What a fuss they make, proclaiming
the secret of long life! We must stay abed till
noon, they say; we must take life slowly and comfortably;
we must avoid worry, live moderately, drink wine,
smoke cigars, and read the Times. Yes;
there is one who, in a letter to the Times,
boasted his grandfather sustained life for a hundred
and one years by reading all the leading and special
articles of that paper; his father got to eighty-eight
on the same diet; himself follows their footsteps on
fare that is new every morning. Another writer
has subscribed to the Times for sixty-seven
years, and now is ninety-two on the strength of it.
Avoid worry, fret not yourself because of evildoers,
let not indignation lacerate your heart, take the
sensible and solid view of things, read the Times,
and you will surpass the Psalmist’s limit of
threescore years and ten.
What a picture of beneficent comfort
it calls up! The breakfast-room furniture fit
to outlast the Pyramids, the maroon leather of deep
armchairs, the marble clock ticking to half-past nine
beneath the bronze figure with the scythe and hourglass,
the boots set to warm upon the hearthrug, the crisp
bacon sizzling gently beneath its silver cover, the
pleasant wife murmuring gently behind the silver urn,
the paper set beside the master’s plate.
Isaiah knew not of such regimen, else he would not
have cried that all flesh is grass, and all the goodliness
thereof as the flower of the field.
Others there are whom poverty precludes
from silver, and the narrow estate of home from daily
sustenance on the Times. Some study diuturnity
upon two meals a day, or pursue old age by means of
“unfired food,” Others devour roots by
moonlight, or savagely dine upon a pocket of raw beans.
These are intemperate on water, or bewail the touch
of salt as sacrilege against the sacrifice of eggs.
These grovel for nuts like the Hampshire hog, or impiously
celebrate the fruitage by which man fell. Some
cast away their coats, some their hosen, some their
hats. They go barefoot but for sandals.
They wander about in sheepskins and goatskins, eschewing
flesh for their food, and vegetables for their clothing.
They plunge distracted into boiling water. Shudderingly,
they break the frosty Serpentine. They absorb
the sun’s rays like pigeons upon the housetops,
or shiver naked in suburban chambers that they may
recover the barbaric tang. They walk through rivers
fully clothed, and shake their vesture as a dog his
coat; or are hydrophobic for their skins, fearing
to wash lest they disturb essential oils. They
shave their heads as a cure for baldness, or in gentle
gardens emulate the raging lion’s mane.
One dreads to miss his curdled milk by the fraction
of a minute; another, at the semblance of a cold, puts
off his supper for three weeks and a day. One
calculates upon longevity by means of bare knees,
another apprehends the approach of death through the
orifice in the palm of a leather glove.
Of course, it is all right. Life
is of inestimable value, and nothing can compensate
a corpse for the loss of it. Falstaff knew that,
and, like the Magpie Moth, wisely counterfeited death
to avoid the irretrievable step of dying. Our
prudent livers display an equal wisdom, not exactly
counterfeiting death, but living gingerly living,
as it were, at half-cock, lest life should go off
suddenly with a flash and bang, leaving them nowhere.
Of course, they are quite right. Life being pleasurable,
it is well to spread it out as far as it will go.
As to honour, the hoary head in itself is a crown
of glory, and when a man reaches ninety, people will
call him wonderful, though for ninety years he has
been a fool. The objects of living are, for the
most part, obscure and variable, and prudent livers
may well ask why for the obscure and variable objects
of life they should lose life itself Propter
causas vivendi perdere vitam,”
if we may reverse the old quotation.
So they are quite justified in eating
the bread of carefulness, and no one who has known
danger will condemn their solicitude for safely.
But yet, in hearing of those devices, or perusing
the Sour Milk Gazette and the Valetudinarian’s
Handbook, somehow there come to my mind the words,
“Insanitas Sanitutum, omnia Insanitas!”
And suddenly the picture of those woeful islanders
whom Gulliver discovered rises before me. For,
as we remember, in the realm of Laputa, he found a
certain number of both sexes (about eleven hundred)
who were called Struldbrugs, or Immortals, because,
being born with a certain spot over the left eyebrow,
they were destined never to know the common visitation
of death. We remember how Gulliver envied them,
accounting them the happiest of human beings, since
they had obtained in perpetuity the blessing of life,
for which all men struggle so hard that whoever has
one foot in the grave is sure to hold back the other
as strongly as he can. But in the end, he concluded
that their lot was not really enviable, seeing that
increasing years only brought an increase of their
dullness and incapacity:
“They were not only opinionative,”
he writes, “peevish, covetous, morose, vain,
talkative, but incapable of friendship, and dead
to all natural affections, which never descended below
their grandchildren. Envy and impotent desires
are their prevailing passions. But those objects
against which their envy seems principally directed
are the vices of the younger sort, and the deaths
of the old. By reflecting on the former they
find themselves cut off from all possibility of pleasure;
and whenever they see a funeral they lament and repine
that others have gone to a harbour of rest, to which
they themselves never can hope to arrive.”
