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Title: The Seven Ages of Man

Author: Ralph Bergengren

Release date: February 16, 2013 [eBook #42110]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SEVEN
AGES OF MAN ***

THE SEVEN AGES OF MAN

Books by
Ralph
Bergengren

The Perfect
Gentleman
The
Comforts of
Home
Each $1.00

—

For
Younger
Readers
Jane, Joseph
and John
Boxed, $3.00

The
SEVEN AGES of MAN
BY
RALPH BERGENGREN

The Atlantic Monthly Press
Boston

Copyright, 1921, by
Ralph Bergengren

CONTENTS
I.Baby, Baby 1
II.To be a Boy 17
III.On Meeting the Beloved 33
IV.This is a Father 47
V.On Being a Landlord 64
VI.Old Flies and Old Men 78
VII.The Olde, Olde, Very Olde Man 94

I

BABY, BABY
In meeting a baby, one should behave as much as possible like a baby
one’s self. We cannot, of course, diminish our size, or exchange our
customary garments for baby-clothes; neither can we arrive in a
perambulator, and be conveyed in the arms, either of a parent or a
nursemaid, into the presence of the baby whom we are to meet. The best we
can do is to hang, as it were on the hatrack, our preconceived ideas of what
manner of behavior entertains a baby, as cooing, grimacing, tickling, and
the like, and model our deportment on the dignified but friendly reticence
that one baby evinces in meeting another.—Baby: his Friends and Foes.
OF the many questions that Mr. Boswell, at one time and another, asked
his friend, Dr. Johnson, I can hardly recall another more searching than one
that he himself describes as whimsical.
“I know not how so whimsical a thought came into my head,” says
Boswell, “but I asked, ‘If, sir, you were shut up in a castle, and a new-born
child with you, what would you do?’
“Johnson: Why, sir, I should not much like my company.
“Boswell: But would you take the trouble of rearing it?
“He seemed, as may be supposed, unwilling to pursue the subject: but,
upon my persevering in my question, replied, ‘Why, yes, sir, I would; but I
must have all conveniences. If I had no garden, I would make a shed on the
roof, and take it there for fresh air. I should feed it, and wash it much, and
with warm water, to please it, not with cold water, to give it pain.’
“Boswell: But, sir, does not heat relax?
“Johnson: Sir, you are not to imagine the water is to be very hot. I would
not coddle the child.”
It appears, too, that the Doctor had given some thought to the subject,
although never expecting to be a mother himself: his immediate insistence
upon fresh air promises well for the infant, and the frequency with which he
proposes to wash his little companion indicates that, so long as the water-

supply of the castle lasted, he would have done his part. A cow in the castle
seems to have been taken for granted; but, in 1769, even Dr. Johnson would
have known little or nothing about formulas, nor would it have occurred to
him to make a pasteurizing apparatus, as so many parents do nowadays, out
of a large tin pail and a pie-plate. Here the baby would have had to take his
eighteenth-century chance. And I wish, too, that he might have had a copy
of “The Baby’s Physical Culture Guide,” that modern compendium of
twenty-four exercises, by which a reasonably strongarmed mother may
strengthen and develop the infant’s tiny muscles; for I like to think of Dr.
Johnson exercising his innocent companion in his shed on the roof. “Sir,”
he says, “I do not much like my employment; but here we are, and we’ll
have to make the best of it.”
Such an experience, no doubt, would have been good for Dr. Johnson,
and good for the baby (if it survived). “That into which his little mind is to
develop,” says “The Baby’s Physical Culture Guide,” “is plastic—like a
wax record, ready to retain such impressions as are made upon it”; and on
this wax some, at least, of the impressions left by Dr. Johnson must have
been valuable. But on the real mystery of babyhood—the insoluble enigma
that the “Guide” can only in small measure dispose of by comparing the
rearing of an infant with the home-manufacture of a record for the
gramaphone—the experience would have thrown no light.
The Doctor, I dare say, would have written a paper on the feeding and
washing of infants, and later dictionaries of familiar quotation might
perhaps have been enriched by the phrase,“‘The baby is grandfather to the
man.’—Johnson.” But of this grandfather the man has no memory. His
babyhood is a past concerning which he is perforce silent, a time when it is
only by the report of others that he knows he was living. His little mind
seems to have been more than a little blank; and although gifted novelists
have set themselves the imaginative task of thinking and writing like
babies, none, in my reading, has ever plausibly succeeded. The best they
can do is to think and write like little adults. I recall, for example, the
honest effort of Miss May Sinclair, whom I greatly respect as an adult, to
see Mr. Olivier through the eyes of his baby daughter Mary. “Papa sat up,
broad and tall above the table, all by himself. He was dressed in black. One
long brown beard hung down in front of him and one short beard covered
his mouth. You knew he was smiling because his cheeks swelled high up in
his face, so that his eyes were squeezed into narrow, shining slits. When

