OLD FLIES AND OLD MEN

_To-day, my dear, I greatly astonished my grandson by standing on my head, and by entering the kitchen by turning a back-somersault through the door--exercises which I frequently practise for the benefit of my digestion, but not often in public. His bewilderment at seeing a man of my years perform such acrobatics was most comical. But there, there, one must amuse one's self with the young sometimes. I have thought more or less seriously of advising these exercises for general use; but few men have had the advantage of being brought up in a circus, and what seems easy to me would no doubt present insuperable obstacles to most. The main thing, after all, is not to grow old before your time, because the silly younger generation likes to flatter itself by thinking you antediluvian._--LETTERS OF FATHER WILLIAM.

Few men read Shakespeare, and so, fortunately enough, few think of themselves as being some day a pantaloon--lean and slippered (as Shakespeare described this sixth age of man), with spectacles on nose, his youthful hose, well-saved, a world too wide for his shrunk shank, and his big, manly voice, turning again to childish treble, operating like a penny whistle when he tries to converse. But the Bard made a bogey: at any rate, there are fewer pantaloons visible than there probably were in Elizabethan England; and the sixth age of man appears more logically to offer a kind of Indian summer that is well worth living for. Shakespeare, it seems to me, slipped a cog in his sequence; and I prefer to think of Cornaro, the Italian centenarian, who began at forty to restrict his diet (though this I care less for), and wrote of himself at eighty-three: "I enjoy a happy state of body and mind. I can mount my horse without a.s.sistance; I climb steep hills; and I have lately written a play abounding in innocent wit and humor. And I am a stranger to those peevish and morose humors which fall so often to the lot of old age."

Granting some other choice of mental employment,--for writing that kind of a play seems nowadays too useless an occupation even for an old man's leisure,--this is the kind of an old man I should like to be.

In the light of recent scientific research with flies, Cornaro probably inherited his longevity from long-lived ancestors, and would have done about as well on a less restricted diet: he might reasonably have lasted as long if not as comfortably. Ideas have changed since Pope asked himself,--

Why has not man a microscopic eye?--

and promptly answered,--

For this plain reason, Man is not a Fly.

Say what the use, were finer optics giv'n, T' inspect a mite, not comprehend the heav'n?

Man since then has provided himself with a remarkably good microscopic eye. He has inspected the mite, and discovered resemblances between this innocently disgusting little insect and himself, which make it desirable, in some cases, to suspend the swatter, and study instead of a.s.sa.s.sinate. Granting that the proper study of mankind is Man, the proper study of mankind is Flies; for the days of a fly present an entertaining and instructive parallel to the years of a man: a seventy-year-old man and a seventy-day-old fly are contemporaries; other things being equal, they might almost be called twins. Confined in gla.s.s bottles and observed impartially from birth to burial, each baby fly, it appears, inherits a maximum number of days on this perplexing planet, and lives fewer according to the activity with which he expends his inheritance. If flies had copybooks one might compose a maxim for little flies to copy,--

Do not fly too much or fast, And you will much longer last.

Thus one scientific gentleman has watched, G.o.dlike, the lives of 5836 flies--3216 fair flies (if I may so call them), and 2620 of their natural, and only, admirers--from their separate birth-minutes till each in turn paid his or her little debt to nature, and pa.s.sed away. It is an odd thing to contemplate--this self-election of a man to the positions of guardian, health officer, divine providence, nursemaid, matchmaker, clergyman, physician, undertaker, and s.e.xton to 5836 flies. Yet it redounds to his credit, and is another proof of the poet's contention that we men are superior: for what fly would ever think of studying us to find out anything about himself? And, by deduction, I, like the little fly, inherit my span of life, although either accident or a germ may get me if I don't watch out.

But even if man, like the fly, inherits his individual length of life, he will, again like the fly, go on living it with little concern as to whatever invisible string may be fastened to his inheritance. He will think hopefully that any ancestor he has had who died by violence or a germ might otherwise have lived to be as hale and hearty as Father William, that lively sage whose habit was to stand on his head at intervals, and to enter a door by turning a back-somersault. Heredity is still a mystery; the ancestry of free men is much more complicated than that of flies in bottles; and any of us, if he anxiously carried his genealogical research far enough back, would find a goodly number of forbears, prematurely carried off, from whom he might reasonably have inherited quite a lot of what the scientific mind calls the "hypothetical substance or substances which normally prevent old age and natural death." Flies growing gracefully old in gla.s.s bottles therefore need not worry us, and every ancestor who has been hanged is a reason for optimism.

