THE WONDROUS AGE.

ש.

THE WONDROUS AGE.

“Oh wondrous Mother Age!”

Wondrous!—such is the title this Age assumes. She wears it written broadly on her phylactery, trumpets it loudly on quay and bourse, on platforms and at market-places, blabs it at clubs and reading-rooms, placards it in railway carriages, puffs it in steam-ships; everything she buys or sells is docqueted, everything she says or does, engraven with the epithet—Wondrous! This is the Age of ages—so she says. The Golden, the Silver, the Brazen, the Iron ages were as nought: it combines them all, and is grander, richer, stronger in its fusion than any of these separate stages. Men are now only beginning to live. In former times they merely dosed or daundered, trifled or philandered, brawled or rioted, dreamed or philosophised through life, wasting its golden sands in writing love-songs, and calling that—poetry; in fighting great battles, and calling that—heroism, chivalry; in sitting by the midnight lamp, gathering knowledge, which in after years might ripen into wisdom, and calling that—study; in sitting by hearth or board, quaffing from the wine-cup, drinking toasts, telling old stories, singing old songs, and calling that—conviviality, good-fellowship; in giving alms to beggars, in feeding the hunger of the idle and the vagabond, and calling that—charity; in uttering strong words, in doing strong deeds, and calling that—manliness; in upholding nationalities, and calling that—patriotism. Such are a few delusions in which men were ever wrapping themselves, until the day of enlightenment dawned, and this Age burst upon us, with its railways and its steam-ships, its doves of peace and arks of commerce, its treaties and tariffs, its leagues and institutes, its unions and schools, its ledgers and invoices, its cotton-mills and manufactories—proclaiming to the world that the true purpose of life, the true destiny of man, was to trade, to manufacture, to make money and circulate it, and, through the medium of cotton bales, silken freights, cargoes of coal, and sacks of corn, to fulfil the great mission of peace and goodwill. Knowledge, learning, courage, perseverance, mind, thought, enterprise, strength, were not to be utterly repudiated; they were only to be converted to the one purpose, driven out of the old slow processes of development, touched with the impulses of the time, and quickened to a more rapid production and circulation. What boots it that our locomotives go at the rate of forty, fifty, sixty miles an hour? that our ships cross the Atlantic in eleven days? that our electric wires carry messages from one end of the land to the other? that our printing-presses throw forth papers by the hundred and books by the thousand? Of what use are our political economics, our statistics, our lectures, our leagues, our steam-power, our mechanical inventions, our liberalism, if men are to move, talk, think, and legislate no faster than in bygone days? This must be, and is, the age of fastness,—of fast travelling, fast talking, fast thinking, fast reading, fast writing, of fast—no! not fast statesmanship—not fast law. These remain, like the old vans and coaches in the by-roads of Cornwall and Wales, to show the world what slow-going was. Men must not now await the long results of time. They are not to sow in youth that they may reap in old age—to labour and conceive in patience that they may produce in strength. The Age will not admit of such stagnation. Its maxim is, that the greatest production in the shortest time, and at the least cost, the best markets and the quickest returns, are the only worthy aims of labour and intellect—the only fit investment for capital of the brain or the pocket.

Thus the Age is to go on growing stronger, busier, faster, doubling the power of machinery, multiplying its mills, increasing its exports and imports, sending forth its freights, machinery, and products as missionaries to all lands, until, by a loving interchange of cotton and corn, a sweet intercourse with ledgers and bills of exchange, men are knit together in a beautiful unity of commerce, and some glorious consummation be attained, such as the poet sees in his vision—

“When the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle’s flags were furled,In the parliament of man, the federation of the world,There the common cause of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.”

“When the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle’s flags were furled,

In the parliament of man, the federation of the world,

There the common cause of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,

And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.”

And what is to be this universal law, according to the Age, if not to the poet’s meaning? Love? Honour? Charity? Truth? Religion? These are all old-world principles. We, in our blindness, ever believed that love, inspired and propagated by religion, was to be the benign influence which would still the discords, close the schisms, unite the jarring creeds and warring nationalities, soothe the angry passions, and wither the petty jealousies, which set man against man, nation against nation, and bind them in a world-wide brotherhood. We were walking in darkness. The illumination of this Age throws its light upon us, and we know there are other means to this great end: that self-interest, the reciprocity of producers and consumers, buyers and sellers, the sweet persuasions of barter, are ultimately to level nationalities, quench the animosities of race and creed, and create a sort of commercial millennium, in which Swede, Russ, and Turk, Hun, Austrian, and Lombard, Dane and German, are to lie down together under one universal tariff.

Gold—the lust of which has been the bitterest curse of sin, and has ever and ever, through the long roll of ages, begotten hatred, wrath, envy, oppression, bloodshed, and division,—is at last to be the peace-maker, the love-mission of the world. This, however, is a vision of the future—“a wonder that shall be.” Let us turn to the Age as it stands before us—wondrous. All ages have had their characteristics. There have been ages of simplicity, ages of grandeur, ages of heroism, ages of degeneracy, ages of barbarism, ages of civilisation, ages of intellect, ages of darkness, ages of superstition, ages of philosophy, ages of faith, ages of infidelity—ages when men have lived the patriarchal life, sitting under their own vines and their own fig-trees, tilling the ground, tending their flocks, worshipping earnestly, enacting justice severely—ages when they revelled in magnificence and luxury, spread their splendour over the earth, and set it up in palaces and monuments—ages in which the strong heart and the strong deed, the bold thought and the generous impulse, were the master agencies, in which strong men, brave men, noble men, were recognised as the natural chiefs—ages in which the earth reeked with the pestilential vapours of vice and dissoluteness, in which manhood and honour had set in long nights, and the profligate, the profane, the sybarite, walked abroad without scorn, and sat in high places without shame—ages when man’s lordship of creation was manifested only in power over brute life, and in the tenancy of fen, forest, and mountain—ages, again, when culture, art, refinement, found a ripe maturity and gorgeous development—ages in which the light and glory of intellect shone on dark places, and the voices of the gifted echoed through many lands—ages in which such voices were silent, and both mind and intellect lay shrouded in thick darkness, or veiled in twilight—ages when men doubted, speculated, and rationalised—ages when they accepted superstitions as creeds, lies as living truths, serpents for fish, stones for bread—ages in which faith was strong, and earnest men lived in it, strove, fought, died for it—ages when men, worse than devils, neither believed nor trembled. Our Age was none of these. It ignored, repudiated, superseded all others. It is the Age of production, of utility, of circulation—to produce the utmost, by forced processes, from brain and muscle, man-power and steam-power, hand and loom, energy and ingenuity, capital and labour; and to circulate the products with a power which almost commands, and a rapidity which almost outstrips the elements: this is the great wonder of the age.