they came out again, you saw scarlet specks and smears in their corners.” A
fearsome Papa!—and, although I have no way of knowing that fathers do
not present themselves in this futurist aspect to their helpless offspring, I am
glad to think otherwise. At all events a baby is, and must be, well used to
living in Brobdingnag.
It would be a surprising thing, if it were not so common, that a man
shows so little curiosity about this forgotten period of his life. But such
curiosity would be impossible to satisfy. Existing photographs of him at that
time are a disappointment: he seldom admits seeing any resemblance, and,
if he does, the likeness rarely, if ever, gives him any visible satisfaction. Nor
can anything of real and personal interest be found out by interviewing
those who then knew him. Of a hundred, nay, of a thousand or a million
babies,—and though I cannot speak as a woman, it seems to me (except,
perhaps, for a livelier interest and pleasure among them in their infant
appearance) that everything I am saying applies equally to babies of that
fascinating sex,—the trivial details observed by those who are nearest them
are practically identical. They thump their heads. They chew their fingers.
They try to feed their toes; and, sillier yet, they try to feed them with things
that are obviously inedible. And so forth. And so forth. If Dr. Johnson,
actually shut up in a castle, and a new-born child with him, had kept a
record, the result would have been very much like the records that mothers
now keep in what, unless I am mistaken, are called “Baby Books.” If
you’ve seen one Baby Book, as the cynical old man said about circuses,
you’ve seen all of ‘em.
Nor does any man take pleasure in preserving and reading over his own
Baby Book. Hercules, to be sure, might have been interested to read in his
mother’s handwriting,--“Tuesday. An eventful day. Two big, horrid Snakes
came in from the garden, and got in Darling’s cradle, frightening Nurse into
hysterics; but Darling only cooed and strangled them both with his dear,
strong little hands. He gets stronger and cunninger every day. When the
horrid Snakes were taken away from him, he cried and said, ‘Atta! Atta!’”
But Hercules was an exceptionally interesting baby; and the average
Baby Book records nothing that a grown man can regard with pride, and
much, if he has any sensitiveness at all, that must make him blush. Nothing
but respect for his mother, it is almost safe to say, would withhold him from
hurrying the incriminating document to the cellar, and cremating it in the
furnace.

For in the beginning Captain William Kidd, George Washington, Dr.
Johnson, the writer of this essay, and even the editor of the “Atlantic
Monthly,” looked and behaved very much alike. And so, for that matter, did
little Moll Cutpurse and little Susan B. Anthony. So far as anybody could
then have said, Captain Kidd might have become a thoughtful, law-abiding
essayist, and I a pirate, handicapped, indeed, by changed conditions of
maritime traffic, but unconscientiously doing my wicked best.
As the twig is bent, says the proverb, so is the tree inclined; but these
little twigs are bent already, and I humbly submit, with all respect to my
scientific friends, and their white mice and their guinea pigs, that where and
how it happened remains an insoluble mystery. Little as I know about
myself, I know that I am neither a white mouse nor a guinea pig. And this,
mark you, is no mere conceit. Scientists themselves have decided that when
babies, in that remote past when they first began really to interest their
parents, and the human mother, the most pathetic figure of that primitive
world, first began the personal and affectionate observation that was to
develop slowly, over millions of years, until it found expression in the first
Baby Book—scientists, themselves, I say, have decided that, then and there,
you and I, intelligent reader, began to differ essentially from every other
known kind of mammal. There appeared—oh, wonder!—something
psychical as well as physical about us; but where it came from, they cannot
tell us. “Natural selection,” so John Fiske once summed up this opinion,
“began to follow a new path and make psychical changes instead of
physical changes.” Little enough there seems to have been to start with;
little enough, indeed, there seems to be now—yet enough more to
encourage us to believe that Baby is a lot further along in the right direction
than he was a good many million years ago. And with this helpful
conviction, Baby himself, whether he will grow up to write essays or
commit picturesque murder, seems reasonably well satisfied. We solemn
adults, standing around the crib, may well admire, not so much the pinkness
and chubbiness of his toes, as the pinkness and chubbiness (if I may so
express it) of his simple satisfaction with the mere fact of existence, his
simple faith in the Universe. And when we think how impossible it is to
think of its beginning, we, too, may capture something of this infantile
optimism.
It is by no means impossible (though not susceptible of scientific proof)
that Baby may have a life of his own; and, if we may assume Hercules