And there is another reason even more valuable than a pendent ancestor.

You and I, gentle Reader, have souls (though there may be times of discouragement when we wish we hadn't), and old age is a mere trivial incident in our jolly eternal lives. w.i.l.l.y-nilly, we begin growing older, by the conventional measurement of time, with our first breath; but who can prove that we are not in reality very much older than we look in the beginning, and very much younger than we look in the end? I get these sober thoughts from the laboratory rather than the pulpit, from evolution rather than dogma. O aged fly, to whom your seventy days are a long life and your gla.s.s bottle a perfectly natural and normal world in which to have lived it! O aged man, to whom your seventy years are a long life, and who may also have lived it, for all you know, in a kind of gla.s.s bottle, big enough to contain comfortably this little planet and all the visible stars! Whoever respects age for its own sake must impartially salute you both.

"It is a man's own fault," said Dr. Johnson, then seventy years old, but no pantaloon, "it is from want of use, if the mind grows torpid in old age." And so plausible is this observation, that any reasonably intelligent man might make it to his wife at breakfast without at all astonishing her. Here, to be sure, one gets no help from flies in gla.s.s bottles who depart this world according as they fly more or fly less, for theirs apparently is a democracy in which no outside observer can yet say that any one fly thinks more or thinks less than another. A scientific study of 5836 old men (in biographies instead of bottles) would very likely do no more than verify the generalization that any thinker may make at breakfast. And this being the case, civilization tends naturally enough to reduce the number of pantaloons. Universal education, books, newspapers, magazines, politics, movies, anything and everything that to any degree employs and exercises the mind, postpones its torpidity; and statistics indicate that an increasing proportion of babies live to be middle-aged people--but a decreasing proportion of middle-aged people live to be old enough to become pantaloons. For many a not-so-very-promising baby survives nowadays who would have perished under earlier conditions; and many a man gets to middle life who would otherwise be dead already, and lacks the "pep," as a popular magazine editor might say, to get very much further. What a survival of the fittest, for example, was that of the beautiful Galeria Copiola, who, I have read, made her first dazzling appearance in the theatre of ancient Rome at the age of ninety! She acted and danced; and Roman playgoers of seventy, sitting in the front rows, had opportunity to become madly infatuated with a charmer twenty years their senior, such as now falls only to the lot of the college undergraduate or the tired business man.

And if anybody doubts this surprising youthfulness of Galeria, I offer the corroborative evidence of the seventeenth-century pamphlet, "The Olde, Olde, very Olde Man; or the Age and Long Life of Thomas Parr," in which John Taylor, the Water Poet, describes the pre-Adamite who was brought up to London at the age of 152, met the King, and had such a great good time in general, that his death nine months later was attributed to over-excitement.

He was of old Pythagoras' opinion That green cheese was most wholesome with an onion; Coa.r.s.e meslin bread, and for his daily swig, Milk, b.u.t.ter-milk, and water, whey and whig: Sometimes metheglin, and by fortune happy, He sometimes sipped a cup of ale most nappy.

(I have looked up "metheglin," and I find it to have been a "strong liquor made by mixing honey with water and flavoring it, yeast or some similar ferment being added, and the whole allowed to ferment." "Ale"

was also a liquor, but made from malt. "Nappy" means heady and strong: "Nappie ale," says an old writer, was "so called because, if you taste it thoroughly, it will either catch you by the nape of the neck or cause you to take a nappe of sleepe." The use of these drinks, it may still be argued, shortened Parr's life; but the fly-research that I have mentioned seems to indicate that their tendency to decrease physical activity by inducing "nappes" may have materially helped him to conserve his inheritance of longevity.)

But these cases are exceptional, and for my part I have no desire to be the Thomas Parr of the twentieth or twenty-first century. It is more important to live right (and there, indeed, is a job for anybody!) than to live long; and old age, like young love, is often oversentimentalized.

