What a term of years has fallen to you, if you will but consider! There are threescore and more of venerable annals in your memory, and to live a twelvemonth is to see strange things. You are yourself a fraction of the world's age, and must embrace some mighty circumstances in her history. You are no cipher, therefore; for, even though it were against your will, you have been a constituent of change in a planet which is part of the universe. No wonder this knowledge disposes you to disdain the uninfluential young, for your movements have helped to set the stars a-tingle. You are of my forerunners and my founders; I am of your manufacture, unawares; were it not for your white locks I should have no being. I bow to you: for you I have a reverent gratitude. Shall I be like you sometime? Let me look upon my fate.
These long grey years have taught you many things, for Time's is the only school. When I consider with what a fantastic armoury you set forth, I find it marvellous that you have got so far in safety; though it is long since you cast away your last ineptitude, I wonder you did not perish in those early days. But now you are equipped after Time's own heart, and nothing but misadventure of the flesh can make a dint upon you. What great lessons he has impressed on you since first you came under his stick! You have learned to regret not nor to mourn, not to refuse nor to deny, to be silent, to sit at ease, to laugh. In your perilous passage to so remote a rock as now you occupy, you have gathered a cheerful stock of wit, pilfering from a thousand forgotten sources; and with this your grey thoughts keep most incongruous company. How is it such a fellowship does not appear unto you bitter? I fancy you must have lost your sense of the grotesque. Your continued joyous existence is most unnatural, for you have violated every spontaneous injunction of your youth. There was never an instinctive longing in you that Experience did not crush; yet so has she shaped you to a grinning disregard that you stand exquisitely adjusted to her. When you were as I am now, you turned from those who were as now you are, with a restrained contempt, a noticeable pity, an incipient fear. It did not seem to you that they were well, alive. You had looked for their disappearance at fifty, but they surprised you. So do you us, your grandsons. Is it not plain to you that in your youth you pursued objects which were shadows? And, were they substantial, you are a score of years beyond them now. What keeps you alive? What can you have left for your ruin of a human frame, for your pillaged temple of a body?
Yet you take life with the ease and indifference of twenty, with no greater anxiety than has the youth on whom a golden world is dawning. It is true his model is not yours to the finger-tips, for you have the secret of living with ease only and not with elegance. Yet you are more fortunate than he; for though like you he lives in the ever-flowing present, there comes a time when he fears the future, while for you there is only the past. Between you and him lie all the terrors, the sorrows, the failures, the tragedies of life. He is not yet upon the tide; you have been washed to the beyond. All great desires have left you; the passions that are born of Life, yet wear their mother to the grave, have fled from a house which holds now but the desire of existence, the passion of self-preservation. You keep yourself in an even balance with external accidents so that they do not disarrange your equable mood, and time has formed this habit so perfectly that you yield only to some material disappointment of a primary order. Threescore years have turned you out a most dainty connoisseur of the daily round, and it is only outrage of this taste smacks to you of misfortune. If your dinner misfits, 'tis an offence for the stocks; but happily you will forget it with the day, as you forget all things. And yet in a way you have but now begun to remember. The champions of old time lie buried in your youth, and their memories are your monopoly. Jealousy died when you resigned the passions, so your delight is at its highest in the company of those who can remember with you. But the memories of coëvals are rarely at one, and each will add a new note of admiration, each will extend into the most astonishing parentheses. These asides are better than your main theses, being instantaneous miniatures of your life, whereas the latter are apt to be cut to one length, excerpts from larger reminiscences, filchings from the public knowledge. But this hark- back is your sweetest diversion, and I often wonder how you bear the passage of your compeers. For as your grey beard turns white, one by one they go by you into the darkness. How long have they been falling away who could remember with you once the great occasion of your manhood? Once you could crack with many, but now your recollections overlap with few. You have not even a fellow to recall the dish old Terrè served upon that summer night sixty years since. For the lack of a stimulus you too are forgetting, and if your friends give you leave Terrè will soon pass from you as all else is passing; even the fragrance of a dish must leave you at last. One would think that this growing isolation would strike a chill into your bones; but though I watch I do not observe you to tremble. I could vow there is not one of you looks across the border enviously; not one blinks at the open prospect. You have no grudge against your position, nor any dread of it. I doubt if you have ever wittingly set your faces to the mist since you grew greybeards; the desire of knowledge and the fear of the unknown died gradually with that growth. I cannot conceive your tie to life. How much of romance have you left? Have you still the dear fiction that there are wondrous things beyond the west? I am sure that long since you have forgot the very name of Woman. She is a domestic instrument between you and the dark; to escape thither you must pass her. She fends you from the eventual evil; you know nothing more of her.
From this side forty your plight seems piteous, but I dare be sworn you are happy. You are without hopes, but you are without fears; and you have the pleasant occupation of life.