THE WORLD OF BOOKS.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 18266, 27 December 1924, Page 9

THE WORLD OF BOOKS.

HALF HOURS IN A LIBRARY. <»?»CU.LLT WIHTM TO I "TBI rMII. ') By A. H. Gbinictg. XCIII.—ON ENDINGS. Mr Hilaire Belloc, who is nothing if not topieal in his essay writing, has for one of his titles ' 1 On Coming to an End"; I prefer "On Endings" as offering a wider scope for a few reflections on the ending of another Old l<?ar. There remain but four more days of 1924, and if it be true that "all's well that ends well," much may depend upoD the happenings of those four days. Maurice Hewlett, one of several familiar forces in the literary world who departed this life during the year, who has an essay on Shakespeare's comedy, says oi' "All's Well That Ends Well": "Hazlitt, who was the boy for an extreme position, and could never admire a thing heartily unless he thought that all the world condemned it, begins his study of this play by saying that it is 'one of the most pleasing of our author's comedies'! It is impossible that he can have thought so, and he proves that , he did not by what he goes on to Bay." i Which is rather hard on Hazlitt. i I am extremely partial to Hazlitt, j and one of my favourite essays for reading when the year is drawing to a close is "On the Pear of Death," whieh begins with the sentence: "Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death i is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end." Whieh is another ■way of saying that the birth of the New Year follows hard after the death of the Old Tear. "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting," and "our little life is rounded with a sleep." As Hazlitt points out, "To die is only to be as we were before we were born." The essay is replete with sentences that compel thought and meditation:— Neither, in truth, hare we any partieular solicitude to pry into the secrets of futurity but as a pretext lor prolonging our own existence. It is not so much that we care to be alive a hundred or a thousand years hence, any more than to have been alive a hundred or a thousand years ago; but the thing lies here, that we would all of us wish the present moment to last for ever., We would be as we are and would have the world remain just as it is, to please us A life of action and danger moderates the dread of death. It not only gives us fortitude to bear pain, but teaches us at every stop the precarious tenure on which we hold our present being. Sedentary and studious men are the most apprehehsive on this- Bcore. Dr. Johnson was an instance in point. A few years Beemed to him soon over, compared with tll'ose sweeping contemplations on time and infinity with which he had been used to pose himself. In the still-life of a man of letters, there was no obvious reason for a change. He might git in an arm-chair and pour out cups of tea to all eternity. Would it had been possible for him to do so. The most rational cure, after all, for the inordinate fear of death is to set a just value on life. If we merely wish to continue on the scene to indulge fiur headstrong humours and tormenting passions, we had better be gone at once; and if we only cherish a fondness for existence according to the good we derive from it, the pang we feel at parting with it will not be very severe. A companion essay to Hazlitt's will he found in a collection entitled "The Gentle Life," by J. Ham Friswell, an author of whom I know. little, »ave that he was born in 1825 and died in 1878. The concluding essay in Friswell 's collection is entitled "On Growing 01d,"*and it re-echoes the sentiment of the opening lines of "Rabbi-Ben-Ezra": "Grow old along with met \ The best is yet to be. The last of life, for which the first was made." The essayist controverts the. idea to which Thackeray continually gave expression, that it is a fearful thing to grow old; and he asks the question, '.'ls it 80 dreadful to grow oldt Does old age need its apologies and its defenders? Is it a benefit and a calamity P Friswell proceeds to compare youth with old age, and he says: "Emerson, Coleridge, Wordsworth, were each and all unhappy boys. They all had their rebuffs, and bitter, bitter troubles; all the more bitter because their sensitiveness was so acute. Suicide is not unknown among the young; fears prey upon them and terrify them; ignorances and follies surround them." Friswell quotes from a well-nigh forgotten work, but famous in its day, the "Patrician's Daughter" of Dr. Westland Marston, father of Philip Bourke Marston, the blind poet:— It may be by the calendar of years Yon are