Mr. Boswell, I think, oversentimentalized it when he asked his long-suffering friend, "But, sir, would you not know old age?... I mean, sir, the Sphinx's description of it--morning, noon, and night. I would know night as well as morning and noon." And the doctor restored the subject to its proper place when he answered: "Nay, sir, what talk is this? Would you know the gout? Would you have decrepitude?" He might, indeed, have gone further. "Do you suppose, sir" (he might have added), "you will know night when you see it? Why, sir, what does a baby know about morning?"

So with Pantaloon: we comparative youngsters have only an external and objective idea of him--his slippers, his stockings, his peevish and morose humors, his feeble mirth and empty garrulity. What living is really like to him we cannot know until we are pantaloons ourselves, and then, mayhap, we shall have forgotten what living is like to us now; let it suffice that we shall probably be far less bothered by our shrunk shanks and piping voices than we now believe possible. At the same time, it will do no harm for some of us to "watch our step." Already I--and there must be many another like me--am sometimes a little peevish and a little morose; a mere _soupcon_ reasonably explainable by natural causes--but there it is! I am hardly aware of it myself. Yet when it is called to my attention by those nearest and dearest to me, I experience an odd, perverse inclination to be more peevish and more morose than before. I _enjoy_, I take a queer, twisted, unnatural, hateful, demoniac pleasure, like Mr. Hyde when Dr. Jekyll turned into him, in the idea of being more peevish and more morose. Here indeed is something to look out for: resist that inclination, and we are laying the foundation of a serene and respected old age; obey that impulse, and we comfort the Devil, and run the risk of some day becoming, not only old men, but old nuisances. I do not know, though I very much doubt, that one old fly is ever more peevish and morose than another old fly; but with mankind, whose superior intelligence so often makes trouble for his a.s.sociates, the variations are visible. Savages, unhampered by the conventions of an artificial civilization, have efficiently knocked their elders on the head in consequence.

Let us, then, do our best to beat the Devil, and prepare for that Indian summer, which, with all respect to Shakespeare, is the true sixth age of man. And they reach it best (to judge by some who have got there) who do their daily work with a good conscience, share their incidental joys with others, and meet their troubles in the spirit of that stout old seaman, Sir Andrew Barton, as I the other day saw his ballad quoted with reference to R. L. Stevenson:--

A little Ime hurt, but yett not slaine; Ile but lye downe and bleede a while, And then Ile rise and fight againe.

VII

THE OLDE, OLDE, VERY OLDE MAN

_Now concernynge the Soule, it is a Queer Thynge consydering that it lives in the Bodie yett dieth nott; and so I conclude that the Soule was made separate, and thys Bodie for its brief use and tenement; and how it gets in and gets oute I cannot tell you. And belyke there bee all sortes and condiciones of Soules, some goode, some bad, some so-so; but because Goode is better than Evil, and because they lyve in Eternity, the bad Soules will finde itt oute in time, and become goode; and the so-so Soules will learn wisdome, and cease of their foolishnesse. But why they were nott alle made alyke to start, that I cannot tell you; nor juste how they was made._--THE SAGE'S OWNE BOKE.

It was a poetess, I am glad to say, and not a poet, who wrote the once popular lines:--

Backward, flow backward, O tide of the years!

I am so weary of toil and of tears,-- Toil without recompense, tears all in vain,-- Take them, and give me my childhood again.

Many a voice no doubt sagged under this load of pathos as it read "Rock Me to Sleep, Mother" to a little group of sympathetic listeners; but if such melancholies are to be set on paper, and circulated in print, I am unchivalrous enough to wish that joyless occupation on the gentler s.e.x.

Most of us perform prodigies of toil, which seem to receive scant recompense, and shed figuratively many a bucket of seemingly useless tears. But I do not imagine that this sad poetess was half as badly off as she seemed to think; and, more than that, she had only to wait long enough, and keep alive long enough, to get her childhood back without asking for it. Time, the Groceryman, in due season would hand her a second childhood in many respects "just as good" as the first; for we who are betwixt and between can observe an unintelligent ignorance of later troubles in one condition, neatly balanced by an unintelligent forgetfulness of them in the other. Our lugubrious poetess, one might say, was neither more nor less than asking the tide of the years obligingly to a.s.sist her to commit suicide. Had her request been granted, there would have been one more child in the world--and one less poetess.

