THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES SATURDAY, JANUARY 9, 1932. “THE YEARS BOTH LESSEN AND SHORTEN.”

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21538, 9 January 1932, Page 8

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES SATURDAY, JANUARY 9, 1932. “THE YEARS BOTH LESSEN AND SHORTEN.”

In January, 1821, exactly 111 years ago, Charles Lamb wrote his essay, “New Year’s Eve.” It contains a serious thought, coloured by sadness, with which Lamb plays whimsically, in the manner so characteristic of him. He had passed into the new year with reluctant feet. “I am content,” he says, “to stand still at the age to which I am arrived, I and my friends; to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer.” He would fain lay his ineffectual finger upon the spoke of the great wheel; he was not content to pass away “like a weaver’s shuttle”; he did not want to drop “like mellow fruit into the grave.” These metaphors of mortality solaced him not. Cicero wrote a long essay to prove that old age was, at least, not an undesirable condition, and Lord Haldane said, “I incline to the view that, despite its drawbacks, old age is preferable to youth.” This view, we take it, is not generally held. People shrink not only from the reality of old age, but they dislike its very appearance. If this is not so, why do we see rouge in our streets and drawing rooms, and why do men spend, in the aggi’cgate, a good many days every year in removing the evidence that they have passed into the ranks of the grey beards? Oliver Wendell Holmes has an amusing description of “ Old Age ” calling and leaving a card on a man, who denies any acquaintanceship with the caller; indeed, he has never heard of him. The caller repeats his visits, only to be repudiated more vigorously, and spurned from the door. At last “ Old Age ” creeps in at the windows, and breaks in at the front door. The rouge pot does not permanently disguise the reality; a coat of fresh paint will not kill the borer in the tenement.

Lamb mentions several causes, common to us all, which made him shrink from the oncoming of age. He was in love with the green earth, the face of town and country, the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets. Richard Jefferies had the same sense of companionship with the world. As he looked through the window pane he wondered; “ How can they all get on without me ? How can they manage, bird and flower, without me to keep the calendar for them? Every blade of grass was mine, as though I had planted it separately. Every wild, free hawk that passed overhead in the air was mine. I joyed in his swift, careless flight, in the throw of his pinions, in his rush over the elms and miles of woodland; it was happiness to see his unchecked life.” If Lamb had not just the same love of the green earth as Jefferies, at least he had a passion for London and its streets. He was a companionable man, and he had his close intimacies, the deepest of all with his sister. During one of her recurrent mental illnesses he wrote to his friend, Miss Hutchinson: “It cuts sad great slices out of the time, the little time, we shall have to live together. . . . But I won’t talk of death; I shall imagine us immortal, or forget that we are otherwise. By God’s blessing in a few weeks we may be making our meal together, or sitting in the front row of the pit at Drury Lane. . ... The wind is tempered to the shorn Lambs.” This clinging to present fellowships was intensified by the fact, that, for Lamb, the long road ended in a land of shadows. Poor Elia, so he tells us, did not pretend to very clear revelations of a future state of being; ho stumbled about dark mountains; but he knew at least how to be thankful for certain relationships lent him here. “ Shall I enjoy friendships there? ” he asks. “ Can a ghost laugh or shake his gaunt sides, when you are pleasant with him ? ” Another reason why Lamb wished to set up his tabernacle here was his love of the companionship of books. He exclaims: “And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios! Must I part with the intense delight of having you (huge armfuls) in my embraces? Must knowledge come to me, if it come at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of reading?” Lamb was a bookman. In the same month in which he wrote his essay on “New Year’s Eve,” he wrote to his friend, Manning, a description of the chambers of which he had just taken possession; “ In my best room is a choice collection of the works of Hogarth, an English painter of some humour. In my next best are shelves containing a small but well chosen library. My best room commands a

court, in which there are trees and a pump, the water of which is excellent cold, with brandy, and not very insipid without. Here I hope to set up my rest, and not quit till Mr Powell, the undertaker, gives me notice that I may have possession of my last lodging. He lets lodgings for single gentlemen.”

It is the love of their work, and the dread that they may not be able to finish it, that makes the swift passing of time, with its accompaniment of physical and intellectual limitations, unwelcome to some men. They shrink from the thought that they will not be able to write “ Finis ” to their magnum opus, or put the coping stone on the institution to which they have given their lives, or see a son established in business, or a daughter in a home of her own. Lamb’s feeling for his work, however, gave him no desire to prolong his life here. His time in the East India Office he described as “ thirty-three years’ slavery ”; the office itself he called “My prison.” He wrote to a friend: “ I would not go back to my prison for seven years longer for £IO,OOO a year.” Lamb lived to change his mind on the subject of work. Later he wrote to Barton: “I pity you for over-work; but I assure you no work is worse. The mind preys on itself, the most unwholesome of food. I bragged formerly that I could not have much time. I have a surfeit. lam a sanguinary murderer of time, and would kill him inch-meal just now. But the snake is vital.” Lamb thought that the antidotes offered for his fears of advancing age and death were “ altogether frigid and insulting.” Job’s metaphors of tality—“ the weaver’s shuttle,” “ the shock of com”—solaced him not. Neither was he consoled by the commonplace of universal*mortality, that king and peasant alike lie down in the same narrow bed. He had not sought such company in life, and the prospect of it in death did not cheer him. Lamb turned elsewhere for his consolation—' * Another cup of wine ” and “the song made by hearty cheerful Mr Cotton for the New Year.’-’

Then let us welcome the new guest With lusty brimmers of the best; Mirth always should good fortune meet, And render e’en disaster sweet; And though the Princess turn her back. Let ug but line ourselves with sack, We better shall by far hold out. Till the next year shall face about. The superficial pessimism and agnosticism of this essay led to protests, both public and private. One of his friends said that “ the literary merit could not destroy the impression produced by so unreligious an effusion.” When Bunyan’s Pilgrims came to a part of the way, where the mountains ahead of them were steep and forbidding, and the valleys dark, the shepherds led them to the top of a hill called Clear, from which the gates of the Celestial City were visible, if they had skill to look through the Perspective-glass. The hands of the Pilgrims did shake, so that they could not look steadily through the glass, yet they thought that they saw something like the gate. Then they went away singing a song. Browning, in his well-known song on old age, used a Perspective-glass:

Therefore I summon age To grant youth’s heritage, ■ Lifers struggle having so far reached its term; Thence shall I pass, approved A man, for aye removed From the developed brute; a god, though in the germ. Among the ancients Socrates the Greek, Cicero the Roman, and Paul the Jew used the Perspective-glass to bring solace to the heart and strength to the will, when their years both lessened and shortened, and their way lay through the Valley of Shadows. Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be. The last of life, for which the first was made; Our times are in His hand Who saith, “ A whole I planned, Youth shows but half; trust God, see all, nor be afraid.”