Heroism, chivalry, faith, imagination, romance—these are all at a discount with it; they are unremunerative, unmarketable, could not be cashed or negotiated. Everything, every man, is to be measured by productive capacity or practical uses. “He who makes a blade of corn grow where a blade of corn ne’er grew before, is of more service to mankind than fifty warriors.” The wit and politician who wrote this, or something like it, would have stared to see the present development of his doctrine—to find production and utility the great tests of progress and civilisation. And is this progress? Is this civilisation? So says the Age. We had dreamed that progress was of the mind and heart; that its stages would be marked by the recognition of justice, the advancement of the knowledge which leads to wisdom, the increase of honesty, courage, faith, honour, truthfulness, the growth of love, and the spread of virtue and godliness, as well as by census tables, statistical returns, financial budgets, and the stock exchange. We had dreamed that civilisation meant mental and social development as well as the existence of wealth; that it must be based on a well-balanced prosperity, which should include a comparative equality in the happiness of all classes, giving each man a power of well-being and comfort in his own sphere—the maintenance of the due proportions in society, and a fair ratio in the increase of riches and the decrease of crime; that it involved the moral, intellectual, religious, and social growth of man, as well as the productiveness of his industry and the development of his science; that it involves the expansion of courtesy, honour, generosity, kindliness, and good faith, as well as the diffusion and circulation of merchandise and gold. Were we dreaming dreams? Are these phantasies? So says the Age; and we, who are living in the glare of its noontide glory, must fain accept its interpretations with humble submission, and expand our faculties to the comprehension of its wonders. But whilst we do this, we may at least indulge in a retrospect of the past,—note what this great change has cost us, and compare our losses with our gains. This has been an age of supercession, and ere we swell the triumph which shall seat the conqueror on its throne, it may be permitted us to look back on the smouldering walls of old homes, the trampled fields of old principles, and the ruined fanes of old faiths, which it has left in its onward march—to mourn over and bury our dead. And what time more fitting for such a valedictory survey than this?—now, when the Age has paused in its career at the grim apparition of war, and the world is undergoing a partial relapse—now, when heroism is once more a power in the land, when men are talking, exulting, and watching over brave deeds, more than over funds, invoices, or railway scrip—when fair women are weeping for the brave dead, and praying for the living brave—now, when a great battle, or the fall of a city, stirs a stronger pulsation in the nation than the rise and fall of stock, or the most stupendous bankruptcies—now, when old things are becoming new, and men are looking back with tolerance, if not with affection, on old principles and old faiths. Let us then cast a glance on the past—our own past—the past of our own generation—think of what we were, and what we are, and strike the balance.

We have little belief in the days of merry England, or in the “good old times,” that illusory paradise of dullards and sluggards, who would rather mourn over a lost Eden than find one in the present, or look for it in a future; but we do remember when the land had more mirth in it than now, when it was more romantic and picturesque. We remember it ere the utilitarian spirit had laid its iron grasp on the hearts of our people, and spread its iron network over our fields and valleys. We remember it less wealthy, less prosperous, less cultivated, and we remember it also as more genial, more joyous, and more beautiful. A change—a great change, almost a revolution—in our social feelings, thoughts and habits,—in our aims and pursuits—in the character of the people and the features of the country—has taken place even in our memory. Has this change wrought most of good or evil? We admit that it had become a necessity of progress that men should be shaken out of their domesticity, their local isolation be more centralised, and become more cosmopolitan—that their intercommunications should be more rapid, their diffusion more general: we admit that the increase of population and labour-power demanded that wealth should no longer be hoarded or land be wasted, and that every penny, every acre, should be made productive—that some such changes as have come upon us must needs have come: but have we not bought them at a price, have we not paid for them at the cost of many manly attributes—many social virtues—by the loss of much rural beauty, and many characteristics of our pastoral life? We quarrel not with steam, the great wonder of the Age—the great means to the mighty end of utilitarianism. We know all that it has done for us—all it has brought us. We know that it has accelerated intercourse, impelled industry, expanded our resources, extended knowledge, equalised consumption and production, given facilities to enterprise, and opportunities to labour. Much has it done for our material prosperity; and we should hail it as an altogether beneficent agent, did we not think—God knows whether rightly or not—that this shuffling together of people, this eager competition, this hot-bed production which it has fostered, was rapidly effacing individuality and simplicity of character—had overstrode that honest persevering industry which toils on slowly and patiently to its end, which is content to labour and to wait—had raised an unrest, a rapid craving for quick results, a discontent with appointed spheres of action, a restless movement of classes to tread on each other’s heels, and had decreased their mutual trust and despondency—did we not know that it had invaded the seclusion of our valleys, smoked and scorched our woods and copses, tunnelled our rocks, cut up our meadows, and overlaid the poesy of nature by the materialism of traffic.