weeping and saying, “Atta! Atta!”—because shrewd observers of babyhood
declare it to be characteristic of babies to say, “Atta! Atta!” when something
desirable, in this case two dead snakes, is removed from their range of
vision,—may we not assume also a universal language of babies, and a
place, such as it may be, from which they have emigrated? Here, indeed,
one follows M. Maeterlinck, except that, in his judgment, unborn babies
speak French. Such a theory is no help to the novelist, for in that case baby
Mary Olivier’s impressions of Mr. Olivier must be rendered in baby—a
language equally unknown to Miss Sinclair and to her readers. Babies have
been heard to say, for example, “Nja njan dada atta mama papaï attaï na-na-
na hatta meenĕ-meenĕ-meenĕ mŏmm mŏmma ao-u”—and who but another
baby knows whether this may not be speech? The assumption that this is an
effort to speak the language of the baby’s elders is academic, as, for that
matter, is the assumption that they are his elders. There may even be no
baby at all; for, as Schopenhauer has almost brusquely put it, “The
uneasiness that keeps the never-resting clock of metaphysics in motion, is
the consciousness that the non-existence of this world is just as possible as
its existence.” But this, I confess, is far too deep for me.

Baby, baby in your cot,
Are you there?—or are you not?
If you’re not, then what of me!
Baby, what and where are we?

For all practical purposes, however, Baby is sufficiently real—
substantial enough, indeed, as “The Baby’s Physical Culture Guide” shows
in Exercise 24, to be lifted by his little feet and stood on his little head; but,
mercifully adds the “Guide,” “do not hold Baby on his head very long.” For
all practical purposes we must, and do, assume our own existence. “Here
we are,” as I have imagined Dr. Johnson saying to his innocent new-born
comrade, “and we’ll have to make the best of it.” Nobody has thought of a
better way, or any other way at all, for us to get here; and the familiar
Biblical phrase, ‘born again,’ may perhaps be more literal than we are wont
to imagine, and apply to this world as well as the next. Baby himself may
just have been born again. That innocent-seeming and rather silly-sounding
monologue, which we flatter ourselves is an earnest attempt to imitate our
own speech,—“Nja njan dada atta mama papaï attaï na-na-na hatta meenĕ-

meenĕ-meeneĕ mŏmm mŏmma ao-u,”—may it not be the soliloquy of a
gentle philosopher, or, again, the confession of an out-and-out rascal,
talking to himself of his misdeeds, chuckling and cooing over them, indeed,
before he forgets them in this new state of being? May not Papa, waggishly
shaking his forefinger and saying, “You little rascal, you,” be speaking with
a truthfulness which, if known, would make him sick?
Meanwhile, as says “The Baby’s Physical Culture Guide,” “Don’t jerk
Baby round. Never rush through his exercises, but talk to him in a happy,
encouraging way. When he is able to talk he will be glad to tell you what
great, good fun he has been having.”
So speaks, I think, a mother’s imagination; in sober reality, even the
great good fun of Exercise 24 will be forgotten. Which is perhaps why,
although I have heard men wish they could again be children, I have never
heard any man say he would like to be a baby.

II

TO BE A BOY
I love dearly to watch the boys at their play. How gayly they pitch and
catch their baseball with their strong little hands! How blithely they run
from base to base! How merrily their voices come to me across the green;
for, although I cannot hear what they say, I know it expresses a young,
innocent joy in this big, good world. Yet even in this Garden there is a
Serpent, and one day two of the little innocents quarreled and came to
blows. A real fight! I soon hurried out and stopped that, but the sight of
their little faces distorted with rage, and one poor boy bleeding at the nose,
upset me for quite a time.—An Old Maid’s Window.
IN “The Boyhood of Great Men,” published by Harper and Brothers, in
1853, but now, I fear, very little read, it is told of Sir Isaac Newton that “An
accident first fired him to strive for distinction in the school-room. The boy
who was immediately above him in the class, after treating him with a
tyranny hard to bear, was cruel enough to kick him in the stomach, with a
severity that caused great pain. Newton resolved to have his revenge, but of
such a kind as was natural to his reasoning mind, even at that immature age.
He determined to excel his oppressor in their studies and lessons; and,
setting himself to the task with zeal and diligence, he never halted in his
course till he had found his way to the top of the class; thus exhibiting and
leaving a noble example to others of his years similarly situated. Doubtless,
after this, he would heartily forgive his crestfallen persecutor, who could
not but henceforth feel ashamed of his unmanly conduct, while Newton
would feel the proud consciousness of having done his duty after the
bravest and noblest fashion which it is in the power of man to adopt.”
We cannot all be Sir Isaac Newtons, and, although I may wish for a
passing moment that some sturdy little school-fellow had kicked me too in
the stomach, the resulting sequence of events would probably have been
different, and the world would have gained little or nothing by my natural
indignation. Having an impartial mind, I should like to know also why Sir
Isaac was kicked in the stomach, and what became afterward of the boy