An impressive parallel may, indeed, be drawn between these two childhoods--the first a period of dependence upon its elders, and the second of dependence upon its youngers, and each, to the reflective observer, a pretty evenly balanced reversal of the other. It is as if, in the beginning, the whole family of recognizable human characteristics, Curiosity, Memory, Affection, Dislike, Ambition, Love, Hate, Good Nature, Bad Temper, and all the rest of them, were moving, one after another, into a new house; and as if, in the end, the whole family, one after another, were leaving an old one. The very youngest and the very oldest men in the world seem equally equipped for living in it--"sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything"; and Baby, a little older, when he goes out in his perambulator is much like ancient Thomas Parr being conveyed to London as a human curiosity in a "litter and two horses (for the more easy carriage of a man so enfeebled and worn with age).... And to cheere up the olde man and make him merry, there was an antique-faced fellow, called Jacke, or John the Foole."

Why, I myself, meeting a baby in a perambulator, have made such antic faces that I might fairly have been called Jacke, or John the Foole, by anybody who saw me, and all to cheere up the younge man and make him merry. A little older yet, the child will run and play, rolling his hoop, spinning his top, enjoying the excitement of tag and hide-and-go-seek; and I dare say that the old man, a little younger than before, would be just as happy with hoop and top (if he were again introduced to them), and would have a grand, good time at tag and hidey-go if he had other old men and old women to play with, and his youngers would let him. I do not mean that he would do any of these things as well as the child; but it would please him as much to do them to the top of his aged bent, though now and then a flicker of remembered convention, which the child has never known and considered, would make him self-consciously abandon these simple pleasures. Even as an old cat, caught trying to catch its tail, will sit up with dignity and pretend that it wasn't.

There was once a custom of including a skeleton, or perhaps a mummy, in the festivity of a banquet, to remind the diners of their mortality, and, for all I know, the after-dinner speakers of the shortness of time; though very likely they soon got used to their silent companion, and took their mortality as lightly as most people do at dinner. An "Olde, Olde, very Olde Man," as a contemporary writer called the unpicturesque human ruin I have just referred to, would, it seems to me, have answered the same purpose, and answered it better. Human nature takes neither the skeleton nor the mummy with continuous seriousness, and proves by its att.i.tude that, if we instinctively fear death at one moment, we instinctively ridicule our fear at another. I have read it argued that man with his clothes on is nevertheless naked,--such arguments seem to amuse the philosophers,--and by the same entertaining process of reasoning we are all skeletons together, though some may worry lest others consider them too fat for romantic admiration. Or, again, to the man who believes that death snuffs him out like a candle, this skeleton at the feast might easily become an urgent reminder that he is still living, and he would most unwisely stuff himself out like a toy balloon while he still had a chance. But your olde, olde, very olde man is a reality: he is both dead and alive; his presence, to say nothing of his table manners, should tend to make each guest regard death as a friend rather than an enemy, and his state of mind and body prove such a warning against pride in either, that even the after-dinner speakers would take notice and modestly shorten their speeches.

Let it not be imagined that I lack respect for age. I tell you frankly, ageing and respected Reader, that so long as you can intelligently read even this essay, you are _not_ seriously old; and when you cannot, you won't know the difference, and no respect of mine will be of any value to you. Your time has not come to sit propped up at table as the latest modern improvement on the skeleton at the feast; and if ever it does, you, my friend, will not be there. Where you will be, I cannot faintly imagine, and neither churchmen nor philosophers help me, for the churchmen are too objective and the philosophers too abstract; the best I can do is to take John Fiske's word for it, who knew far more about both science and metaphysics than I can hope to, when he says the materialistic theory that the life of the soul ends with the life of the body is "perhaps the most colossal instance of baseless a.s.sumption that is known to the history of philosophy." But when its house has become a ruin, my soul will certainly have sense enough to look for something more habitable, and may conceivably depart while there are still a few embers burning in the furnace, leaving the fire to die out when it will.

Man is a conventional being, and perhaps his most astonishing convention is a funeral.