Commerce and manufacture! shall we raise our voices against them? God forbid! Have they not been the great agents in our prosperity? Have they not created our wealth, begotten our merchant princes, raised our shipping, filled our island with products, and circulated our own to the ends of the earth? Have they not promoted science, encouraged enterprise? Have they not nourished our colonies, given employment to our growing millions, made this little spot to swarm like a busy hive, and placed it as the centre of a wide-spreading civilisation—the heart of a mighty organisation? Should they, however, beget a thirst for gold—a mad pursuit for wealth, which will engross and absorb our thoughts and feelings to the exclusion of generous impulses and noble principles, hitherto main elements in the happiness and greatness of nations—will they be all gain? Will not there be a balance then—moral loss against material gain? Answer for thyself, O wondrous Age!

Neither will we quarrel with model farming. The competition of production, the opening of markets, the pressure of other classes and interests, have forced agriculture, for the sake of its very life and being, to adopt utilitarianism—have compelled it to turn every inch of ground to account. Utility demanded that hedgerows should be levelled, the waste patches, knolls, and nooks ploughed up, old pollards and groups of trees uprooted, and that sheep and oxen, instead of cropping the pleasant herbage in pleasant sunny meadows, should be cooped and stalled in narrow spaces, fed by rule and measure, and left to fatten in darkness; that machinery should supersede the reaper’s and thresher’s work, and that crops should be stacked and garnered as a matter of business, and not borne home, as heretofore, with festive rejoicings and thanksgivings. And if the increasing number of mouths required so many more bushels of corn, so many more pounds of meat, and they can be obtained only by such means, then must the picturesque, the poetic, and the beautiful be sacrificed instantly and ruthlessly, that man may eat and live. Yes! uproot, overturn, change, overlay them all, if thus, and thus only, the people may be fed, the poor have bread. The beautiful has ever yielded to the inroads of necessity or utility, which is a sort of modified and modernised necessity. Yet may we not mourn over the things which are gone or going, the things belonging to the outer world of the poetic, the romantic, and the picturesque? They are associated with sunny holidays, with the memories of boyhood, and the feelings of youth; and we must mourn them, though their extirpation be the doom of an imperious and beneficent necessity. We must fain mourn over those hedgerows, as we remember them, with their soft, grassy banks—the nursery of early violets and gregarious primroses—the parterre of more gaudy daffodils, and the nestling-place of hundreds of tiny flowerets, whose names we knew not, but whose faces we loved, with their tops crowned by rich-scented hawthorn, budding hazel, and dark-leaved sloe—with their bases bordered by luxuriant brambles and flowering gorse. They were favourite haunts of ours, those hedgerows: there we sought the early nosegay, there we clutched at the ripe brown clusters of nuts,—the slip shellers, theSpolia primaof the season—our hoards were gathered elsewhere: there we stripped the sloe-bushes of their fruit, under the delusion that, by a long process of hoarding in bran, they would become luxuries, and would not set the teeth on edge; there, with net and ferret, or with dog and gun, we commenced our initiation as sportsmen; there, as Dandie Dinmont would say, we were entered on the rabbit.

We must mourn, too, for these groves and thickets, which lay in the intervals of cultivation like the remnants of a conquered race amid the conquerors. Much, very much, did we love to thread these coverts, in the schoolboy pursuits of nutting or bird-nesting, or to roam in mere wantonness through the thick underwood, gathering an immature poetry from the massed foliage of holly, mountain-ash, alder, and willow—from the tangled shades of briar, woodbine, convolvulus, and the other creepers which wreathed their wild luxuriance round stem and boughs, or trailed it in a rich undergrowth along the ground—from the lights, which fell soft and mellow through the openings and through the leaves on the long-tufted grass below, rich with blue-bells, harebells, wild anemone, and many another wildling;—from the fluttering of wings, the twitterings and the cooings of birds—from the sweet-scented breaths—from the solitude, and from the many gentle influences through which nature inspires the beautiful. These places have glad memories—the gladdest of all—the memories of the full heart, the free fresh impulses, and of growing thought. On some such spot, too, we took our first stand as a sportsman. We see it even now—an opening glade, a plash overhung with the boughs of a holly bush—behind a knot of alders and some tangled brushwood. Even now we feel our heart fluttering, and our cheek flushing, as Flush—the best of cockers—after wagging and bustling about in a most excited manner, gave one sharp bark, one spring, and, something rising before us, we fired, and a bird fell. We had killed our first woodcock. Utilitarianism has waged the war of extermination most ruthlessly against these spots, and the gorse brakes which shone in golden patches betwixt the fallow and grass lands. There are few left now. The fields are spread before us, smooth and bare, and the corn waves on the ground, erewhile cumbered by old trees and brushwood, which were of no use, save to grow berries, give a covert to birds, rabbits, and vermin, and to offer the eye a pleasant spot to rest upon in the landscape. Away with such uselessness! The world is not large enough for such waste.

Those old pollards, too—those venerable solitary trees which, with their grey scarred trunks, and the green twigs shooting from their tops, evidences of the life still within,—seemed to us always the very symbols of a hale, vigorous old age, furrowed perchance, or shrunken by time, but crowned and flowering still with the presence of youth. Is there not room for them? and wilt thou, oh man! regret also that utilitarianism has wrought such a similitude betwixt agriculture and manufacture,—has so imbued both with the self-same economy of space and material, that the buildings and structures of the one are as stiff, formal, and red-bricked as the other? Yea, O Age! even so far will our perverseness carry us. Those old farmhouses, with their low thatched roofs covered with grass and lichens, their stacks of chimney, the old tree at the gable-end, the trim little garden and the bee-hives in front, those old straggling farmyards with their ivy-covered out-houses and linheys, their pools and scattered groups of trees, were doubtless incommodious and wasteful, but they had a picturesqueness in our eyes never to be claimed by their successors. Utility seeks not such effects.

