VON BEING A LANDLORD

Then the father,Infant on knee, and happy like the clam,—

but that would have been the end of it. He would have crossed out the experiment, and taken another drink.

Father, in fact, follows Mother, in the mind of the general, so far behind that he is almost invisible, a tiny object on red wheels at the end of a string. But the little fellow carries a pocketbook: when Mother needs money she pulls in the string, and he comes up in a hurry. And, as is usually the case with popular conceptions, this odd, erroneous notion, which most fathers seem cheerfully enough to accept, has no doubt its historic foundation, and derives from the unquestionable supremacy of Mother in the beginning. At that period, indeed, it is hardly to be expected that any father should feel immediatelyen rapportwith his new-born child, or becomeintimately associated with its helpless, flower-like life. Ever since the idea, which has now so long lost its original element of bewildering surprise, yet remains always somewhat surprising, first dawned upon a human father and mother thatthis babybelonged tothem, conditions have inexorably consigned the infant to the care of its mother, while its father pursued elsewhere the equally necessary business of providing sustenance for the family. A division of labor was imperative: somebody must stay at home in the cave and tend the baby, somebody must go out in the woods and hustle for provisions. Maternity was, as it must have been, already a feminine habit, but paternity was something new and unexpected; and although I suspect, in many cases, this astonishing discovery was followed by speedy flight. Trueheart the First took uphis responsibilities and his stone axe together.

The horror is recorded with which Dr. Johnson regarded the idea of being left alone in a castle with a new-born child; and this feeling in so civilized a man was no doubt an echo of the emotion with which poor, bewildered, primitive, but faithful Trueheart would have envisaged being left alone in the cave with his new-born baby: the sense of relief, of gayety, of something definite and within his capabilities to do, with which the young father nowadays takes his hat and starts for the office, must be much the same as that with which Trueheart took his stone axe and started for the woods.

Thus, in the very inception of the human family, fatherhood became subordinate to motherhood; and so, because conditions after all have not fundamentallychanged, it has ever since continued. “Mothers’ Day,” for example, is celebrated with enthusiasm; “Fathers’ Day” remains a mere humorous suggestion, a kind of clown in the editorial circus. Then as now, moreover, in the earlier life of the child, Father, although not quite as useless as a vermiform appendix, was and is of very little importance.

I am not forgetting—for I do them an honor I can hardly express—those fathers who walk, all through the night, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, across an otherwise silent room, that the motion incidental to their perambulation may soothe a mysteriously afflicted babe to sleep; nor am I unaware that Father sometimes pushes baby’s wicker chariot, pausing ever and anon to pick up and restore some article of infant use or pleasure that the littlerascal has mischievously thrown overboard, and in many other touching ways patiently tries to make himself useful. These offices are almost impersonal. Any father could perform them for any baby: a mechanical father, ingeniously contrived to walk back and forth, push, or pick up and restore, according as the operator wound him up and pressed the proper button, would do as well. Only in proportion as the child begins to sit up and take intelligent notice does Father’s position become responsible, important, and precarious. From that time on, his behavior has consequences.

Fatherhood, in fact, is a mighty serious business—yet even to-day many a father seems to have made no more conscious preparation for it than had our astonished ancestor, Trueheart. My friend Mr. Todd, for example, meets Miss Margaret Lemon at an afternoontea. A blind attachment (I am putting the case with unimpassioned simplicity, for this is no novel) springs up (God knows why) between them. If Harvey Todd had been Faust, Mephistopheles would have wasted time trying to tempt him with any Margaret but a Lemon; and if Miss Lemon had been that other Margaret, Mephistopheles would have had to produce Harvey Todd, who, I am glad to believe, would have promptly told him to go to the Devil.

