Points of View (Sherman)/Forty and Upwards
There is an interesting and true passage in the letters of Matthew Arnold which spirited young fellows encounter with a chill. It is this: "The aimless and unsettled, but also open and liberal, state of our youth we must perhaps all leave and take refuge in our morality and character; but with most of us it is a melancholy passage from which we emerge shorn of so many beams that we are almost tempted to quarrel with the law of nature which imposes it on us."
The revolt of youth, the cries of which are now so audible in our literature, is an attempt to resist as long as possible the imposition of the traditional morality and the traditional character upon the fluent welter of youth's desires and possibilities. The revolt derives its bright enthusiasm from the belief of the insurgents that as the yoke of custom is something wilfully imposed by tyrannical elders, it may, by a superior wilfulness of the young, be thrown off. The wise young Arnold dashes cold water on that belief by referring to the imposing power as a "law of nature."
What is that law of nature to which, in the end, the rebel necks must bow? What power is it that drives young spirits, trailing clouds of glory, into the austere refuge of morality and character? Suppose, to begin with, we call it the law of self-preservation, individual and racial. That has a formidable sound. And, indeed, it is a formidable power. When we feel its wolfish breath at our back, we lighten our impedimenta; we stiffen our sinews; we lengthen our stride; we fix our gaze on the patch of light beyond the woods; and we become careless of wayside flowers.
Some of us, to be sure, seek for a time, to ignore or evade it. An occasional college boy, stimulated to believe that he is the maker of his own destiny, listens with wonder and eager curiosity to a lecturer commending the "cultural ideal" of Goethe—the seductive notion of the continuous growth and free unfolding of a many-sided personality, developed at all points. He may even, through his undergraduate years, revel a little in his own versatility and caress his multifarious unformed tastes and talents. By extending the years of schooling and popularizing higher education, by bobbing our hair and keeping our faces clean shaven, and by reading the novels of undergraduate authors and taking counsel of their tailors, a few of us manage to extend the plastic age and the experimental and uncertain appearance and opinions of adolescence well into our third decade.
But to pass for a youth beyond that point, requires far more money, leisure, and freedom from the cares of this world than are ordinarily to be had upon the economic tableland of democracy. In a society where the most that the average person can expect is to start without a handicap, the occupations of the first four decades are essentially predetermined. Our average man has his work cut out for him if he keeps abreast of normal expectations; and to keep abreast, he is impelled by the strongest instincts in him.
There is nothing forbidding or externally formidable in the deputy powers that take him captive, and abduct him out of the irresponsible company of youth. Quite the contrary. He sees the invitation and the promise of life in a pair of grey eyes and white hands, and he runs to meet them, and while he is explaining in a moment of youthful intoxication, how sweet earth would be if Maytime would last forever and gipsying were in fashion, he is bound hand and foot, and delivered to a power which effectively terminates his roving in the Romany Rye. The law of self-preservation has him in thrall. Or to put the matter in plain terms, he must educate himself and pay for his education; he must find a profession; he must marry and pay for his wife; he must start a family and pay for his family; he must buy a lot and build a house; he must pay for his life insurance and start a fund for his old age; he must begin the education of his children. In this homespun garb the awful "law of nature" enforces itself before he knows what has got hold of him.
He enters upon these tasks with the unreflective gusto of youth—a fluent, unformed, unchanneled energy. All the "boys" are doing likewise. All the prizes are attached to doing likewise. As the heat of the contest heightens, he strips himself one by one of the recreations and accomplishments through which in his vernal days the mounting diffusive sap of his youth burst briefly into flower: dancing, acting, singing, mandolin-playing, drawing, verse-writing, tramping, shooting, camping, tennis, and the rest. He pulls himself together. He concentrates. He specializes. "Three meals a day," he says, "my work, my pipe, and no interruptions!" He is nothing but a driving energy. He drives so hard that the bloom of life is brushed off in his passage. Yet for a long time he does not cease to think of himself as one of the "young fellows." The very intensity and singleness of his effort is due, in fact, to a youthful pride and doggedness developed under a sense that the Old Men are watching the youngster critically.
But by and by comes a season when a lot of things, unimpressive singly, happen together and become impressive. His wife gaily discovers three grey hairs, one above his left ear, two above his right. "Yes," says his daughter, kissing a spot on the back of his head, "but Dad will never be grey!" At about the same time he discovers that he needs a stronger pair of glasses. His dentist, who has hitherto passed him easily through the semi-annual inspection, now suggests an extensive plan of bridge construction. He still feels quite fit; but on the way home he mutters to himself with a playful grimness: "A-ha! Baldness, Blindness, and Toothlessness are scouting out a position before the main army of Death." Then he notices with a realizing eye how tall his sons are growing, and how independent, and how—well, he would call it saucy, if they were not so tall. He has to contradict them firmly because—well, they have no business at their age to know so much more about the point than their father. But he fails to feel impressive in the assertion of his authority, for even when they seem to assent, he has a subtle uneasy sense that they are merely humoring him, with an indulgent filial smile in their sleeves. Presently he overhears one of them referring to him as The Old Man.