The explorer further discovered that,
after the age of eighty, the marriages of the Struldbrugs
were dissolved, because the law thought it a reasonable
indulgence that those who were condemned, without any
fault of their own, to a perpetual continuance in
the world, should not have their misery doubled by
the load of a wife; also that they could never amuse
themselves with reading, because their memory would
not serve to carry them from the beginning of a sentence
to the end; and after about two hundred years, they
could not hold conversation with their neighbours,
the mortals, because the language of the country was
always upon the flux.
It is a pity that the laws of Laputa
stringently forbade the export of Struldbrugs, else,
Gulliver tells us, he would gladly have brought a
couple to this country, to arm our people against the
fear of death. Had he only done so, what a lot
of letters to the Times, advertisements of
patent medicines; and Eugenic discussions we should
have been spared! If earthly immortality were
known to be such a curse, we could more easily convince
the most scrupulous devotee of health that old age
was little better than immortality.
It is not, therefore, as though great
age were such a catch that it should demand all these
delicate manipulations of diet, sleep, rest-cures,
health-resorts, scourings, and temperatures, for its
attainment. How refreshing to escape from this
hospital atmosphere into the free air, blowing whither
it lists, and to fling oneself carelessly upon existence,
as Sir George Birdwood, for instance, has done!
He also wrote to the Times, but in a very different
tone. Like another Gulliver, he pictured the
calamity of millionaires living on till their heirs
are senile. It is all nonsense, he said, to prescribe
rules for life. One of his oldest friends drank
a bottle of cognac a day, and, as for himself well,
we know that he is eighty, has lived a varied and
dangerous life in many lands, has written on carrots,
chestnuts, carpets, art, scholarship, all manner of
absorbing subjects, and yet he heartily survives:
“I attribute my senility let
others say senectitude,” he shouts in his
cheery way, “to a certain playful devilry of
spirit, a ceaseless militancy, quite suffragettic,
so that when I left the Indian Office on a bilked
pension I swore by all the gods I would make up
for it by living on ten years, instead of one, which
was all an insurance society told me I was worth.”
That sounds the true note, blowing
the horn of old forests and battles. “A
playful devilry of spirit,” “a ceaseless
militancy” how stirring to the stagnant
lives of prudent regularity! “Lie in bed
till noon-day!” he goes on; “I would rather
be some monstrous flat-fish at the bottom of the Atlantic
than accept human life on such terms.” Who
in future will hear of rest-cures, retirements, retreats,
nursings, comforts, and attention to health, without
beholding in his mind that monstrous flat-fish, blind
and deaf with age, rotting at ease upon the Atlantic
slime? Life is not measured by the ticking of
a clock, and it is no new thing to discover eternity
in a minute. “I have not time to make money,”
said the naturalist, Agassiz, when his friends advised
some pecuniary advantage; and, in the same way, every
really fortunate man says he has no time to bother
about living. So soon as a human being does anything
simply because he thinks it will “do him good,”
and not for pleasure, interest, or service, he should
withdraw from this present world as gracefully as
he can. Of course, we all want to live, but even
in death there can hardly be anything so very awful,
since it is so common.
“The Kingdom of Heaven is not
meat and drink.” “He that loses his
life shall find it,” said one Teacher.
“Live dangerously,” said another; and
“Try to be killed” is still the best advice
for a soldier who would rise. For life is to
be measured by its intensity, and not by the tapping
of a death-watch beetle. “I’ve lost
my appetite. I can’t eat!” groaned
the patient whom Carlyle knew. “My dear
sir, that is not of the slightest consequence,”
replied the good physician; and how wise are those
scientists who deny to invalids the existence of their
pain! Sir George Birdwood recalled the saying
of Plato that attention to health is one of the greatest
hindrances to life, and I vaguely remember Plato’s
commendation of the working-man, who, in illness, just
takes a dose, and if that doesn’t cure him,
remarks, “If I must die, I must die,” and
dies accordingly. That is how the working-man
dies still; though sometimes he is now buoyed up by
the thought of his funeral’s grandeur.
“A certain playful devilry of spirit,”
“a ceaseless militancy” for
life or death those are the best regulations.