And so Mr. Todd becomes engaged; and after a decent interval, he becomes a husband; and after another decent interval he becomes a father—and who more surprised than he! Even as we congratulate him, clinking together the long-handled spoons that come in the ice-cream sodas with which all good fellows now celebrate such an occasion, it is perfectly evident that Harvey Toddhas given hardly more thought to the tremendously important and interesting relation of father and son than might reasonably have been expected of little Harvey, Jr. Mind you, I do not attempt to say how he shall conduct himself: that is his business; but as he begins, so is he likely to go on to the end of the chapter, when little Harvey is no longer a roly-poly human plaything but a great big man like himself. And according as hehasconducted himself, that great big man will bless him or curse him or regard him with varying degrees of affection or contumely. If he has never thought of it before, it is something for him to think about now, seriously, in the brief respite while his duties are perambulatory, and a mechanical father, cleaned, oiled, and wound up once a day, would do just as well. Fill the glasses again, O white-coated Dispenser, andmake mine chocolate. For this man is a father! He has created new life, or clothed in mortality an immortal spirit (though he doesn’t know which), and here he stands,—I said chocolate,—and Solomon, with all his wisdom and all his experience, could not tell him what to do about it.

So we clink our long-handled spoons.

For in sober truth, as one reads the reputed wisdom of Solomon on this topic, fatherhood seems to be in a state of evolution and to have advanced materially since he was a father. “He that spareth his rod,” said Solomon in the complacent, dogmatic way that seems to have charmed the Queen of Sheba more than it would charm me, “hateth his son: But he that loveth him, chasteneth him betimes.” And again, “The rod and the reproof giveth wisdom.” We know better nowadays: the rod hasbecome a figure of speech, the occasions that even appear to excuse its use are fewer and fewer, and when they happen, the modern practice may be described quite simply as a laying-on of the hand. Here, however, is something objective for a father to do—an occasion when Mother pulls in the string, and Father, mercifully hanging back on his red wheels, comes up in a hurry, and what has to be done is done. But the procedure, over the centuries, has compelled thought; the idea has ripened slowly in the paternal mind that it is an unwise waste of strength and emotion to attempt at one end what may be better accomplished at the other; and in this revolutionary discovery there must have been pioneers whose success as fathers was measured by the affection and respect of worthy sons. Hamlet’s father, I believe, rarely, if ever, spanked youngHamlet, and never in such mood and manner as to make the little Prince of Denmark smart at the injustice of the high-handed proceeding. Mr. Todd can do no better than follow the elder Hamlet’s example; and in so doing he will show himself wiser than Solomon, with his old-fashioned insistence on proverbs and a stout stick. “He that, being often reproved, hardeneth his neck,” said Solomon (and here perhaps is the origin of the phrase to “get it in the neck”), “shall suddenly be broken, and that beyond remedy”; which is an attitude of mind that the best thought certainly no longer considers conducive to the best fatherly results. The book for Mr. Todd to read is not Solomon’s Book of Proverbs but Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to his Children.

If Solomon had been right, fatherhood would be easy; but the simple fact thateven you or I, gentle Reader, being often reproved, will harden our necks, reveals the widespread tendency to ossification that has gradually discredited the didactic and strong-arm system. If I may compose a proverb myself—

The wise man maketh no enemy of his neighbor;And the wise father maketh a friend of his son.

But it is easier to compose a proverb than to apply it, and friendship, which can be built only on a good foundation of common understanding and truthful speech, is here especially difficult. “To speak truth,” says Stevenson, “there must be a moral equality or else no respect; and hence between parent and child intercourse is apt to degenerate into a verbal fencing bout, and misapprehensions to become ingrained. And there is another side to this; for the parent begins with an imperfect notion of the child’s character, formed in earlyyears or during the equinoctial gales of youth; to this he adheres, noting only the facts that suit with his preconceptions; and wherever a person fancies himself unjustly judged, he at once and finally gives up the effort to speak truth.”

Somehow or other our Mr. Todd, if he wishes to make the best of his paternity, must overcome the handicap imposed by his wider mental experience and his acquired moral distinctions between rightness and wrongness; somehow or other he must create in Harvey, Jr., an affectionate regard for his jolly old father that shall make it a line of least resistance for the little fellow to follow and imitate his jolly old father’s opinions and wishes. Often, indeed, if he is wise, Mr. Todd will dare to seem foolish. “Foolishness,” said Solomon, “is bound up in the heart of the child”—andthere he stopped, after adding his usual suggestion about the rod as a remedy. But it is bound up also, O Solomon, in every heart that beats, and is one thing at least that Mr. Todd and little Harvey have in common to start with.