who kicked him. As his fame grew in the world, the reflected glory of
having thus kicked Sir Isaac Newton in the stomach would presumably
have brightened in proportion, but, lacking other distinction, the kicker
served his evolutionary purpose and has now vanished.
But this much remains of him—that his little foot kicks also in the
stomach the widely accepted fallacy that boyhood is an age of unalloyed
gold, to which every man now and then looks back and vainly yearns to be
a boy again. “Oh! happy years!”—so sighed the poet Byron,—“once more,
who would not be a boy?” And so to-day, as one may at least deduce from
his general newspaper reading, sigh all the editors of all the newspapers in
the United States. Not, indeed, for a boyhood like Sir Isaac Newton’s, but
for the standard American boyhood, to which, in theory, every ageing
American looks back with tender reminiscence—that happy time when he
went barefooted, played “hookey” from school, fished in the running brook
with a bent pin for a hook, and swam, with other future bankers, merchants,
clerks, clergymen, physicians and surgeons, confidence-men, pickpockets,
authors, actors, burglars, etc., etc., in an old swimming-hole. The
democracy of the old swimming-hole is, in fact, the democracy of the
United States, naked and unashamed; and even in the midst of a wave of
crime (one might almost imagine), if the victim should say suddenly to the
hold-up man,—

“Oh, do you remember the ole swimmin’ hole,
And the hours we spent there together;
Where the oak and the chestnut o’ershadowed the
bowl,
And tempered the hot summer weather?

Ah, sweet were those hours together we spent
In innocent laughter and joy!
How little we knew at the time what it meant
To be just a boy—just a boy!”

—the hold-up man would drop his automatic gun, and the two would
dissolve on each other’s necks in a flood of sympathetic tears.
It is a pleasant and harmless fallacy, and I for one would not destroy it; I
am no such stickler for exactitude that I would take away from any man

whatever pleasure he may derive from thinking that he was once a barefoot
boy, even if circumstances were against him and his mother as adamant in
her refusal to let him go barefooted. But the fallacy is indestructible: the
symbols may not have been universal, but it is true enough of boyhood that
time then seems to be without limit; and this comfortable, unthinking sense
of immortality is what men have lost and would fain recover. One forgets
how cruelly slow moved the hands of the school-room clock through the
last, long, lingering, eternal fifteen minutes of the daily life-sentence. One
forgets how feverishly the seconds chased each other, faster than human
feet could follow, when one’s little self was late for school, and the clamor
of the distant bell ended in a solemn, ominous silence. Then was the
opportunity for stout heart to play “hookey,” and to lure the finny tribe with
a poor worm impaled on a bent pin; and that, in the opinion of all the
editors of all the newspapers in the United States, is what all of us always
did. But in the painful reality most of us, I think, tried to overtake those
feverish seconds, seeking indeed to outrun time, and somehow or other,
though the bell had stopped ringing, get unostentatiously into our little seats
before it stopped. And so we ran, and ran, and ran, lifting one leaden foot
after the other with hopeless determination, in a silent, nightmare world
where the road was made of glue and the very trees along the way turned
their leaves to watch us drag slowly by. Little respect we would have had
then for the poet Byron and his “Ah! happy years! once more, who would
not be a boy?”
But even when time seemed to stand still, or go too fast, we had no
consciousness that the complicated clock of our individual existence could
ever run down and stop; and so happily careless were we of this treasure,
that we often wished to be men! “When I was young,” says the author of
“The Boy’s Week-Day Book,”—another volume that is not read nowadays
as much as it used to be,—

I doubted not the time would come,
When grown to man’s estate,
That I would be a noble ‘squire,
And live among the great.

It was a proud, aspiring thought,
That should have been exiled:—

I wish I was more humble now
Than when I was a child.
I wonder what proud, aspiring thought Uncle Jones, as he called himself,
just then had in mind; but it was evidently no wish to be a boy again:
perhaps he meditated matrimony.
For my own part I cannot successfully wish to be a boy; I remain
impervious to all the efforts of all the editors of all the newspapers in the
United States to dim my eye; and there must be many another eye like
mine, or else it is unbelievably unique. I lean back in my chair, close my
undimmed eye, and do my best; but, contrary to all editorial expectation, I
can summon no desire to go barefooted, fish with a bent pin, or revisit the
old swimming-hole

Where the elm and the chestnut o’ershadowed the bowl,
And tempered the hot summer weather.

