Just how flat and silly the ordinary love letter is, nobody who reads the law reports in his daily paper can fail to know. The specimens there printed are almost invariably revolting in their banality. Only on the rarest occasions have I read one which I felt to be intrinsically moving. What follows—to quote one of these rare examples—is not a love letter, but a death letter, a letter written by a man just before he killed himself. The imminence of death leaves most men’s style as feebly inexpressive as the burning presence of passion. The poor wretch who wrote these lines was a most exceptional suicide. Here they are.
No wish to die. One of the best of sports, which they all knew. Not in the wrong, the boys will tell you. This b—— at Palmer’s Green has sneaked my wife, one of the best in the world; my wife, the first love in the world.
And that is all. But how moving it is! And, in its way, how beautiful! The rhythm of the sentences is perfect. And those repetitions at the close are managed with what, were the writer a deliberate artist, would be a most exquisite felicity. Reading this letter, we are made to feel that the man who wrote it was something more than an Antony of Brunswick Square—that the passion which made him kill himself was a genuine agony on the tragical scale. But it would be possible while preserving the sense, so to alter the phrasing of this letter that it would seem perfectly commonplace, flat, “insincere.” We should read it with indifference and, if we thought about its author at all, say that he was a dim little man incapable of anything but a dim little suffering. And yet, in spite of beaver hats and bad style, there is such a thing as suicide.
Old Age
Age is deformèd, youth unkind;
We scorn their bodies, they our mind.
THOMAS BASTARD.
Things have changed since Queen Elizabeth’s days. “We,” that is to say the young, scorn not only their bodies, but also (and above all) their minds. In the two politically, most “advanced” states of Europe this scorn is so effective that age has become a definite bar to the holding of political power. Communism and Fascism appeal for the support of youth, and of youth alone. At Rome and Moscow age has been disfranchised. The reasons for this state of things are simple. In an unchanging, or very slowly changing, environment, old age is actually an asset. Where the present is like the past, a long experience of past circumstances equips old men to deal effectually with present circumstances. But where circumstances are rapidly changing there is no guarantee that action which was successful in the past will be successful in the altered present. In a changing world, age and long experience cease to be an asset and become a handicap. Hence the disfranchisement of old age in Italy and Russia.
True, the leaders are trying to moderate a little the fine scorn of the first revolutionary days. When they themselves were young, how lyrically they sang youth’s praises! with what ferocious mockery they derided the greybeards and the complacently middle-aged! But they themselves are now entering on middle age, and the youths of a new generation are repeating with a loud and rather menacing approval the very words they themselves were using ten or twelve years ago. For how much longer will these ex-young men be successful in persuading their followers that it is essential, for the sake of the Cause, that they should continue to hold office? Within the communist society, class-war has been abolished. But, to make up for this, generation-war is just beginning. Beginning again, to be accurate; after how many thousands of years? Among primitive peoples, a crack over the head with a club was, and still is, the equivalent of an old age pension. Even kings had to submit to the law which condemned the old. To a white traveller who visited him, “Give me hair-dye!” was the agonized cry of the greatest of African chiefs. “Hair-dye!” He was going grey. Not long afterwards his warriors speared him to death. Leaders in Russia and Italy may soon expect a similar fate. They will be the first European victims of the new generation-war, which they have done so much to foster and intensify.
Beauty is but a flower,
Which wrinkles will devour;
Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young, and fair;
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye;
I am sick, I must die.
Lord have mercy on us!
Strength stoops unto the grave;
Worms feed on Hector brave;
Swords may not fight with fate;
Earth still holds ope her gate.
Come, come, the bells do cry;
I am sick, I must die.
Lord have mercy on us!
Wit with his wantonness
Tasteth death’s bitterness;
Hell’s executioner
Hath no ears for to hear
What vain art can reply;
I am sick, I must die;
Lord have mercy on us!
Haste therefore each degree
To welcome destiny:
Heaven is our heritage,
Earth but a player’s stage.
Mount we unto the sky;
I am sick, I must die.
Lord have mercy on us!