And so the father plays his unapplauded part—“tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited,” as Polonius might enumerate. He wants no applause. He wants no “Father’s Day.” He wants no statue. He wants no advice. Yet it seems to me that a figure and character has lately been perpetuated in statuary of various kinds that answers all practical purposes, though most of us think of the original as a Great American rather than as a Great Father.

In an informal, but practical way, a landlord is, and must be, a Justice of the Domestic Peace. If one tenant murders another tenant, the case passes beyond his jurisdiction: he has no power of the black cap. But if one tenant annoys another (which may eventually lead to homicide more or less justifiable), the case comes to his court: he is both jury and judge, and can in extremity pronounce sentence of eviction. But so many and subtile are the ways in which tenants annoy each other that to be a perfectly just landlord would demand a wisdom greater than Solomon’s.—Apartments To Let.

ONmy consciousness are impressed the names of fourteen married womenand one (so far as I know) unmarried man: Mrs. Murphy, Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Cawkins, Mrs. Trolley, Mrs. Karsen, Mrs. Le Maire, Mrs. Barber, Mrs. Sibley, Mrs. Carrot, Mrs. Mahoney, Mrs. Hopp, Mrs. Ranee, Mrs. Button, and Charlie Wah Loo. Their husbands I hardly know at all; indeed, if Mrs. Carrot should introduce Mr. Hopp to me by that dear title,—as, for example, ‘my husband, Mr. Hopp,’—I should hastily readjust my ideas and decide that Mrs. Carrot was really Mrs. Hopp, and Mrs. Hopp really Mrs. Carrot. Charlie Wah Loomaybe married; he devotes his days to the washtub and ironing-board, and his nights (I like to think) to what Mr. Sax Rohmer, author of “The Yellow Claw,” mysteriously mentions as “ancient, unnamable evils.” In feudal times, however, I should have known them all better.Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! that brave little company—

—would have marched sturdily under my banner, each in his stout leathern jerkin, manfully carrying his trusty pike, halberd, long bow, short bow, or arbalest; and with them Charlie Wah Loo would have trotted along by himself as an interesting human curiosity—or, perhaps, in a cage. Each in his time would have done me fealty, saying, “Know ye this, my lord, that I will be faithful and true unto you, and faith to you will bear for the tenements which I claim to hold of you; and that I will lawfully do to you the customs and services which I ought to do at theterms assigned. So help me God and his saints.”

Those, in retrospect, were pleasant days for the landlord, when rent was paid in loyal service and a few dozen eggs, or what not. But all that now remains of the ancient custom is that they continue, vicariously, through the agency of their beloved helpmates, to pay me rent. In this sense, Charlie Wah Loo, with his washtub and irons, is his own beloved helpmate.

Briefly, I am a landlord. But do not hate me, gentle reader, for I am of that mild, reticent, and reluctant kind to whom even collecting the rent, to say nothing of raising it, is more a pain than a pleasure. There are such landlords, products of evolution, inheritance, and a civilization necessarily based on barter. Our anxious desire is to exact no more than a “fair rent”; at our weakest,when a tenant gets in arrears and, evidently enough, cannot catch up, our line of least resistance would be to go quietly away and leave that tenement to the tenant, his heirs and assigns forever. It is unpleasant, and becomes more so every time, to remind him that he owes us money. Only the inexorable harshness of our own overlords compels us, hating ourselves the while, to be strict.

I have seen it stated as a scientific deduction that “in the beginning man probably dwelt in trees after the fashion of his ape-like ancestors. He lived on nuts, fruits, roots, wild honey, and perhaps even bird’s eggs, grubs from rotten wood, and insects.” And my own experience leads me to feel that there was much to be said for this way of life, though I draw the line at birds’ eggs, grubs from rotten wood, and insects, at which items of an earlier menu even thescientific mind seems to baulk. But it may well have happened that some strong fellow presently got possession of an especially desirable tree, and allowed others to share its branches only if they kept him supplied with provisions. Thus may landlordry have been established.