Those brooks which used to meander through pleasant meadows and shady copses, or ripple gently over rocks and yellow pebbles, and whose waters are now diverted into straight channels and narrow cuts to irrigate land or turn wheels, are not they a lost beauty? But there is a gain in water-power, a saving in labour.

Harvest-homes—merry-makings—rural feasts! The Age repudiates and ignores them utterly. The land is too poor, life too short, for such follies. Yet do we look back lovingly on the days when the loud shout of the reapers announced far and wide the cutting of the first sheaf—when the last load was carried home, attended by a long procession of men, women, and boys, all rejoicing with shouts, song, and laughter, in the plenty which had been gathered in; and when the event was celebrated ever with feasts and mirth, with open-doored hospitality, and open-handed charity. Nor has there ever yet been a time in the age of the world when the fruitfulness of the earth has not been hailed by man with joy and triumph, or the completion of its riches been calendared by festivity and thankfulness. Now the goodly sheaves are carted and thrown out before their garners as so much manure or so many cotton bales. “So much the better,” says utilitarianism; “there is so much time, so much money saved.”

And are men’s stomachs, men’s pockets, to be the all in all of consideration? Are their hearts and fancies not to be fed or cultured? Is man’s labour to find the dead level of toil, ungladdened by the sound of rejoicing, unbrightened by hours of mirth? Is he to see no other end and aim in such toil than the receipt of a few shillings at the week’s end—the fair day’s wage for the fair day’s work? Is this to be the sole tie betwixt him and the soil—betwixt him and his labour? Is life to be stripped of all its poetic and noble inspirations, and be reduced to a dead materialism? Is man’s soul to become merely the motive power in a mechanism of profit and loss, utility and production? Is thy civilisation to take this form, O wondrous Age! If so, the experiment may be a grand one, a successful one; but the experiences of the past, and the instincts and sentiments of mankind, are against it. For what do men most love to look into the past? To seek the useful, or the heroic and the beautiful? Do they pore over musty tomes, and delve into buried cities, that they may discover the secret of Tyrian dye and Etruscan pottery, the system of Phœnician commerce and the sources of Egyptian wealth; or that their hearts may burn with the heroism of Marathon or swell with the glories of Alexander, and that the thrilling words of Pindar, the noble thoughts of Sophocles, the beautiful legends of Grecian mythology, the grand truths of Grecian history, may be their own? Do they investigate the records of the middle ages to understand the monetary schemes of Lombardy and Venice, or that they may read how men fought, how women loved, and minstrels sang—that they may dwell on knightly courtesy and knightly chivalry? Utility has, I fear, little of the study. This may be a human error, but it is a deep-seated and long-standing one. What a Jeremiad to sing over a fine old hedgerow, rotten stumps, and barbarous customs! Not so, O Age! It is not things themselves we mourn, but the feelings, the principles they nurtured or represented.

Agriculture followed of necessity in the march of utilitarianism. It was challenged to fight for its own footing—to struggle and compete with its rivals in the quickness and quantity of production. In this struggle it gained, maybe, much strength from its alliance with science, and added to its resources by the applications of art; but it lost much of the Arcadian character, the pastoral beauty, the simplicity of pleasure and simplicity of toil, the simple honesty and the generous manliness, which placed in point of attraction the rural life next to the heroic in men’s minds, which invested the vocation of the husbandman with the graces and dignity of a higher order of labour, and wreathed the bare facts of his toil with the garlands of poesy and sentiment. It was forced to strip for the race, to throw away all its adornments, its poetry and sentiments, and descend to the bare remunerative materialism of husbandry. It can no longer afford

“Those gentle hours that plenty bade to bloom,Those calm desires that asked but little room,Those healthful sports that graced the peaceful scene,Lived in each look, and brightened all the green.”

“Those gentle hours that plenty bade to bloom,

Those calm desires that asked but little room,

Those healthful sports that graced the peaceful scene,

Lived in each look, and brightened all the green.”

We doubt whether the consummation, imagined by the poet, has arrived, when “rural mirth and manners are no more,” but we see that they are being fast swept into the vortex of the great maelstrom of utilitarianism and generalisation. Carp we at these changes, then? We merely, according to our first proposition, balance gains against loss, crediting so many more cultivated acres, so many more turnips, so much more corn, against the loss of picturesqueness, the loss of many moral features and characteristics in a class which has hitherto been no mean element in our commonwealth. Had the Age, however, done no more than this, we should not have grudged the sacrifices thrown in the path of the great Juggernaut of progress. Spite of railroad and factory, there will still be beauty enow in our land—enow for poet and painter. It will not lie so much in our daily paths; it will not be such a constant presence to worker and wayfarer; but it will still be found by its worshippers. Even utilitarianism cannot nullify nature or denude the world of its Edens. Still must the corn wave, the grasses grow, the trees bud. Still will the “stately homes of England” stand beautiful “amid their tall ancestral trees through all the pleasant land,”—the cottage homes peep from their coverts. Still will the mountains stand in their grandeur, the rivers run in their gladness, and the valleys laugh and sing.

The rural virtues, too, may have only disappeared, to reappear under the influence of a higher intelligence. At least, we feel that a vocation, which is carried on in the open air, in constant communion with nature, must ever maintain a certain healthiness of feeling, a certain manliness of spirit.

But if this self-same utilitarianism, which has levelled our fields, turned our rivers, and laid open our valleys, be also levelling and laying bare our hearts, and frittering the great currents of the soul into a thousand channels—if it be overthrowing our moral landmarks, and invading the moral principles, which were once laws in our social cosmos, what hast thou, O Age, amid all thy wonders, to balance such work?

