XVII
THE SPELL OF THE PAST
INOTICE that as a man grows old he is more and more fond of quoting his father,—what he said, what he did. It has more and more force or authority with him. It is a tribute to the past. Not until one has reached the meridian of life or gone beyond it, does the spell of the past begin to creep over him.
Said a middle-aged woman to me the other day, “Old people are beginning to look very good to me; I like to be near them and to hear them talk.” It is a common experience. I have seen many a granny on the street whom I felt like kidnapping, taking home, and seating in my chimney corner, for the sake of the fragrance and pathos of the past which hovered about her; for the sake also, I suppose, of the filial yearning which is pretty sure to revive in one after a certain time.
No woman can ever know the depths of her love for her mother until she has become a mother herself, and no man knows the depths of his love for his father until he has become a father. When we have experienced what they experienced, when we have traveled over the road which theytraveled over, they assume a new value, a new sacredness in our eyes. They are then our former selves, and a peculiarly tender regard for them awakens in our hearts. There is pathos in the fact that so many people lose their parents before the experiences of life have brought about that final flavoring and ripening of the filial instinct to which I refer.
After one has lived half a century, and maybe long before, his watch begins to lose time; the years come faster than he is ready for them; while he is yet occupied with the old, the new is upon him. How alien and unfriendly seem the new years, strangers whom we reluctantly entertain for a time but with whom we seem hardly to get on speaking terms,—with what uncivil haste they come rushing in! One writes down the figures on his letters or in his journals, but they all seem alien; before one has become at all intimate with them, so that they come to mean anything special to him, they are gone. While he is yet occupied with the sixties, living upon the thoughts and experiences which they brought him, the seventies have come and gone and the eighties have knocked at his door.
The earlier years one took to his heart as he did his early friends. How much we made of them; what varied hues and aspects they wore; how we came to know each other; how rounded and complete were all things! Ah, the old friends and the old years, we cannot separate them; they had a quality and an affinity for us that we cannot find inthe new. The new years and the new friends come and go, and leave no impression. Youth makes all the world plastic; it creates all things anew; youth is Adam in Paradise, from which the burdens and the experiences of manhood will by and by cause him to depart with longing and sorrow. “When we were young,” says Schopenhauer, “we were completely absorbed in our immediate surroundings; there was nothing to distract our attention from them; we looked upon the objects about us as though they were the only ones of their kind,—as though, indeed, nothing else existed at all.”
It is perhaps inevitable that a man of sensibility and imagination should grow conservative as he grows old. The new is more and more distasteful to him. Did you ever go back to the old homestead where you had passed your youth or your early manhood, and find the old house, the old barn, the old orchard, in fact all the old landmarks gone? What a desecration, you thought. The new buildings, how hateful they look to you! They mean nothing to you but the obliteration of that which meant so much. This experience proves nothing except that the past becomes a part of our very selves; our roots, our beginnings, are there, and we bleed when old things are cut away.
After a certain age is reached, how trivial and flitting seem the new generations! The people whom we found upon the stage when we came into the world,—the middle-aged and the elderly people who were bearing the brunt of the battle,—they seemimportant and like a part of the natural system of things. When they pass away what a void they leave! Those who take their places, the new set, do not seem to fill the bill at all. But the chances are that they are essentially the same class of people, and will seem as permanent and important to our children as the old people did to us.
To repeat the experience, go to a strange town and take up your abode. Everybody seems in his proper place, there are no breaks, we miss nothing, the social structure is complete. In a quarter of a century go back to the place again; ruins everywhere, nearly all the old landmarks gone, and a new generation upon the stage. But to the newcomer nothing of this is visible; he finds everything established and in order as we first found it. It is so in life. Our children are the newcomers who do not and cannot go behind the visible scene.
We are always wondering who are going to take the place of the great poets, the great preachers, the great statesmen and orators who are passing away. We see the new men, but they are not the worthy successors of these. The great ones are all old or dead. The new ones we know not; they cannot be to us what the others were; they cannot be the star actors in the drama in which we have played a part, and therefore we fancy they are of little account.
Are there any genuine old men any more? Why, the old men, the real ones, are all dead long ago; we knew them in our youth; they were always old,old from the foundations of the world. These old men of to-day are mere imitations; we can remember when they were not old,—it is all put on. The grandfathers and the grandmothers whom we knew—think of any present-day grandparents being anything more than mere counterfeits of them!