Millions of years have passed since then,—a mere flicker in the great movie of eternity,—and we are still, many of us, living in trees; but the trees have been cut down and made into houses, of which at present there are not enough to go round. We have outgrown our simple arboreal diet, developed and perfected the hen (no small achievement in itself), invented underwear, and in countless other cunning ways have created a complex civilization. Century by century, generation by generation, we have acquired tastes and conventions that prevent us from returning to thesimple, happy, uncomplicated life of our ape-like ancestors. And in this civilization that we have made, the figure of the landlord bulks large and overshadowing, and might, indeed, be likened to Rodin’s Thinker, thinking, in this instance, about how much more he shall raise the rent. One must assume, of course, that he is thinking about it just before taking his morning bath.

It is not my purpose to dwell upon those disgraceful landlords who profiteer. I am concerned rather with the character of the Perfect Landlord, a just man, respected, if not loved (within reason), by fourteen married women and a Charlie Wah Loo. But this admirable ideal seems impracticable. I know a landlord who speaks with pleasure of the social aspect of collecting his rents; but his is a selected tenantry, for he lets apartments only to what he calls “nicepeople,” whose society he feels reasonably certain he will enjoy on rent-day, and whose financial status, he also feels reasonably certain, is and will remain such that no painful embarrassment on this sordid but necessary side of their relations will ever cast a gloom over his visit. Yet even so, I gather that there are sometimes breaks in the golden chain, when the nice tenant chats with a too feverish interest about life and things in general, and the sordid aspect cannot be glossed over by a casual “Ah, yes, the rent.” Such breaks in the golden chain are the test of landlordry.

I am reminded of a little one-act play which I have just written entitled

THE RENTCharacters: Mrs. Button, a tenant.I, a landlord.Scene:A tenement, owned byI,butreferred to asMrs. Button’s,which is perhaps more correct.Mrs. Buttonis washing dishes. The room steams. Slow creaks outside as of a reluctant man coming upstairs.Mrs. Buttonsmiles enigmatically. A knocking at the door, as in “Macbeth.”Mrs. Button. Come in. (Ienters.)I(laughing with affected lightness).Ah,good-morning, Mrs. Button. I’ve come for the rent.Mrs. Button(weeping).It’s not me, as ye know, sir, that likes to be behind with th’ rint. I’m proud.I(touched in spite of himself by the sight of a strong woman in tears).I knowthat.But you’ve been here seven months, Mrs. Button, without—Mrs. Button(wiping her eyes).Yis, I’m an old tenant, and ‘t would break me heart to go. An’ me goin’ to beginpayin’ reg’lar only nixt week, sir. It’s th’ only home I’ve got, an’ it’s cruel harrd to leave it.I (sternly). Very well. Very well. I shallexpectthe money next week. Good-day, Mrs. Button.Mrs. Button.Good-day, sir.Iexits.Mrs. Buttonresumes washing dishes, smiling enigmatically. The room steams, and steps are heard going hastily downstairs, fainter and fainter.(Curtain)

THE RENT

Characters: Mrs. Button, a tenant.

I, a landlord.

Scene:A tenement, owned byI,butreferred to asMrs. Button’s,which is perhaps more correct.Mrs. Buttonis washing dishes. The room steams. Slow creaks outside as of a reluctant man coming upstairs.Mrs. Buttonsmiles enigmatically. A knocking at the door, as in “Macbeth.”

Mrs. Button. Come in. (Ienters.)

I(laughing with affected lightness).Ah,good-morning, Mrs. Button. I’ve come for the rent.

Mrs. Button(weeping).It’s not me, as ye know, sir, that likes to be behind with th’ rint. I’m proud.

I(touched in spite of himself by the sight of a strong woman in tears).I knowthat.But you’ve been here seven months, Mrs. Button, without—

Mrs. Button(wiping her eyes).Yis, I’m an old tenant, and ‘t would break me heart to go. An’ me goin’ to beginpayin’ reg’lar only nixt week, sir. It’s th’ only home I’ve got, an’ it’s cruel harrd to leave it.

I (sternly). Very well. Very well. I shallexpectthe money next week. Good-day, Mrs. Button.

Mrs. Button.Good-day, sir.

Iexits.Mrs. Buttonresumes washing dishes, smiling enigmatically. The room steams, and steps are heard going hastily downstairs, fainter and fainter.