"The Old Man! Good Heavens!" he exclaims, "How old am I? Forty?—Forty is nothing, nowadays. President Eliot went bicycling before breakfast, at seventy-five. Lounsbury played the New England tennis champion at seventy-five. At eighty-five or ninety Uncle Joe Cannon and Chauncey Depew had just got started. At forty, a man is a mere fledgling." So he soothes and flatters himself. But, in this season of disillusion, another fact gradually establishes itself in his awakened consciousness—a fact full of pathos and mystery: he discovers that the unchallengeably young people really prefer their own society to his, while he himself prefers their society to that of the men of forty. There is nothing like that to plunge a sword into a man's viscera and twist it about in the wound. He tries to conceal his hurt. He rallies his gaiety and makes a desperate effort to retrace his steps and rejoin the merrymakers who are going a-Maying. But even when he presents himself in scenes dewy with sentiment, sparkling with young desires, and rich with dreams, somehow he does not seem to "enter in." He feels—he confides it soberly and in the utmost confidence to his own heart—he feels like Leonard Merrick's hero in quest of his youth, who fell asleep, and snored softly—didn't he?—while his old sweetheart bent over him, bitterly, in the trysting hour.
He feels "the fierce necessity to feel" but lacks the power. What is the trouble with him? He knows. He knows. He faces a tragedy. It isn't that he is forty. Other men have been forty. 'Tis common, Madam! His tragedy is that he possesses a character. No: his character possesses him. He is imprisoned in his morality and his character. He overhears the respectful rumor of his contemporaries: "Yes, Brown has achieved a character. We can count on Brown. We know where he stands."
The object of this applause inwardly squirms. He squirms on the pointed truth in what they say. He himself knows where he stands: he is a man of property, he is a professional man, he is a voter and taxpayer, he is the husband of one of the caryatides of society, he is the father of four children, he is one of four men with plates who walk up the aisles of the church in frock coats on Sunday morning.
He acts from those positions. He acts only from them. His feeling is adequate to those positions. But he feels nothing more. So this is what is called "achieving a character." He has "achieved" nothing of the sort. This prison-house is not the edifice of his will; it was built about him by his destiny. It is nothing but his circumstances catching him in a trap. This character is a highwayman. It came up behind him, like a thief in the night. It cried "Halt! Stick 'em up!" And there he stopped; and delivered up his youth; and went no further. And that is why men know where he stands, and can count on him.
Yes: they can count on him—and so they don't count him any longer. If he speaks in public, his friends don't come out: they know well enough what he will say. If he publishes a book, no one buys it; they have the book that he wrote ten years ago. If he is absent from a committee, no one misses his counsel: any one of the members can easily present his "views." If a subscription list is circulating, they put him down for ten dollars without consulting him: he always gives ten dollars. If his own children conceive any enterprise, tainted with novelty, scandal, or promise of vivid interest, they first conspire with their mother to placate him, knowing for certain that "Dad will oppose it." Yes: he can be counted on. He is no longer an incalculable force. He is an homme rangé. He is a character. He is fixed at forty—like a monument, like a gravestone, with one blank line waiting to mark the formal decease and burial of his body.
Isn't it true that when one begins to stop growing one begins to die? When did he begin to die? He looks backward to discover the point at which his vital force began to draw in from the branches to the trunk and gradually retire towards the earth. He looks backward thirty years—thirty-five years. There was a time, back there, very early in his life—say between his fifth and his tenth years—when every morning multiplied his budding interests, and the green young shoots of his curiosity pushed eagerly into "the blooming buzzing confusion" of the universe.
Between five and ten he was a Roosevelt for versatility—yet in that respect he was exactly like every normal child! There was not a dull page from table of contents to index in the whole of life's sweet scented manuscript. All arts, all sciences, all religions, all philosophies, all histories, all customs of life "intrigued" him.