Hence, also, the new generation always go astray according to the old, and run after strange gods. “And also all that generation were gathered unto their fathers; and there arose another generation after them, which knew not the Lord, nor yet the works which He had done for Israel.”
How ready we are to believe in the past as against the present; to believe that wonders happened then that do not happen now! Miracles happened then, but not now. The Divine One came upon earth then, but he comes no more! Our whole religion is of the past. How hard to believe in a present revelation, or to believe in the advantages and opportunities of the present hour!
From the standpoint of each of us the sunrise and the sunset seem like universal facts; it must be evening or morning throughout the world, we think, instead of just here on our meridian. In the same way we are prone to look upon youth and age as commensurate with human existence; the world was young when we were young, and it grows old as we grow old; youth and age we think are not subjective experiences, but objective realities.
How can these youths here by our side feel as we have felt, see what we have seen, have the samejoys and sorrows, the same friends, the same experiences, see the world clad in the same hues, feel the same ties of home, of father and mother, of school and comrades, when all the world is so changed,—when these things and persons that were so much to us are forever past? What is there left? How can life bring to them what it brought to us? But it will. The same story is told over and over to each succeeding generation, and each finds it new and true for them alone. As we find our past in others, so our youths will find their past in us, and find it unique and peculiar.
The lives of men are like the sparks that shoot upward; the same in the first ages as in the last, each blazing its brief moment as it leaps forth, some attaining a greater brilliancy or a higher flight than others, but all ending at last in the same black obscurity. Or they are like the waves that break upon the shore; one generation following swift upon the course of another, repeating the same evolutions, and crumbling and vanishing in the same way.
Probably no man ever lost his father or his mother or his bosom friend without feeling that no one else could ever have had just such an experience. Carlyle, in writing to Emerson shortly after each had lost his mother, said, “You too have lost your good old mother, who stayed with you like mine, clear to the last; alas, alas, it is the oldest Law of Nature; and it comes on every one of us with a strange originality, as if it had never happened before!”
Speaking of these two rare men, each so attractive to the other, how unlike they were in their attitude toward the past,—the one with that yearning, wistful, backward glance, bearing the burden of an Old World sorrow and remorse, long generations of baffled, repressed, struggling humanity coming to full consciousness in him; the other serene, hopeful, optimistic, with the spell of the New World upon him, turning cheerfully and confidently to the future! Emerson describes himself as an endless seeker with no past at his back. He seemed to have no regrets, no wistful retrospections. His mood is affirmative and expectant. The power of the past was not upon him, but it had laid its hand heavily upon his British brother, so heavily that at times it almost overpowered him. Carlyle’s dominant note is distinctively that of retrospection. He yearns for the old days. The dead call to him from their graves. In the present he sees little, from the future he expects less; all is in the past. How he magnifies it, how he re-creates it and reads his own heroic temper into it! The twelfth century is more to him than the nineteenth.
It is true that the present time is more or less prosy, vulgar, commonplace to most men; not till we have lived it and colored it with our own experiences does it begin to draw us. This seems to have been preëminently the case with Carlyle; he was morbidly sensitive to the crude and prosy present, and almost preternaturally alive to the glamour of the past. What men had done, what they hadtouched with their hands, what they had colored with their lives, that was sacred to him.
Is it not a common experience that as we grow old there comes more and more a sense of solitude and exposure? Life does not shut us in and house us as it used to do. One by one the barriers and wind-breaks are taken down, and we become more and more conscious of the great cosmic void that encompasses us. Our friends were walls that shielded us; see the gaps in their ranks now. Our parents were like the roof over our heads; what a sense of shelter they gave us! Then our hopes, our enthusiasms, how they housed us, or peopled and warmed the void! A keen living interest in things, what an armor against the shafts of time is that! Always on the extreme verge of time, this moment that now passes is the latest moment of all the eternities.Newtime always. The old time we cannot keep. The old house, the old fields, and in a measure the old friends may be ours, but the atmosphere that bathed them all, the sentiment that gave to them hue, this is from within and cannot be kept.
Time does not become sacred to us until we have lived it, until it has passed over us and taken with it a part of ourselves. While it is here we value it not,—it is like raw material not yet woven into the texture and pattern of our lives; but the instant it is gone and becomes yesterday, or last spring, or last year, how tender and pathetic it looks to us! The shore of time! I think of it as a shore constantly pushing out into the infinite sea, stretchingfarther and farther back of us like a fair land idealized by distance into which we may not again enter. The future is alien and unknown, but the past is a part of ourselves. So many ties bind us to it. The past is the cemetery of our days. There they lie, every one of them. Musingly we recall their faces and the gifts they brought us,—the friends, the thoughts, the experiences, the joys, the sorrows; many of them we have quite forgotten, but they were all dear to us once.