First of the levelling. We speak not of the changes or influences of democracy, for we have a firm belief that the proportions of society are determined by laws so fixed and true, that any attempt to violate them will eventually produce reaction; but of the changes which are gradually levelling and overthrowing the moral distinctions and moral barriers of our social life, and especially those of age. Where is now our youth?—where our old age? Where are our boys?—where our old men? We have men-boys and boy-men. But where are the veritable boys—the boys with eager hearts, throbbing pulses, buoyant spirits, gay hopes, glowing fancies, unreasoning beliefs, and ready faith—the boys with the young thoughts and the young feelings gushing through them like the juices of young life—the boys who hail their stage of existence joyfully, gathering its pleasures, battling its sorrows, and venting its impulses; not striving and straining after an unripe knowledge and a forced maturity? Where are now our veritable grey-beards—the old men who calmly, and of course, enter on their stage of life assuming its dignities, claiming its privileges, and fulfilling its functions; separating themselves from the turbid action, the toil and strife of the world, and reposing honourably in the retirement of experience and council; not clinging to the semblance of foregone periods, not envying the energies of youth or the prime of manhood, but keeping alive the memories and feelings of both to ray their declining day with mellow light—the old men who rejoiced to wear their grey hairs as a crown of glory, and stood amid their fellows with their hoary heads, their wise hearts, and their brows engraven with the lines of thought like

“The white almond-trees full of good days.”

Such a man the poet draws—

“Behold a patriarch of years, who leaneth on the staff of religion;His heart is fresh, quick to feel, a bursting fount of generosity.He, playful in his wisdom, is gladdened in his children’s gladness;He, pure in his experience, loveth in his son’s first love.Lofty aspirations, deep affections, holy hopes are his delight;His abhorrence is to strip from Life its charitable garment of Idea.The cold and callous sneerer, who heedeth of the merely practical,And mocketh at good uses in imaginary things,—that man is his scorn;The hard unsympathising modern, filled with facts and figures,Cautious and coarse, and materialised in mind,—that man is his pity.Passionate thirst for gain never hath burnt within his bosom;The leaden chains of that dull lust have not bound him prisoner:The shrewd world laughed at him for honesty, the vain world mouthed at him for honour;The false world hated him for truth, the cold world despised him for affection:Still he kept his treasure, the warm and noble heart,And in that happy wise old man survive the child and lover.”

“Behold a patriarch of years, who leaneth on the staff of religion;

His heart is fresh, quick to feel, a bursting fount of generosity.

He, playful in his wisdom, is gladdened in his children’s gladness;

He, pure in his experience, loveth in his son’s first love.

Lofty aspirations, deep affections, holy hopes are his delight;

His abhorrence is to strip from Life its charitable garment of Idea.

The cold and callous sneerer, who heedeth of the merely practical,

And mocketh at good uses in imaginary things,—that man is his scorn;

The hard unsympathising modern, filled with facts and figures,

Cautious and coarse, and materialised in mind,—that man is his pity.

Passionate thirst for gain never hath burnt within his bosom;

The leaden chains of that dull lust have not bound him prisoner:

The shrewd world laughed at him for honesty, the vain world mouthed at him for honour;

The false world hated him for truth, the cold world despised him for affection:

Still he kept his treasure, the warm and noble heart,

And in that happy wise old man survive the child and lover.”

Such men may still exist, scattered like old pollards over the levelled face of society; but they are not thy products, not the results of thy materialism, O Age! The youth which opens under thy auspices, and runs by thy creeds, cannot sow the seeds of such a harvest. The youth formed under thy influences and action will have no growth, will not know the natural processes of maturation—“First the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.” Thy youth will be put up and fashioned like a piece of mechanism, set to work like a steam-engine, moving ever by the same hard heavy material laws,—so much speed from so much power, so much knowledge from so much pressure.

Such a morning cannot end in the even we have pictured. “The merely practical,” “the facts and figures,” “the exacting coarse materialism of mind,” “the passionate thirst,” will be “the leading chains” which must bind the old age of the man who lives by thy doctrines and fulfils thy theories. Affection, feeling, imagination, faith, cannot wreathe or foliage the hoar trunk, for these will have been long before lopped off and withered by “that solid falsehood, the material.”