He modeled in clay, he painted in water colors, he composed unrecorded melodies, he participated in the folk dancing called "London Bridge Is Falling Down"; he was an "out-of-door naturalist" and explorer of rivers, caves, and valleys; he was a collector and classifier of stamps, minerals, coins, curiosities from the Holy Land, insects, flowers, birds' eggs; he shuddered under the knife of Aztec sacrifice; he learned from the Koran that Paradise is under the shadow of the sword; he wrote to his grandfather for a copy of the Hebrew alphabet that he might study the Decalogue in God's own tongue; he dipped into "The Light of Asia"; he studied idolatry in the old Chinese quarter; he was interested in Jesus; he was knocked down by experimenting with the current in a trolley wire; he manufactured gunpowder, and cannon from brass shotgun shells; he molded bullets; he tanned squirrel skins; he attempted to stuff birds; he made maps of pulped brown butcher's paper; he prepared medicines from herbs; he distilled liquor and attempted to petrify wood; he built houses and trapezes and dams and attempted to build a lake; he raised pigeons, chickens, rabbits, and snakes; he drilled for oil; he examined openings in the fruit industry, lawnmowing, pickling, floriculture, printing, and the newspaper business; but most of all his heart was set on goldmining, exploring Indian graves, and swinging a rawhide lariat from a saddle of Spanish leather while spurring a lean broncho after the mavericks scurrying through the sagebrush of a western mesa.
Suppressed desires? Not at all! He found time and means and energy for all this rich and various life by the time he was thirteen. He has squeezed all the juice from those oranges. But what has he done since? Soon after thirteen, a drouth descended upon the tropical exuberance of his experience. The lighter foliage of his life withered up. Education fell upon him like a blight, and the luxuriant quick blossoms of childhood were scattered. His sensuous contacts with the world diminished with amazing rapidity. He began to be concerned with words rather than with things; and things shrivelled and died and disappeared under the labels that he was taught to attach to them. His education, he perceives, operated like the old-fashioned dentistry, by killing off and extracting the nerves, so that a man in middle life should find himself with a set of dead and, theoretically, untroublesome bones in his mouth. (Only, it seems, these dead things festered.) His education was designed to make out of a piece of living matter a substantial economic block, useful for homebuilding, useful in the fundamental structure of society. He had been taken, so to speak, out of his own hands by the race, and had been thrust, half alive, into a chink of the wall, and on him an inscription had been carved: "Here lies a solid character. Requiescat in pace."
At just about this point one may predict with considerable assurance either that nothing at all will happen, or that something like a miracle will happen. Either Brown will quietly resign himself to being Brown for the rest of his days; or Brown will become that most dangerous type of rebel, a middle-aged rebel, and attempt to become something new and strange.
Let us assume first that at forty there is little rebellion left in this solid character. After a brief period of wistfulness, he surrenders to the indolence which men flatter with the name of destiny. He settles firmly down at the point of view to which his circumstances have driven him. In that case, there is a fair likelihood that in his leisure hours he will become a tedious utilitarian critic of his own upbringing. He will complain of the liberal education which unsettles youth and fills it with insatiable hungers by attempting to develop a general human personality instead of a sharp vocational instrument. He will turn around upon his Alma Mater and condemn her harshly for not having cut away, at an earlier age, all the young unprofitable shoots of his general human curiosity. He may declare that the fault of his education was its failure to make him an even keener, harder, sharper vocational instrument than he is.
"What good," he will say, "have history and literature and philosophy ever done to me? You teachers pumped me full of culture. You filled me up with stuff about the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and the Reformation and the Puritan Revolution. You wasted my youth in talk about the real and the ideal and the good and the beautiful. You lured me into listening to symphonies and looking at pictures and vibrating to the pity and terror of tragic drama. You peopled the greenwood of my imagination with poetic figures of knights and ladies on great adventures and romantic quests. And then I married a fairly good cook and you sent me into the world to serve as a chemist in a dye works or to write advertising for toothpowder and laundry soap. My education was not practical. It didn't prepare me for life. It was no good. I have no use for it."
To this complaint, it should be remarked in passing, there is a retort which all "liberal" educators should learn to make. It runs something like this: "You say that your education is 'no good.' We reply, O solid businesslike character, that your life is 'no good.' Your life is not good because you built it too small to hold the best of your possessions. The trouble with you is that you wasted the wealth that we gave you; you let it rust and mildew in cellar and attic. You lacked ingenuity to use your capital. You have not learned how to employ your culture in your life. You have made no outlets for your education. Don't blame us if you can't draw Niagara through a brass faucet into the kitchen sink. As occasion serves, we shall continue to 'pump' culture into you. Perhaps bye and bye you will burst. We rather hope that you will. Then possibly something more exhilarating than a solid businesslike character can be made of the ruins and fragments of you. Perhaps a personality can be made of the pieces. At any rate there will be no great loss if you burst. On the whole, go ahead and burst. You really aren't worth saving."
