There is no use pretending; even the thrice royal game of hide and seek has somehow lost in zest.All our attributes are modified or chanced and it will be a poor account of us if our views do not modify and change in a proportion.To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser.It is as if a ship captain should sail to India from the Port of London; and having brought a chart of the Thames on deck at his first setting out, should obstinately use no other for the whole voyage.
And mark you, it would be no less foolish to begin at Gravesend with a chart of the Red Sea.SI JEUNESSE SAVAIT, SIVIEILLESSE POUVAIT, is a very pretty sentiment, but not necessarily right.In five cases out of ten, it is not so much that the young people do not know, as that they do not choose.There is something irreverent in the speculation, but perhaps the want of power has more to do with the wise resolutions of age than we are always willing to admit.It would be an instructive experiment to make an old man young again and leave him all his SAVOIR.I scarcely think he would put his money in the Savings Bank after all; I doubt if he would be such an admirable son as we are led to expect; and as for his conduct in love, I believe firmly he would out-Herod Herod, and put the whole of his new compeers to the blush.
Prudence is a wooden juggernaut, before whom Benjamin Franklin walks with the portly air of a high priest, and after whom dances many a successful merchant in the character of Atys.
But it is not a deity to cultivate in youth.If a man lives to any considerable age, it cannot be denied that he laments his imprudences, but I notice he often laments his youth a deal more bitterly and with a more genuine intonation.
It is customary to say that age should be considered, because it comes last.It seems just as much to the point, that youth comes first.And the scale fairly kicks the beam, if you go on to add that age, in a majority of cases, never comes at all.Disease and accident make short work of even the most prosperous persons; death costs nothing, and the expense of a headstone is an inconsiderable trifle to the happy heir.To be suddenly snuffed out in the middle of ambitious schemes, is tragical enough at best; but when a man has been grudging himself his own life in the meanwhile, and saving up everything for the festival that was never to be, it becomes that hysterically moving sort of tragedy which lies on the confines of farce.The victim is dead - and he has cunningly overreached himself: a combination of calamities none the less absurd for being grim.To husband a favourite claret until the batch turns sour, is not at all an artful stroke of policy; and how much more with a whole cellar - a whole bodily existence! People may lay down their lives with cheerfulness in the sure expectation of a blessed immortality;but that is a different affair from giving up youth with all its admirable pleasures, in the hope of a better quality of gruel in a more than problematical, nay, more than improbable, old age.We should not compliment a hungry man, who should refuse a whole dinner and reserve all his appetite for the dessert, before he knew whether there was to be any dessert or not.If there be such a thing as imprudence in the world, we surely have it here.We sail in leaky bottoms and on great and perilous waters; and to take a cue from the dolorous old naval ballad, we have heard the mer-maidens singing, and know that we shall never see dry land any more.Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.If there is a fill of tobacco among the crew, for God's sake pass it round, and let us have a pipe before we go!
Indeed, by the report of our elders, this nervous preparation for old age is only trouble thrown away.We fall on guard, and after all it is a friend who comes to meet us.