(Curtain)

It is a grave responsibility—this power to dispossess other human beings of their little home—to say nothing of the recurrent task of making them behave themselves in it. Perhaps, on some other and happier plane of being, all landlords will be just and all tenants reasonable of disposition and stable of income. Then, indeed, the landlordneed have nothing in common with a well-known walrus, of whom it is told that, in dealing with certain oysters, “with sobs and tears he sorted out those of the largest size.” But something might even now be done by compulsory psychopathic—I had nearly said psychopathetic—treatment; for thus the effort to solve the rent problem would go to the soil in which it is rooted, and no complicated laws would be needed. Landlords and tenants, in fact everybody, would have to take the treatment,—including, of course, the psychopathic practitioners, who would treat each other,—but it would be a fine thing for the world if it worked.

One sees in imagination the profiteering landlord, after looking long and intently at a bright object, say a five-dollar gold-piece, dropping peacefully asleep; one hears the voice of the scientistrepeating, firmly and monotonously, “When you wake up you will never want anything more than a just rent—a just rent—a just rent—a just rent.”

One sees this profiteering landlord, once more wide awake, busy at his desk with pencil and paper, scowling conscientiously as he endeavors to figure out exactly what a just rent will be. Investment, so much; taxes; insurance; repairs; laths and plaster here, wall-paper there; water, light, putty, paint, janitor, Policeman’s Annual Ball, postman at Christmas, wear and tear on landlord’s shoes, etc., etc., etc., etc.—now, if ever, there is a tired business man.

Or,—to take another aspect of this great reform,—there is the sad case of Mrs. Murphy, who can no longer endure the children of Mrs. Trolley, who lives in the flat above her. They run and play, run and play; they produce in Mrs.Murphy a conviction that presently the floor will give way, and the children, still running and playing, will come right through on her poor head. Yet it is the nature of children to run and play, run and play: the landlord cannot, try as he may, persuade Mrs. Trolley to chain her offspring. So away, away to the Public Psychopathic Ward with poor Mrs. Murphy. “Madam, when you awake, the sound of running feet over your poor head will suggest the joys of innocent childhood, and you will be very happy when they run and play, run and play—happy all day—run and play—run and play—happy all day—run and play.”

But alas, so far even psychopathic treatment cannot promise to stabilize incomes. There must still be times when the just landlord must say to his tenant, “All is over between us; we must part forever—and at once.” To which,judging by the tenor of some of the laws that have lately been suggested, the tenant may presently answer, “All right, you Old Devil. This is the tenth of the month, and I’ll shake the dust of your disgraceful premises off my feet two years and six months from to-morrow.”

It’s a puzzling time for us landlords. Not long ago I felt compelled to raise the rent of fourteen married women and one (so far as I know) unmarried Chinaman. And then, overcome by conscience, I sat down and figured out a just rent. And when I had finished I came upon a distressing discovery. I had raised the rent of neither Mrs. Murphy, Mrs. Smith, Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Cawkins, Mrs. Trolley, Mrs. Karsen, Mrs. Le Maire, Mrs. Barber, Mrs. Sibley, Mrs. Carrot, Mrs. Mahoney, Mrs. Hopp, Mrs. Ranee, Mrs. Button, nor Charlie Wah Loo, anything like enough.

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 generationlikes to flatter itself by thinking you antediluvian.—Letters of Father William.

FEWmen 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 Italiancentenarian, 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 assistance; 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 mightreasonably 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 assassinate. 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 glass 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, godlike, 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 passed 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 sexton 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 toenter 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 glass 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 jollyeternal lives. Willy-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 glass 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 glass 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 glass 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, anythingand 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 becomemadly 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’ opinionThat green cheese was most wholesome with an onion;Coarse meslin bread, and for his daily swig,Milk, butter-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 liquormade 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 tolive 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, hisstockings, 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 meresoupçonreasonably 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. Ienjoy, 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 associates, 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.

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 sex. 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 childhoodback 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 assist 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 thebeginning, 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 thechild 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 continuousseriousness, and proves by its attitude 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 asa 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 arenotseriously 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 assumption 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 menwill 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, thatthisbaby belonged tothem, 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 platitude 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, masqueradingin 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 assurance 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 theexplanation 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, assemble, 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 theway 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 haveclosed 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.”

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