第20章 CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH(5)

By way of an apologue for the aged, when they feel more than usually tempted to offer their advice, let me recommend the following little tale.A child who had been remarkably fond of toys (and in particular of lead soldiers) found himself growing to the level of acknowledged boyhood without any abatement of this childish taste.He was thirteen;already he had been taunted for dallying overlong about the playbox; he had to blush if he was found among his lead soldiers; the shades of the prison-house were closing about him with a vengeance.There is nothing more difficult than to put the thoughts of children into the language of their elders; but this is the effect of his meditations at this juncture: "Plainly," he said, "I must give up my playthings, in the meanwhile, since I am not in a position to secure myself against idle jeers.At the same time, I am sure that playthings are the very pick of life; all people give them up out of the same pusillanimous respect for those who are a little older; and if they do not return to them as soon as they can, it is only because they grow stupid and forget.Ishall be wiser; I shall conform for a little to the ways of their foolish world; but so soon as I have made enough money, I shall retire and shut myself up among my playthings until the day I die." Nay, as he was passing in the train along the Esterel mountains between Cannes and Frejus, he remarked a pretty house in an orange garden at the angle of a bay, and decided that this should be his Happy Valley.Astrea Redux;childhood was to come again! The idea has an air of simple nobility to me, not unworthy of Cincinnatus.And yet, as the reader has probably anticipated, it is never likely to be carried into effect.There was a worm i' the bud, a fatal error in the premises.Childhood must pass away, and then youth, as surely as age approaches.The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances.To love playthings well as a child, to lead an adventurous and honourable youth, and to settle when the time arrives, into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artist in life and deserve well of yourself and your neighbour.

You need repent none of your youthful vagaries.They may have been over the score on one side, just as those of age are probably over the score on the other.But they had a point;they not only befitted your age and expressed its attitude and passions, but they had a relation to what was outside of you, and implied criticisms on the existing state of things, which you need not allow to have been undeserved, because you now see that they were partial.All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete.

The follies of youth have a basis in sound reason, just as much as the embarrassing questions put by babes and sucklings.

Their most antisocial acts indicate the defects of our society.When the torrent sweeps the man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory.Shelley, chafing at the Church of England, discovered the cure of all evils in universal atheism.Generous lads irritated at the injustices of society, see nothing for it but the abolishment of everything and Kingdom Come of anarchy.Shelley was a young fool; so are these cocksparrow revolutionaries.But it is better to be a fool than to be dead.It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity.Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind.For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself! As for the others, the irony of facts shall take it out of their hands, and make fools of them in downright earnest, ere the farce be over.There shall be such a mopping and a mowing at the last day, and such blushing and confusion of countenance for all those who have been wise in their own esteem, and have not learnt the rough lessons that youth hands on to age.If we are indeed here to perfect and complete our own natures, and grow larger, stronger, and more sympathetic against some nobler career in the future, we had all best bestir ourselves to the utmost while we have the time.To equip a dull, respectable person with wings would be but to make a parody of an angel.

In short, if youth is not quite right in its opinions, there is a strong probability that age is not much more so.

Undying hope is co-ruler of the human bosom with infallible credulity.A man finds he has been wrong at every preceding stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right.Mankind, after centuries of failure, are still upon the eve of a thoroughly constitutional millennium.Since we have explored the maze so long without result, it follows, for poor human reason, that we cannot have to explore much longer; close by must be the centre, with a champagne luncheon and a piece of ornamental water.How if there were no centre at all, but just one alley after another, and the whole world a labyrinth without end or issue?

I overheard the other day a scrap of conversation, which I take the liberty to reproduce."What I advance is true,"said one."But not the whole truth," answered the other.

"Sir," returned the first (and it seemed to me there was a smack of Dr.Johnson in the speech), "Sir, there is no such thing as the whole truth!" Indeed, there is nothing so evident in life as that there are two sides to a question.

History is one long illustration.The forces of nature are engaged, day by day, in cudgelling it into our backward intelligences.We never pause for a moment's consideration but we admit it as an axiom.An enthusiast sways humanity exactly by disregarding this great truth, and dinning it into our ears that this or that question has only one possible solution; and your enthusiast is a fine florid fellow, dominates things for a while and shakes the world out of a doze; but when once he is gone, an army of quiet and uninfluential people set to work to remind us of the other side and demolish the generous imposture.While Calvin is putting everybody exactly right in his INSTITUTES, and hot-headed Knox is thundering in the pulpit, Montaigne is already looking at the other side in his library in Perigord, and predicting that they will find as much to quarrel about in the Bible as they had found already in the Church.Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other.There is nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong.Let them agree to differ; for who knows but what agreeing to differ may not be a form of agreement rather than a form of difference?

I suppose it is written that any one who sets up for a bit of a philosopher, must contradict himself to his very face.For here have I fairly talked myself into thinking that we have the whole thing before us at last; that there is no answer to the mystery, except that there are as many as you please; that there is no centre to the maze because, like the famous sphere, its centre is everywhere; and that agreeing to differ with every ceremony of politeness, is the only "one undisturbed song of pure concent" to which we are ever likely to lend our musical voices.