the elder man; but 'tis the sun Of knowledge on th® mind's dial shining bright, -a! And chronicling deeds and thoughts, tn»c | makes true time. , Is Time after all only an abstraction, j or is it an arbitrary tyrant imposed upon the mind of man, an attempt 1 to enforce infinity on the finite? Sometimes, by way of a change, I stray from the flowery paths of poetry into the thorny thickets of philosophy. Turning idly the pages of M. Henri Bergsen's massive tome on "Time and Free Will," my eye caught the following sentence: "We may therefore surmise that Time, conceived under the form of, a homogeneous medium, is some spurious concept, due to the trespassing of the idea of space upon the field of pure consciousness." This seems to me to be what Friswell is driving at when he writes:—— Old men are valuable, not only as relicts of the past, but aa guides and prophets for the future. . . . Old Montaigne, or Capulet and old Polonius, that wise maximman, enjoy themselves quite as well as the moody Hamlet, the perturbed I/aertes, or even gallant Mercutio or love-sick Borneo. . The precise Duke of Wellington, answering every letter with "P.M. presents his compliments," the wondrous w#ker Humboldt, with his orders of knighthood, stars, and ribbons, lying dusty in .his drawer, still contemplating ' 'Cosmos, and answering his thirty letters a were both men in exceedingly enviable, happy position*» they had reached the (op of the hill and could look back quietly over the rough road which they had travelled. . . . The wheels of Time have brought us to the goal; we are about to rest while others labour, to stay at home while others wander. We touch at last the mysterious door—are we to be pitied or to be envied?

"It seems to us," says Friswell, "that a great deal of unnecessary pity has been thrown away _ upon old. - age. We begin at school reading Cicero's treatise, hearing him talk with Seipio and Laelius: we hear mueh about poor old men; we are taught to admire the vigour, quickness, and capacity of youth and manhood. We lose sight of the wisdom which age brings even to the most foolish." This reference Jed me to turn to Cicero's "Book of Old Age." translated by Thomas Newton, who was born in 1542 and who died in lt>o7. The title-page of the translation is delightfully quaint, the type being fantastically displayed according to 16th century ideas: — The Worthye Boolce of old ajte otherwise entituled the elder Cato, containing a learned defense and praise of Age and Aged Men: writted in latine by thit father of eloquence Marcos Tnllns Cicero and now englished. Whereonto is annexed a Recitall of diverse men that lived long. With a declaration of sundry# soortes of yeares. and the divensitie between? the veereo in the old time and our yeares now* adares. Anno 1-5 69 xmpriated at London by Thomas —Marshe. Cicero's "Book of Old Age" was written in 44 8.C., and it makes excellent reading at the close of 1P24. A.D., albeit 1968 years have passed in the interval. Cieero eauses Cato to rail against the "brainless inconstancy, foolish sottage, and perverse vaywardness of wayward people" who say of Old Age that "it creepeth and stealeth upon them faster and sooner than they thought it would. " The rejoinder is delightful: "Who causeth them to imagine and think sueli a false and peevish untruth? for why. should they think that after their youth and adolescency old age creepeth faster upon them rather than their adolescency and youth doth after childhood!" Later in the treatise may be found a profound passage: "Young men are. subject to more occasions of death (because of the humours and blood which do abound in them) and are the nourishers of the matter of maladies and disease. They fall sooner into sickness and infirmities; their diseases are more perilons and vehement, their recovery and cure more difficult. And therefore there are but few that live till they come to old age, whieh, if it were not so, but that there might be a great number of old men, they would live a great deal more pleasantly and wisely. For wit,, reason, and good counsel resteth in old men, and therefore, if there were no old men, there would consequently be no cities." Cieero concludes by saying:— Tet is it both convenient and also opt able for a man, when he. hath .honestly played his part in the pageant of life, to die and pay his debt to nature. For Nature as she : hath an end of all other things, so also of living. And old age is, as it were* the peroration, or final end of a man's time, in this world, much like to the epilogue or catastrophe of an interlude, the. wearirome repetition or