I prefer a beach and a bathing-suit and somebody my own age. Yet do not
think, shocked reader, that I am unsympathetic with youth. I am more
sympathetic—that is all—with my contemporaries; and the thought forces
itself upon me that boyhood is a narrow and conventional period, in which
my own desire to go without shoes was exactly similar to my mother’s
determination to wear a bustle. Equally anxious to follow the fashion of our
respective sets, neither understood the other; and I would no more have
worn a bustle than my mother would have gone barefooted. My father,
similarly thwarted in a single desire, would have cared less: his wider
interests—politics, business, family, the local and world gossip that
immersed him in his newspaper, art, literature, music, and the drama, to say
nothing of professional baseball and pugilism (in which, however, many
fathers and sons have a common interest)—would have absorbed his
disappointment.
But my narrower world, so to speak, was all feet. An unconventional
boy, as I think the most erudite student of boy-life and boy-psychology will
admit, is much more rare than an unconventional man; and even then his
unconventionality is likely to be imposed upon him “for his own good” by
well-meaning but tyrannical parents. “I have known boys,” wrote Uncle
Jones, observing but not comprehending this characteristic fact, “when
playing at ‘Hare and hounds’ and ‘Follow my leader,’ to scramble over

hedges, leap over brooks, and mount up precipices, in a manner which they
would not have dared to attempt, had it not been for the examples set them
by their school-fellows; but,” he adds, “I do not remember any instance of a
boy imitating another on account of his good temper, patience, forbearance,
principle, or piety.”
Naturally not. You and I, Uncle Jones, might be expected to imitate each
other’s good temper, patience, forbearance, principle, or piety,—though I do
not say that we would,—but from the point of view of a boy these virtues
are unconventional. Their practice shocks and disconcerts the observer. The
behavior of Sir Isaac Newton, when kicked in the stomach, was perfectly
scandalous.
And what is there, after all, in the life of a boy, that a man would find
interesting? Or that he may not do, if such is sufficiently his desire to
“make” the time for it, as he makes time for his adult pleasures, and if he is
not too old or too fat? He can spend his vacation at the old swimming-hole
—but he never does it. He can go barefooted whenever he wishes: his
mother can no longer prevent him. He can fish with a bent pin in the
porcelain bathtub,—adding a goldfish to make the pursuit more exciting,—
every morning before he takes his bath. He can chase butterflies; here and
there, indeed, a man makes a profession of it, and institutions of learning
call him an entomologist, and pay him much honor and a small salary.
Nobody forbids him to enlarge his mental horizon by reading the lives of
criminals and detectives; and I can myself direct him to many an
entertaining book, which is at once far worse and far better, morally and
artistically, than the sober narratives that Old Sleuth used to write by the
yard for boys to read by stealth. He can roll a hoop; in many cases it would
do him a world of good to roll it down to the office in the morning and back
home at night. If he can persuade other ageing men, wishful of renewed
boyhood, to join with him, he can play at marbles, tick, puss-in-the-corner,
hop-scotch, ring-taw, and “Hot beans ready buttered.” (Uncle Jones
mentions these games. I do not remember all of them myself, but “Hot
beans ready buttered” sounds especially interesting.) And where better than
in some green, quiet corner at the Country Club? And why, if you will raise
the question of conventionality, why more foolish than golf, or folk-
dancing?
But what he cannot do is to assume the boy’s unconsciousness of his
own mortality. What he cannot unload is his own consciousness of

responsibility to and for others. Life, in short, has provided the man with a
worrying company of creditors of whom the boy knows nothing—Creditor
Cost-of-Living, Creditor Ambition, Creditor Conscience, and Creditor
Death. And the boy is unmarried! It is even claimed by one philosopher of
my acquaintance that this is why men wish they were once more boys. I
grant the plausibility of this opinion; for the more a man is is devoted to his
wife and family, the more he is beset and worried by these troublesome
creditors, the more, one may reasonably argue, he feels the need of time to
meet his obligations, and is likely now and then to envy the boy his narrow,
conventional, but immortal-feeling life.
Uncle Jones misses, I think, this fundamental fact. He is always trying to
destroy the boy’s sense of immortality in this world by trying to persuade
him to read the Bible and prepare for immortality in the next. “When a boy
first begins his A B C,” says Uncle Jones, “it is terrible work for him for a
short time; yet how soon he gets over it, and begins to read! And, then, what
a pleasure to be able to read a good and pleasant book! Oh, it is worthwhile
to go through the trouble of learning to read fifty times over, to obtain the
advantage of reading the Bible.”