Truly the tendency of thee and thy utilitarianism, O Age! is to materialise the beginning and end of life—to take from youth its freshness and romance, from old age its geniality and repose; and better so, thou sayest, for thus will its space, its strength, and its energies, be concentrated on the great producing period manhood, and not expended in boyish frolics and follies—in the maunderings and idleness of dotage. Why should there be these waste places in life? “Is not youth the preparation for manhood, and old age its result?” Is it not right, therefore, that our youth should not be fed on nursery tales, prurient fancies, fiction, poetry, and high-flown sentiment, but be early imbued with the solid facts, the useful knowledge, the rules of science, and the power of calculation, which will fit it to play its part well and ably in the great battle of utility? And why should old age rest, sink into placid inaction? If it cannot labour, cannot it scheme and calculate and speculate, till the brain begin to err, and the mind to fail in its correctness?—then, indeed, let it be thrown aside like an old file, or used-up machine, to moulder and decay. It were well said, O Age! if life had no uses save the practical—if this world were merely one great warehouse, one great mart, one mass on which trade and manufacture were to erect theirfulcra, and were not, as it is, covered and filled with the beautiful and sublime; if man were a machine of brain, muscle, and bone, and not endowed with heart and soul, the divine sparks of vitality; if he were to live by bread alone, or be judged by his gold,—then, indeed, ’twere well said and well done. But whilst beauty and sublimity still exist as elements of the physical cosmos, and heart and soul of the moral; whilst we know the glorious thoughts and glorious deeds which the study and culture of them has produced through all time, we cannot but think that they will still be, as ever, chief agencies in this great world of ours; we cannot but think that the beautiful and sublime, reflected on heart and soul, should now, as ever, radiate in the warm impulses, pure worship, and warm imaginings of youth, and beam round age in the sunset hues of a summer day. What are their uses, sayest thou? What are spring and autumn to the seasons? What morn and even to the day? Shall there be no more spring shooting of leaves—no bursting buds, no fluttering or carollings of spring life? Shall there be no brown leaves, no fallow, no mellow fruit? Shall there be no rosy lights of morn, no jocund sounds or pleasant sights of waking life? Shall there be no gorgeous sunsets, no calm splendour of declining day? Is life to toil and sit henceforth under summer heat, and abide ever in the blaze and glare of noonday, rising only in the glimmer of infancy, and setting in the cold gleam of twilight? Shall the bounding step, the joyous laugh, the free heart, generous thought, and intuitive heroism, be no longer the attributes of our youth? Have these no uses? Do they cast no bright lights on a land, raise no pleasant echoes? Have they no genial influences, no glad inspirations for the working world? Shall we no longer see the glorious sight—to us the most sublime spectacle which human life or the world can offer—the sight of a man resting in old age from his labours, not estranging himself from the world, but weaning his thoughts from its cares and turmoil, holding still by its affections and memories, but gently withdrawing his spirit from the strife, to prepare it by repose for the great emancipation it is expecting? Has this no uses? Has it no grand lessons—no sublime teachings—no infinite suggestions? Does it shed no blessing or holiness around—nor reflect a ray of its own peacefulness on striving, toiling men? And are these things nought, and shall they not be? Wilt thou dare, O Age! to cast thy spell over youth and old age, and thus sacrifice to thy materialism and utility the periods which God has sanctified to the highest manifestations of spiritualism—to the purest developments of innocence, love, truth, and faith—to the richest perfectedness of peace, purpose, and wisdom?

We have seen somewhat of the system by which thou nurturest thy youth, and like not it nor its results. We love not theLanista, gladiatorial training by which heart and imagination are rubbed, starved, and sweated down—and the mind fed, the intellect exercised, for the merely material struggle—the combat of facts and realities—the great game of profit and loss. We love not the training, nor love we those who undergo it. They have not, in our eyes, the loveliness or the lovableness which we used to associate with the image of youth. Young without youth, old without maturity, young in form, old in heart and brain, they stand before us, keen, sharp, and confident; strong in a knowledge of facts, dates, and tables—a knowledge unleavened by the touches of imagination, unsoftened by modesty, unmoved by the freshness and simplicity which give such beauty to youth, and which sometimes make even the wisdom of manhood bow to its intuitions, confessing with the German philosopher, that “the fresh gaze of the child is richer in significance than the forecasting of the most indubitable seer.”

In what spirit dost thou lead them to the first study—the book of nature? Dost thou spread it before them as a book of God, that they may see its great wonders, learn its great lessons, perceive its great symbols, learn its great poesy, and inhale its great sublime worship,—not comprehending all at once, but gathering them in, for future thought and future perception? Is it thus thou presentest nature to thy children, or not rather as a science and mechanism, the laws, rules, times and measurements of which they must learn and master, forgetting or heeding not the great principles which these represent, the great system of which they are a part? Thy children are taught accurately the distances between stars and the times of their movements; they can babble of strata and formation, explain the secrets of tide, and current, and the law of storms; classify plants, from the hyssop on the wall to the cedar which groweth on Lebanon, and name scientifically the shells on the sea-shore; but we seldom hear them talk of the glory of the heavens or the beauty of the earth, or the wonders of the sea, or point to them as types and revelations of the Power which made and moveth in them all. Nature, with her laws and changes, appeareth in thy schools as the result of mechanic forces and chemical combinations. If thou teachest more than this, we find it not in thy books, in thy public teachings, or in the minds of thy pupils! Is it not the same with other studies? History, science, and poesy are, with thee, so abridged, extracted, epitomised, and tabulated, that only facts are left for the memory, not thought for the mind. All the noble examples, the heroic deeds, the noble thoughts, and great principles which they recorded or contained, are carefully suppressed or parodied; for what have they to do with the practical work on which this generation is about to enter? Thus with their catechisms and manuals, thy pupils, learning without reverence, thinking without feeling, knowing without believing, unencumbered by modesty, unchecked by impulse, enthusiasm, or imagination, can rush at once into the arena, ready and confident. And in choosing this system of training and education, thou art wise in thy generation—wise as the serpent—for by what other couldst thou hope to raise men, who, eschewing nobleness, and aspiring not to greatness—who, rejecting antecedents and abandoning individuality, shall swell the throng of money-getters, buyers, sellers, producers, contractors, speculators, and other zealots of utility, and thus elevate thee to the height of practical glory, thus make thee still more wondrous!

Such men thou wilt have, such men thy system must make; but to quote more eloquent words and thoughts than our own, “If we read history with any degree of thoughtfulness, we shall find that the checks and balances of profit and loss have never been the grand agents with men; that they have never been roused into deep, thorough, all-pervading efforts by any commutable prospect of profit and loss, for any visible finite object, but always for some invisible and infinite one.”

Ages, in which self-interest has been the one pervading principle, this world has seen before: such an age was that of Louis XV., only that then pleasure, not profit, was the prevailing object; lust, not mammon, the presiding deity. Such an era is being now enacted across the Atlantic. There self-interest, in the shape of mammon, is running its race boldly and fiercely, unstayed by old traditions, old memories, or old institutions, and is exhibiting to the world, in all its glory and success, the reign of the practical, the triumph of utility. Let thy admirers, followers, pupils, study these well, ere they rush on their onward career.