THOMAS NASHE.
Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears;
List to the heavy part the music bears,
Woe weeps out her division when she sings.
Droop herbs and flowers,
Fall grief in showers,
Our beauties are not ours;
O, I could still
Like melting snow upon some craggy hill.
Drop, drop, drop, drop,
Since nature’s pride is now a withered daffodil.
BEN JONSON.
Fair summer droops, droop men and beasts therefore;
So fair a summer look for never more;
All good things vanish less than in a day,
Peace, plenty, pleasure, suddenly decay.
Go not yet away, bright soul of the sad year,
The earth is hell when thou leav’st to appear.
THOMAS NASHE.
One could fill volumes with this plaintive poetry of transience. Poetry like an autumnal sunset, like bells heard from a long way away—mournfully beautiful. Poetry that makes us luxuriously sad. A pleasant poetry, in spite of the threats of death and old age. For threats, if unprecise and melodious, are almost agreeably moving. But melody may also be combined with precision of statement—making it more precise. The poet can, if he so wills, use his music to sharpen his threats, to send them barbed and rankling into our wincing imagination.
There was a time when, though my path was rough,
This joy within me dallied with distress,
And all misfortunes were but as the stuff
Whence Fancy made me dreams of happiness:
For hope grew round me, like the twining vine,
And fruits and foliage, not my own, seemed mine.
But now afflictions bow me down to earth,
Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE.
What is it to grow old?
Is it to lose the glory of the form,
The lustre of the eye?
Is it for beauty to forgo her wreath?
—Yes, but not this alone.
Is it to feel our strength—
Not our bloom only, but our strength—decay?
Is it to feel each limb
Grow stiffer, every function less exact,
Each nerve more loosely strung?
Yes, this, and more; but not
Ah, ’tis not what in youth we dreamed ’twould be.
’Tis not to have our life
Mellowed and softened as with sunset-glow,
A golden day’s decline.
’Tis not to see the world
As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,
And heart profoundly stirred;
And weep, and feel the fulness of the past,
The years that are no more.
It is to spend long days
And not once feel that we were ever young;
It is to add, immured
In the hot prison of the present, month
To month with weary pain.
It is to suffer this
And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel.
Deep in our hidden heart
Festers the dull remembrance of a change,
But no emotion—none.
It is—last stage of all—
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.
MATTHEW ARNOLD
So may’st thou live, till, like ripe fruit, thou drop
Into thy mother’s lap, or be with ease
Gathered, not harshly plucked, for death mature.
This is old age; but then thou must outlive
Thy youth, thy strength, thy beauty, which will change
To withered, weak and grey; thy senses then,
Obtuse, all taste of pleasure must forgo
To what thou hast; and, for the air of youth,
Hopeful and cheerful, in thy blood will reign
A melancholy damp of cold and dry
To weigh thy spirits down, and last consume
Thy balm of life.
JOHN MILTON.
Ange plein de gaîté, connaissez-vous l’angoisse?
La honte, le remords, les sanglots, les ennuis
Et les vagues terreurs de ces affreuses nuits
Qui compriment le cœur comme un papier qu’on froisse?
Ange plein de gaîté, connaissez-vous l’angoisse? . . .
Ange plein de santé, connaissez-vous les Fièvres?
Qui, le long des grands murs de l’hospice blafard,
Comme des exilés, s’en vont d’un pied trainard,
Cherchant le soleil rare et remuant les lèvres?
Ange plein de santé, connaissez-vous les Fièvres?
Ange plein de beauté, connaissez-vous les rides,
Et la peur de vieillir, et ce hideux tourment
De lire la secrète horreur du devoûment
Dans des yeux où longtemps burent nos yeux avides?
Ange plein de beauté, connaissez-vous les rides? . . .
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE.
Coleridge writes almost prettily of what is, after all, one of the most dreadful things about old age—its insentient apathy and indifference. Who would divine in such a pleasantly tinkling couplet as:—
But now afflictions bow me down to earth,
Nor care I that they rob me of my mirth,
the depths of infinitely depressing significance