III

ON MEETING THE BELOVED
Now it is a quainte Oddity of thys State and Mysterie of Loue that youre
trew Louer combines the opposyte qualities of a deepe Humilitie and a
loftie Conceit of Hymselfe. For with respect to this, hys Mistresse, he
believes himself a most inferior Person, and as it were a mere Worme; yet if
he doth suspect her to regard any Man els as his Equal, he is consumed
with great Astonishment and raging Indignation, for this same Loue is a
great Destroyer of Common Sense in its Victimes. For he thinketh Hymselfe
inferior to her because he is her Louer, and superior to all Men els for the
same silly Reason.—Anatomie of Loue.
TO any sensitive man, not yet armored by the indifference that comes of
being married himself, there is cause for apprehension in the prospect of
meeting for the first time that person, male or female, whom somebody he
knows and loves has recently agreed to marry. The event, when it comes, is
unavoidable, nor is there any period in adult life when it may not happen, or
anybody we know so old that he or she may not occasion it. Fact is more
romantic, or at any rate remains romantic much later in life, than fiction.
Only the other day I read in the newspaper of a man of one hundred and
thirty-five years who had just subjected his little circle to this formality.
Very likely the newspaper exaggerated, but the case undermines the security
that one ordinarily feels in his relationship with the ageing.
Now it needs no argument that to be happy in the happiness of others is
an inexpensive pleasure and well worth cultivating. Other things being
equal, one should go dancing and singing to his first meeting with another’s
beloved. Bright-colored flowers, be she sixteen or sixty, should blossom, to
his imagination, from the granite curb along his way; and, though a foolish
convention may repress the song and dance, yet should he walk as if shod
with the most levitating heels ever made from the liveliest of live rubber,
and sing merrily in his heart.
But, thus to enter into the happiness of another, one must see and feel, as
if for himself, some good and sufficient reason for that happiness; and the

deep, insoluble mystery essential to all proper betrothals is that this good
and sufficient reason is not necessarily visible: these two are happy-mad,
and how shall anybody who is sane enter into their lunacy?
Mr. Harvey Todd, 2d,—to take the first name that comes to mind,—has
become engaged to Miss Margaret Lemon; Miss Lemon to Mr. Todd. Well
and good. Nature, which, for some reason that mankind has long curiously
and vainly sought to penetrate, wishes to continue the human race, is, one
may believe, reasonably well satisfied. It is one job among many. But the
satisfaction of Mr. Todd and Miss Lemon, if it could be put to such
haberdashery use, would girdle the Equator, and the ends, tied in a true
lover’s knot, would flutter beyond the farthest visible star. Men and women
have become engaged in the past; men and women will become engaged in
the future; but this engagement of Harvey Todd and Margaret Lemon is and
will ever remain unique—and so whoever is now called upon to appraise
one party to this wonder and congratulate the other, may well be troubled.
He is not so much afraid of what he may do and say,—for any man may
hope to achieve a hard, quick, almost sobbing pressure of the hand and a
few muttered words,—as of the way, in spite of himself, that he will look
when he does and says it; there, indeed, the amateur actor profits by his
hobby. There is, to be sure, the saving chance that Miss Lemon (or Mr.
Todd) may so pleasurably affect him that the ordeal will be less difficult
than he anticipates: there is even the rare chance that he may instantly and
completely agree with Mr. Todd’s estimate of Miss Lemon; but this is the
happy-madness itself, and certainly not desirable under the circumstances.
There is the possibility, even more rare and less desirable, that Miss Lemon,
seeing him for the first time, will instantly and completely prefer him to Mr.
Todd. There is the possibility that he may recoil with horror from Miss
Lemon (or Mr. Todd), or be recoiled from, or that both may recoil
simultaneously, falling over, figuratively, on their backs, and being picked
up and carried away unconscious, and in opposite directions, by surprised
onlookers. His whole nature may, in short, instinctively run toward, or away
from, the beloved; and between these extremes lies a gamut of intermediary
emotions, which at the moment he would hardly wish to uncover. This stiff
and geometrical smile, he asks himself at the worst, can it deceive
anybody? this hypocritical mutter of congratulation, does it proceed from
his own or an ice chest? Nor is he much relieved when Mr. Todd or Miss
Lemon, as the case may be, proves how genuine appeared his smile, how