We, personally, stand aghast at thy offspring. They terrify us by their unripe shrewdness and “Smallweed” wisdom. Though verging on the period of the sere and yellow leaf, we ever loved the companionship of boys, and were considered rather a good fellow by them. We could discuss the shape of a bat, the colour of a fly, the merits of a pony, or the distinction of prison bar and prison base, pretty well, and at a push could even talk respectably of the stories of old Virgil, the marches of Xenophon, or the facetiæ of Horace. This was all well. But one does not now dare to touch one of these young prodigies without a fear that he will forthwith shoot an arrow from his quiver of facts and dates, by deliberately asking, how far Saturn is from the Earth, or at what rate sound travels, or what is the population of China, or the date of the Council of Nice.

Our flesh quakes even now, and a cold perspiration comes over us, at the thought of the intellectual contests we shall have to undergo with our firstborn. That child-man haunts us like a phantom. The vision sits upon us like a nightmare. We believe him to be our lawfully-begotten offspring, but he will be thy child, O Age; child of thy nurture, of thy circumstances, thy influences. Thou wilt be the she-wolf who will suckle him! We see him grown formal, knowing, and conceited, battering us with questions from his catechisms, ’ologies, tables, and measures. We are not yet resolved how to meet this coming contest; whether to read up covertly for the emergency, or to follow an expedient once successfully adopted by a patriarch of our experience—that of affecting to despise and pooh-pooh all elementary knowledge as beneath and unworthy of him. Yes; we see this our offspring, and we know him chiefly by negatives, chiefly by contrast with boys of our own youth. We know that he will be more proper, discreet, and decorous than ourselves or our contemporaries. We know that he will not be misled by impulse or sympathy; that his mind will never be led from Euclid or Greek grammar, by the ringing of some old rhyme in his brain, or the memory of some old joke, or the thought of the green fields and green woods on which the sun is shining without; that his pulse will not beat quick at reading of the heroic three hundred at Thermopylæ; that he will perhaps vote the Horatii and Camillus humbugs; pronounce theLay of the Last Minstrelan idle tale, and theArabian Nightsa collection of fooleries; that he will never believe in ghosts, and will smile scornfully at the mention of fairies and pixies; that he will never risk a flogging for the sake ofRobinson CrusoeorRoderick Random; thatChilde HaroldandDon Juan, so sedulously kept from us, may safely be left within his reach; that he will never secrete the family tinder-box, or tear leaves from his father’s logbook to make bonfires on the 5th of November; that he will never give, except aquid pro quo; or play, except with a calculation of gain or loss. Will he ever know a boy’s love? Yes, perhaps, but he will pursue it calmly and discreetly, like a man and a gentleman; will approach his inamorata without diffidence, and talk to her without hesitation. Not such was our boy’s love; not thus did we go through that ordeal of beating pulse and rushing thought. To our recollection, we never spoke six words to the object of our adoration, and never entered her presence without blushing or stammering; but the sight of her flaxen curls and blue eyes at the window would set our brain in a whirl, and a smile or bob of the curls would cause such a beating of the heart that we forthwith set off at topmost speed, and were only stopped by loss of breath or wind. After all such interviews, the said curls and eyes, and certain frilled trousers with which our deity was generally invested, would come dancing in on every mote and sunbeam, drawing off eye and thought from slate or book; and the memory of the many occasions on which we ate cane on account of such distractions, still causes a tingling in the regions devoted to flagellation.

Will he be a sportsman? Probably, but scientifically and unenthusiastically. We think not that he will ever mingle with his sport that love of wood and fell, stream and river, rock and waterfall, cloud and sunshine, leaf and spray, without which rod and gun would be to us as vain and idle implements. We know that he will never sleep in barn or outhouse to be early by the side of the stream or cover; that he will never invest pocket-money in flies, until their fitness for the season or stream has been well tested; that he will never, in anticipation of a raid on hare or rabbit, collect and lock up all the curs and mongrels in the neighbourhood, thereby delighting his parents by a midnight serenade. Will he delight in feasts and revelry? Yes; but staidly and soberly, dressed in fitting costume, conducting himself decorously, and talking on most proper topics. He will never, methinks, taste the luxury of banqueting on potatoes and sausages roasted in the cinders of a bonfire, or rejoice in the irregular joviality of harvest-home, village feast, or dancing in a barn. Wretch that we are! the shadows of such things cling lovingly to the skirts of our memory. One occasion we remember especially. It was the custom of ourlocale, that every village should have a day appointed for a feast, and on this all doors were opened, all friends welcomed from far and near. On such a day we crossed accidentally the threshold of a yeoman friend, and were dragged forthwith to a board literally groaning under the weight of a piece of beef of nameless form, a kid-pie made in a milk-pan, a plum-pudding ditto, with other delicacies of the like light kind. After trying our digestion, and working our wicked will on them, we adjourned to the barn, and there, claimed as a partner by a cherry-cheeked daughter of our host, we had to confront the struggle of a country-dance or jig, which or what we know not now, and knew not then. It was a fair trial to dance each other down. A bumpkin at our elbow looked on us with invidious rivalry, and commenced at once most outrageous operations with heel and toe. Our partner rushed recklessly on her fate. We felt misgivings as to our own powers. The limbs grew weak, the breath faint. We looked at the Cherry-cheeks; a few oily drops were trickling down them. We felt encouraged. Presently the steps of our bumpkin fell more fitfully and irregularly. Again we looked at the Cherry-cheeks; the moisture was streaming down now in copious rivulets. Bumpkin at last went off in a convulsive fling, and Cherry-cheeks, with a groan and a sigh, confessed herself beaten. We stood conqueror on the field. It was our first and last saltatory triumph. We have never before or since gained éclat in the mazy. Blush not for thy parent, child of our love, but throw thy mantle decently over his delinquencies! No such escapades will ever disturb the regular mechanism of the life which thou and thy comrades will lead!