defatigation whereof we ought to avoid and eschew, and especially when we are fully cloyed with satiety. Thus much at your request I had to say concerning old age, unto the which God grant you may arrive, that the things whieh you have heard of me by. month, you may prove trae by certain trial and actual experiment. In a little book of essays—"Admissions and Asides"—published some years since, Mr A. St. John Adeock writes on '' The Ait of Keeping Young,'» and says: "Years do not really mate us old. Some are younger at forty than they were at twenty-five . . . Surely if we could forget our yesterdays and take no thought for to-mor-row, we might be happier and live longer young." Stevenson's essay on "Crabbed Age and Youth" puts the other side of the .question, "To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty, is," declares R.L.S., "to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well none the wiser." And Stevenson, who to the very last, kept very young, and who, like Peter Pan, never grew up, expressed his innermost conviction .when he wrote:— It is. customary to say that age should be considered, because it comes last. It seems just as much, to the point that youth comes first.' And the scale fairly kicks the beam,' if you go on to add that ace, in the majority of cases never comes at all. . . . People may lay down their lives with cheerfulness in the Buro. expectation of a blessed immortality; but that is a different affair from giving up youth with all its admirable pleasures, in the hope of a' bittter quality of gruel in a more than problematical, nay more than improbable, old age. We Bhould 'not compliment a hungry man, who should refuse a. whole dinner and reserve his appetite for the dessert, before he knew whether there was to be any dessert or not. If there be such a thing as imprudence in the world, we surely have it here. We sail in leaky bottoms and on great. and perilous waters; and to take a cue from the dolorous old naval ballad, we' have heard the mermaidens singing, and know that we shall never Bee dry land any more. . Old and young, we are all on. our last cruise. If there is a fill of tobacco among the cr«w, for God's sake pass it round, and let us have a pipe before we go. In "People and Questions" Mr G. S. Street'has a paper on "The New House and the Old" which is peculiarly applicable to a time when the Old Year is ending and a New Year is beginning. "The Old House was utterly gone," he writes, "and the New. not begun." Finally, the new home was finished and he went to stay in it, and he meditates: "Everything was delightful. Some slight fanciful contrast may have crossed one's mind between the new house and th» old friend; some feeling, as it were, that the mud of one's boots and the • ashes of one's pipe should be watched with tmusual care. Still, I did not seriously fear that the new house would place the old friend in too searching a light; my faithful boots and pipe would be at home. I had no pang of regret until after dinner." The sequel has application to the dying of the Old Year; — But in the watches of the night the ghost of the old home came crying oatside my window. It whispered that it had been my good friend, not worthy to 1 be so easily forgotten. Was a.billiard room or a gallery worth the death of an affection? Was not I a wretch who could ad-' mire the beauty and strength of the new love without ono thought of the old? The old house,, as I had been told, was the foundation of the new: our great jeys : ested in its strong support. There was an allegory which I doubt might be painful to follow out. . . . "Ring out the old, ring in the- new!" But there are moments when one seems to belong to the past more faithfully than to tbe future, and while I salute the new house with admiration and wish myself a long acquaintance with it, I dedicate this tribute of to the memory of the old. I remember ending my 1923 Old Year article with Austin Dobson's lines "To Time, the Tyrant"; from the same versifier's ainp?a stock I have chosen as ending this year "When Finis Comes":— When Finis comsa, the Book we close, And somewhat sadly. Fancy goes, WHh backward step, from stags t« stage Of that accomplish ;d pilgrimage . . . The thorn lies thicker t/isn the rode! There is so much ttit no eae knowi— So. much unreached that none acpp#se; What flaws I whit faults!—an every psg«. Whet. Pinis-towi. Still, —they must pass! The swift tide flaws, Though not for all the laurel grovs. Perchance, in this be-slandered age. The worker, mainly, wins his wage;— And Time will sweep both friend* and foes 1 When Finis comes.