sincere his mutter, by asking him in affectionate detail what he thinks of the
other—a procedure which should be legally forbidden the newly engaged,
under penalty of being refused a marriage license for at least ten years.
This state of mind in lovers, so important to those who are called upon to
meet the beloved for the first time, has engaged the attention of essayists,
conversationalists, and philosophers. “They fall at once,” wrote Stevenson,
“into that state in which another person becomes to us the very gist and
centre point of God’s creation, and demolishes our laborious theories with a
smile; in which our ideas are so bound up with the one master-thought, that
even the trivial cares of our own person become so many acts of devotion,
and the love of life itself is translated into a wish to remain in the same
world with so precious and desirable a fellow creature. And all the while
their acquaintances look on in stupor.”
“No, sir,” said Dr. Johnson, promptly improving Mr. Boswell’s milder
assertion that love is like being enlivened with champagne, “No, sir.
Admiration and love are like being intoxicated with champagne”—an
opinion, one hopes, that will not some day be made the basis of a nation-
wide campaign to prohibit falling in love.
“His friends,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, “find in her a likeness to her
mother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no
resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to
rainbows and the song of birds.”
Mr. Todd and Miss Lemon (so like a rainbow) are impervious to any lack
of enthusiasm that you or I, dear, unselfish, sensitive reader, may fear to
exhibit when either leads us the other by the hand and says, “This is IT.”
Ours, if any, will be the suffering. It may even happen that Miss Lemon or
Mr. Todd—Mr. Todd or Miss Lemon beaming consent and approval—will
suggest that we call her (or him) Margaret (or Harvey).
Yet from another point of view, but this is a selfish one, apprehension is
justified in proportion to the sensitive man’s previous intimacy with the
individual whose beloved he is about to meet. For until that meeting is over,
“previous” is the word for it: whatever opinion the beloved may form of
him will determine the degree and manner of its continuance. If Miss
Lemon disapproves of him, though Mr. Todd has hitherto loved him as
Damon did Pythias, all is over; if Mr. Todd disapproves of him, though he
has known Miss Lemon from her perambulator, all is over. A pale ghost, he

may, in either case, sometimes hang his spectral hat in the Todd hallway,
and even extend his phantom legs under the Todd mahogany; but ALL IS
OVER. Divinely harmonious as they seem, these two will never agree to let
him try, however humbly and conscientiously, to cultivate the inexpensive
pleasure of being happy in their happiness. He becomes what no self-
respecting man can wish to be—a fly in the ointment. Most cases,
fortunately, are not so serious: he will be given a reasonable chance to make
a place for himself on this new plane to which Mr. Todd and Miss Lemon
have been translated; but it is always a question whether he can enter that
plane himself, or must hereafter be content with hearing from his former
friend through a medium. For he has not, as is so often gracefully but
emptily said on these trying occasions, been enriched by the acquisition of a
new friend: he has simply exchanged Miss Lemon or Mr. Todd (as the case
may be) for a composite, a Toddlemon or a Lemontodd—a few years will
show which. He must make the best he can of that composite. He who was
formerly described as (let us say) “my friend, Mr. Popp,” becomes, if he
becomes at all, “our friend, Mr. Popp”; and if ever he hears himself being
introduced as “Mr. Todd’s friend, Mr. Popp,” or as “Mrs. Todd’s friend, Mr.
Popp,” he had better go away as soon as politeness permits, and never come
back. Never.
I speak, of course, in generalities; for there are no rules immutably
governing all cases, and life is mellowed and beautified by shining, sensible
examples, in which Mr. Todd and Miss Lemon become one, yet realize that
in many respects, being human, they must still remain two; then, indeed, the
congratulator may actually be enriched by the acquisition of a new friend—
but not instantly, as one is enriched by the acquisition of a new hat. Yet it is
always the wiser part, in preparing to meet a beloved, to prepare for the
worst.
These are evidently the apprehensions of a bachelor, sensitive but not
unselfish; the mental attitude is different with a student, philosopher, and
idealist who, thinking not of himself, contemplates another’s marriage in
the calm, intelligent way, having as yet no beloved in which he can
contemplate his own. Such a one weighs. Such a one is conscious that, little
as he knows the beloved of Mr. Todd or Miss Lemon, there is grave danger
that Mr. Todd knows Miss Lemon, or Miss Lemon Mr. Todd, hardly better.
This happy-madness may not only be a delusion, as a calm outside
intelligence contemplates it, but it may be a snare. Mistakes do happen.

There are known cases in which the happy lunatic has been mistaken in a
beloved not once but often; and the persistent effort of these poor madmen
and madwomen to correct one mistake by making another is one of the
most discussed and pitiable phases of our civilization. The calm intelligence
must balance also the practical aspects of the business, its risks and
liabilities as well as its profits; and so serious is the enterprise when thus
examined that he can hardly fail to be terrified for anybody he knows and
loves who is undertaking it.
O Harvey! Harvey! (or Margaret! Margaret!)
Tact is what he will pray for. And if his prayer is granted, when Mr. Todd
(or Miss Lemon) asks him, “Now, honestly, what do you think of her (or
him)?” he will say, “Of course I do not know Miss Lemon (or Mr. Todd)
very well yet, but I have never met anybody whom I hoped to know and
like better.” Which will be quite true, and please the twittering questioner
much more than if he said, “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know.”