If our friends should come back from their graves, could they be what they once were to us? Not unless our dead selves came back also. How precious and pathetic the thought of father and mother to all men; yet the enchantment of the past is over them also. They are in that sacred land; their faces shine with its hallowed light, their voices come to us with its moving tones.
Pope in replying to a letter of Swift’s said, “You ask me if I have got a supply of new friends to make up for those who are gone? I think that impossible; for not our friends only, but so much of ourselves is gone by the mere flux and course of years, that, were the same friends restored to us, we could not be restored to ourselves to enjoy them.”
In view of this power and attraction of the past, what do we mean by saying we would not live our lives over again? It seems to be an almost universal feeling. Cicero says, “If any god should grant me, that from this period of life I should become a child again and cry in the cradle, I should earnestlyrefuse it;” and Sir Thomas Browne says, “For my own part I would not live over my hours past, or begin again the thread of my days.” Sir Thomas did not want to live his life over again, for fear he would live it worse instead of better. Cicero did not regret that he had lived, but intimates that he had had enough of this life, and wanted to enter upon that new and larger existence. “Oh, glorious day! when I shall depart to that divine company and assemblage of spirits, and quit this troubled and polluted scene!”
But probably the true reason was not given in either case.We do not like to go back.We are done with the past; we have dropped it, sloughed it off. However pleasing it may be in the retrospect, however fondly we may dwell upon it, our real interest is in the present and the future. Probably no man regrets that he did not live at an earlier period, one hundred, five hundred, two thousand years ago; while the wish that our existence had been deferred to some future age is quite common. It all springs from this instinctive dislike to going back, and this zest for the unknown, the untried. There are many experiences in the lives of us all that we would like to repeat, but we do not want to go back. We habitually look upon life as a journey; the past is the road over which we have just come; these were fair countries we just passed through, delightful experiences we had at this point and at that, but we do not want to turn back and retrace our steps. There is more or less a feeling of satiety.We want to go ahead, but of what is behind us we have had our fill. What is the feeling we have when we meet a crowd pressing into the show as we are coming out, or when we see our eager friends embarking for Europe as we again set foot on our native shore? Do we not have a kind of pity for them? Do we not feel that we have taken the cream and that they will find only the skimmed milk? We think of the world as moving on, everybody and everything as pressing forward. To live our lives over again would be to go far to the rear. It would be to give up the present and all that it holds; it would be a kind of death.
Take from life all novelty, newness, surprise, hope, expectation, and what have you left? Nothing but a cold pancake, which even the dog hesitates over. One’s life is full of routine and repetition, but then it is always a new day; it is always the latest time; we are on the crest of the foremost wave; we are perpetually entering a new and untried land. I am told that lecturers do not weary of repeating the same lecture over and over, because they always have a new audience. The routine of our lives is endurable because, as it were, we always have a new audience; this day is the last birth of time and its face no man has before seen. Life becomes stale to us when we cease to feel any interest in the new day, when the night does not re-create us, when we are not in some measure born afresh each morning. As age comes on we become less and less capable of renewal by rest and sleep, and so gradually life losesits relish, till it is liable to become a positive weariness.
Hence in saying we would not live our lives over, we are only emphasizing this reluctance we feel at going back, at taking up again what we have finished and laid down. Time translates itself in the mind as space; our earlier lives seem afar off, to be reached only by retracing our steps, and this we are not willing to do. In the only sense in which we can live our lives over, namely, in the lives of our children, we live them over again very gladly. We begin the game again with the old zest.
Who would not have his youth renewed? What old man would not have again, if he could, the vigor and elasticity of his prime? But we would not go back for them; we would have them here and now, and date the new lease from this moment. It argues no distaste for life, therefore, no deep dissatisfaction with it, to say we would not live our lives over again. We do live them over again from day to day, and from year to year; but the shadow of the past, we would not enter that. Why is it a shadow? Why this pathos of the days that are gone? Is it because, as Schopenhauer insists, life has more pain than pleasure? But it is all beautiful, the painful experiences as well as the pleasurable ones; it is all bathed in a light that never was on sea or land, and yet we see it as it were through a mist of tears. There is no pathos in the future, or in the present; but in the house of memory there are more sighs than laughter.