But the custom has long gone out of thus poignantly reminding diners that a time is coming when they will have no stomachs; and olde, olde, very olde men will get no invitations out to dine for any suggestion of mine. Fortunately there are other uses for them. They are, for example, a source of innocent pride to their families. "Grandpa was eighty-nine his last birthday, and he still has a tooth." They interest the million readers of the morning newspaper. "Friends from far and near gathered yesterday to celebrate the 101st birthday of Mr. John Doe, 17 Jones Avenue. The venerable patriarch, who can still walk unaided from his place of honor by the steam radiator to his cushioned chair in the dining-room, when asked to what he attributes his ripe old age, replied with astonishing intelligence that the winters are longer than they used to be. Mr. Doe was surrounded by 247 living children, grandchildren, and great-grand-children." These are visible uses; but this olde, olde, very olde man may have, invisibly, a more important function; and the helplessness of age, like that of infancy, may well have been a necessary factor in the slow conversion of our ape-like ancestor into you and me.

I have commented elsewhere on the natural astonishment of the first parents who realized, with their inefficient prehistoric minds, that _this_ baby belonged to _them_, and how, in the considered opinion of able scientists, the little hitherto missing link joined father and mother into the first human family. Tending and providing for Baby made the cave a home; but I suspect it was a long time before tending and providing for Grandpa added another motive for the cultivation of those higher qualities that distinguish man from all other animals. Why, there were savages who ate him! Yet in due time the olde, olde, very olde man became such a motive, and to-day man is the only animal that takes care of its grandfather. When you think of the differences between men to-day and men then, between men then and the ape-men before them, and between men now as they go about their various occupations, it seems quite possible that ape-men had no souls at all, and that some men to-day have rudimentary ones, millions of years behind others in evolution. It explains much. And so, wherever there is an olde, olde, very olde man, I dare say the care his youngers take of him is doing them good; they might even reverse the parental plat.i.tude of punishment, and say, "Grandpa, this does me more good than it does you."

But this proud possession of an olde, olde, very olde man does not always work visibly toward such beneficent ends. His obstreperous infancy, masquerading in mature garments, sometimes exhausts the patience of his youngers; and his permanent conviction (often the only sign of intelligence left) that he knows more than they do, and perhaps more than anybody else, makes their task difficult: it is one thing, so to speak, to take care of a baby when it is growing up, and another thing to take care of a baby when it is growing down. Then, indeed, one needs the a.s.surance of immortality, the conviction that Grandpa is, little as one might think it, still growing up, and that this simulacrum of Grandpa that still remains to be looked after, must not be taken too seriously. These olde, olde, very olde men are not all just alike: there are grandpas whom anybody might be proud to take care of, and grandpas whom anybody might be excused for wishing (as the brisk, modern phrase has it) to sidestep. And the explanation of this diversity, as of much else that puzzles us in a puzzling world, may be that they were not all just alike when they were babies. Inside their thin and tiny skulls some had better brains than others, brains with more of those wonderful little pyramidal neurones, which, able scientists (unless I get their message twisted) tell me, correlate, connect, a.s.semble, and unite our individual ideas, memories, sensations, and intellectual and emotional what-nots. Men, in short, may be born free, but they are not born equal.

But why worry? If the individual soul is still young, it will keep on growing in wisdom and experience; nor will it lose touch with other souls that are akin to it, and, in the measurement of eternity, its contemporaries; and it will have a better and better house to live in, with ever more modern improvements in the way of pyramidal neurones. As the March Hare conclusively replied to Alice, when she asked why the three little sisters who lived in the treacle-well learned to draw by drawing everything that began with an M, "Why not?"

So if ever I become like the valetudinarian described by Macaulay, who "took great pleasure in being wheeled along his terrace, who relished his boiled chicken and his weak wine and water, and who enjoyed a hearty laugh over the Queen of Navarre's tales," I hope that somebody will considerately push my chariot, boil me an occasional chicken, and keep handy my spectacles and the Queen of Navarre's mirth-provokers. The weak wine and water I shall have to do without. But my soul, I like to think, which is the Me for work and play, love, friendship, and all the finer things of life, already will have closed the door of its house and gone away. And as it goes, I like to think, also, that it whistles cheerfully a little tune of its own, the burden of which is "Life is long."