Thus we trace him onwards by negatives from a youth without enthusiasm to a manhood without generosity or nobleness—a perfect machine, with the parts well adjusted and balanced, regulated to a certain power, fitted to work for certain ends by certain means—the end profit, the means the quickest and cheapest which can be found. As such a man, he will be a richer and shrewder one than his forefathers, and gain more distinction—perhaps become a railway director, have pieces of plate presented to him at public dinners, die a millionaire or a beggar, and be regarded hereafter, according to success, as a great man or a swindler. Such, O Age! is the distinction, and the reverse, which thou offerest to thy children!

Yes; so bigoted are we, that we would not exchange the memory of days spent on green banks, with the water rippling by and the bright sky above us—of nights passed with an old friend—of hours of loving commune with the gifted thoughts and gifted tongues of other days—the memory of the wild impulses, fervid thoughts, high hopes, bounding sympathies, and genial joys of our past—a past which we hope to carry on as an evergreen crown for our old age—even to play for such a high stake, and win.

We cannot test thee so well by old age, for the old men now standing in this generation are not wholly of thy begetting; but, judging by the law of consequences, we can foretell that material youth and material manhood must lead to a material old age; that souls long steeped in reekings from the presses of Profit, and bound for years in the chains of Utilitarianism, cannot readily escape from their pollution and bondage; and we can see also, even now, the dark shadow of the present passing over the spirits of men who began their career in a past. Old age is not, as of yore, a privileged period. Men no longer recognise and value it as a distinction, nor aspire to it as to an order having certain dignities, privileges, and immunities, like the old men at Rome, who were granted exemption from the heavy burden of state duty, and served her by their home patriotism and counsel. Men love not now to be considered or to become old; they fight against this stage of life by devices and subterfuges, and strive to stave off or disguise its approaches. Nor are they so much to blame. The relations of age are changed; it holds not the same consideration or position as in former days, receives not reverence and deference as its due homage, nor is accorded by common consent an exemption from attack, a freedom of warning and counsel. The practical workers of to-day would as soon think of bowing to the hoary head or wise heart of a man past his labours, as to the remains of a decayed steam-engine or broken-down spinning-jenny. The diseased faculties of old age are to them as thedisjecta membraof worn-out mechanism. It is this non-estimation, this non-appreciation, which drives men to ignore and repudiate the signs and masks of a period which brings only disability and disqualification, and makes them cling by every falsehood, outward and inward, to the semblance of youth—very martyrs to sham and pretence.

It was not always thus. Within our own experience, men at a certain time of life assumed a change of dress, habits, and bearing—not relinquishing their vocations and amusements, but withdrawing quietly from themêleé, and becoming quiet actors or spectators; thus signifying that they were no longer challengers or combatants, but rather judges and umpires in the great tussle of life. We remember with what respect we used to regard these as men set apart—a sort of lay priesthood—an everyday social house of peers—a higher court of council and appeal. How deeply we felt their rebukes and praises; with what reverence we received their oracles, whether as old sportsmen, old soldiers, old scholars, or old pastors. These men are becoming few, for such feeling in regard to them is dying out or extinct. Your young utilitarian would show no more mercy to a grey-haired veteran, than the barbarians did to the senatorial band of Rome, but would indifferently hurl Cocker at his head, or joust at him with his statics.

How many classes of these old men, familiar to this generation, are disappearing! We will not touch on the old gentleman, the old yeoman, and others; their portraits have been drawn most truly already, and are impressed on most of our memories; but we must mourn over them with a filial sorrow, believing, O Age! that the high honour, dignity, worth, courage, and integrity by which they tempered society, were of more use to it than the artificial refinement, multiplied conveniences, rabid production, and forced knowledge which thou callest civilisation—that the moral virtues which they represented were more precious to a people, and more glorious to a nation, than the products and wonders of thy mechanism! If thou has bereft us of these, it will be hard to strike the balance!

One class we miss entirely—the old clergymen. Taunt us not, O Age! with the fox-hunting, hard-drinking, hard-riding parsons of the last generation. We knew them too, and knew many whose burden of delinquencies in regard to horse, hound, gun, and wine-cup, leavened as they often were by kindly charities and loving sympathies, will perhaps sit as lightly as that of many a well-oiled, smooth-going machine of capital, who sets the moral tone for our time. We speak not of these, but of the mild evangelists—the gentle brothers whose benevolent faces still beam on our memory; whose gentle words, unmixed with the gall of controversy or the fearfulness of commination, fell often sweetly on our hearts. These lived ere this age discovered that the gospel of Christ required a new development, and the religion of God a new adaptation to the purposes and destinies of man. In many of the quiet sequestered villages of England, pastors who were content to preach and live as their Master had preached and lived, delivering His promises and commands gently and lovingly, and following faithfully His behest in visiting the sick, and comforting the afflicted—many such it was our lot to see and hear. A servant of our household often took us, in our childhood, as the companion of her Sunday holiday. This woman was most erratic in her devotions, and wandered indiscriminately from fold to fold—now sitting under the Established Church, now under Wesleyan, Brionite, or Ranter. Many a field-preaching and conventicle meeting have we attended in consequence, much to the scandal of an orthodox aunt. As she loved, however, to mingle creature-comforts with her religious exercises, we more often visited some friendly yeoman, and went with him and his family to the village church. Pleasant is the memory of many of these Sabbaths; the walk through a quiet lane, or by a shady wood-path; the entry through the sequestered churchyard, with its grass-green graves, ‘neath which the forefathers of the hamlet slept; the church, simple and unadorned, where

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