But now let us assume the more enlivening of the possibilities: let us assume that a miracle happens. As Brown looks dismally out from the barred small window of his character upon his life, and sees that it is finished, suddenly his past breaks away from him, as Sicily broke away from Italy, and a gulf yawns between. There is evidence that this thing does happen. His past is no longer his; it has become a part of human history. It has become a dramatic spectacle; sitting in the box of his character he regards it as it were across footlights, with spectatorial detachment. He can re-examine it now without shame or vanity or repentance. It interests him no longer as conduct waiting for the Judgment Day but as food for intellectual and aesthetic curiosity. He now finds a use for his culture in understanding, not judging, the whole of the human spectacle. He wheels a speculative eye upon his coevals—those dreary "substantial characters" who now for so many years have been giving one another, as Thoreau complained, the same old bite of the same musty old cheese that they are. They, too, have become dramatic spectacles, each one with its own individual savour! And his wife and the four children? The moment that he stops worrying about that abstract line which is the shortest distance between two points, he perceives at last the full colour and fragrance and taste of his relation to them.
What does all this mean? It means that at forty, when a man seems hermetically enclosed in his character, an angel may just possibly unbar the door, and, leaving his possessive, aggressive body sleeping there, let his spirit out for the recognition and appreciation of a new life. So long as he wished to possess and direct the world, the world erected barriers against him, and progressively shut him in. As soon as he exacts nothing of it, it gives him all—all its qualities for his discrimination and delectation. There is no way to return to his youth by retracing the caterpillar progress of the senses or by the renovation of cells that have become clogged with the hard deposit of years. But all those old interests which he had thought dead are now reborn with wings. He can return to his past, he can flit into his future, with the swift flight of a butterfly. While he seems to sleep in the barred prison-house of his character, and his old sweetheart weeps over the baldheaded, roundwaisted man of property gently snoring there, he perchance has discovered that she can't be met at the old trysting place any more, and has pushed on up the highroad to the detour of pure poetic contemplation where all her fair qualities, her joy and blitheness and beauty, are recollected in tranquillity. Out of the death of the possessive passion, a rebirth of the mind and imagination!
If this miracle has happened, he feels, at forty, the possibility not merely of a new life but of a new kind of life opening before him. He sees the necessity of revising the "theory of education." At forty, instead of killing off the nerves, one should be occupied in reviving the spirits. Instead of closing old doors, one should be cutting new windows. Instead of sitting down and going to sleep at his own point of view, he should hunt for new ones, if he has to go to China or Alaska or Tierra del Fuego to find them. What a man of forty needs to do is to re-examine his metaphors. Let us try our hammer on this "solid character."
We spend our lives in a quarry of words. We immure ourselves behind a wall of images. We talk of characters; immediately the mallet and chisel are in our hands. We are sculptors, and our subjects are unhewn blocks of marble, and the form we seek is imposed from without. The chips fly. Chips of what? Is the imposition of marble qualities upon flesh and blood responsible for that grim and weary and hopeless look of the Old Man of the Mountain, which establishes itself at middle age upon faces once mobile and rosy? Has this entire theory of human sculpture a bearing upon the prevalence of ennui, rigor mortis, premature death, and petrification at forty? Is there a gleam of hope in a change of images?
"He built his house on a rock." Is that the best place for a house? Not if one cares for gardening. At forty, one is justified at least in enquiring whether what looked like a white rock was only a ribbon of foam. There is current an alternative set of images, which takes us out of the stone-quarry and the graveyard and away from the tedious refrain, Requiescat in pace.
Our lives are a bright-flowing mist of days and nights. Our blood is a swift-winding river. Our flesh is a changing flower. There is a season of buds and a season of fruit and a season of wine and perfume. And after the vintage, there are memories and dreams.
Is there no kinetic and flowing character—no form imposable upon wind and water: such form as the cloud takes in the West, such color; such shapes as life transiently rests in, rising from seed to blossom?
Come, let us make a new set of maxims, not for youths in their twenties with houses to build and children to educate, but for men of forty and upwards who are growing tired of one another and yet are not quite ready to die:
Unfold, leaf by leaf.
Become more and more intimate with life.
Ask no cold question of any joyous thing.
Go to all living things gently, listening for the wonder of the breath and the heartbeat.
Ask all successful and happy creatures for a clue.
Study all lovely things, with docility seeking their principle of beauty.
Consider whether it is better to change and be living than to be unchanged and dead.
Eschew pedantry and make much of fine art: it possesses a secret of eternal life.
Be your residence urban or rural, there is no provincialism so narrow as that developed by the inveterate maintenance of your own point of view.
Push on into untrodden forests, up unexplored valleys, seeking new springs of refreshment, crying at the foot of every mountain ridge, "Let us see what is on the other side."