IV

THIS IS A FATHER
Proud Parent, in this little life
Yourself reflected see,
And think how Baby will progress
A man like you to be!

So stout, so strong, so wise, and when
Sufficient years have flown,
Like you the happy parent of
A baby of his own!

And when that unborn baby grows
To be a man like you,
Oh, think how proud that man will be
To be a parent too.

So think, when life oppresses you
And you are feeling sad,
A million, million, million times
You’ll be a happy dad.

—The Father’s Anthem.

IN the life of man fatherhood is so likely to happen, that I wonder
Shakespeare did not select father as a natural, and indeed inevitable,
successor to lover in his well-known seven ages. He chose the soldier, “full
of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,” presumably because such
soldiers were common in Elizabethan London. But fathers must have been
more so: they must have gone in droves past the tavern window where
Shakespeare (as what we now call the “wets” so like to think) sat at his ale-
stained table, dipping now his quill in an inkwell, and again his nose in a
tankard; but they seem to have made no impression. Indeed this unromantic,

necessary figure, composite as it is of all sorts and conditions of men, has
never appealed strongly to the poets; perhaps it is their revenge because
fathers so seldom read poetry.
Whatever else a man does, whether he lives by banking or burglary,
ascends to the presidency or descends to the gutter, he is likely to be a
father: they are as countless as the pebbles on a beach or the leaves in
Vallombrosa, and the few who evade paternity evade also the purpose for
which nature evidently created them, and go through life thumbing their
noses, so to speak, at Divine Providence. So taken for granted is this
vocation of fatherhood, and so little considered in comparison with other
masculine employments, that no correspondence school offers a course, and
many a young man undertakes to raise children with less hesitation than he
would start in to raise chickens. Some accept fatherhood with joy, others
with resignation, like a recently wedded young Italian who cobbles my
shoes, and spoke the other day of his own new little one. “Zee fadder and
zee modder,” he said, “zey work and zey slave for zee leetle one. But what-
a good? When he is grow up, he say, ‘To hell wiz zee fadder and zee
modder!’” And so, as Shakespeare may have decided, there is no universal
type of fatherhood, nor has the imagination of mankind created one, as in
the case of mothers, for convenient literary and conversational use. The
lines of the balladist,—

With his baby on his knee
He’s as happy as can be,—

were, to be sure, something in this direction; but they have become so
wholly associated with humor, that even the late Mr. Rogers, had he known
the ballad, could hardly have found inspiration therein for a group; nor
Shakespeare adapted the lines to describe seriously one of his seven ages.
He might have scribbled experimentally,—

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
immediately en rapport with his new-born child, or become intimately
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
that this baby belonged to them, 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 up his 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
fundamentally changed, 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 little rascal 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 afternoon tea. 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 Todd has 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 he has conducted 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, and make 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 has become 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 young Hamlet, 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
that even 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 early years 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”—and
there 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.

V

ON BEING A LANDLORD
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.
ON my consciousness are impressed the names of fourteen married
women and 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 Loo may be 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—

Button Ranee
Hopp Mahoney
Carrot Sibley
Barber le Maire
Karsen Trolley
Cawkins Brown
Smith Murphy

—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 the terms 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 the scientific 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 the simple, 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 “nice people,” 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 RENT
Characters: Mrs. Button, a tenant.
I, a landlord.
Scene: A tenement, owned by I, but referred to as Mrs. Button’s, which
is perhaps more correct. Mrs. Button is washing dishes. The room steams.
Slow creaks outside as of a reluctant man coming upstairs. Mrs. Button
smiles enigmatically. A knocking at the door, as in “Macbeth.”

Mrs. Button. Come in. (I enters.)
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
know that. 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 begin payin’ 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 shall expect the money next week.
Good-day, Mrs. Button.
Mrs. Button. Good-day, sir.
I exits. Mrs. Button resumes 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 landlord need 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 scientist repeating, 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.

VI

OLD FLIES AND OLD MEN
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
generation likes to flatter itself by thinking you antediluvian.—Letters of
Father William.
FEW men 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 Italian
centenarian, 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 might reasonably 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 to enter 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 jolly eternal 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, anything and 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 become
madly 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’ opinion
That 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 liquor
made 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 to live 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, his stockings, 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 mere
soupçon reasonably 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. I enjoy, 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.

VII

THE OLDE, OLDE, VERY OLDE MAN
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 childhood back 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 the
beginning, 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 the child 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 continuous seriousness, 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 as a 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 are not seriously 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 men will 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, that this baby
belonged to them, 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,
masquerading in 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 the explanation 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 the way 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 have closed 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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