Matthew Arnold’s poetry often shares, though to a less extent, the defects of Coleridge’s. He realized to the full and in all its details the horror of growing old; but the actual artistic rendering of the experience, though much better than Coleridge’s, is still not completely adequate. The language is oddly dead and conventional; the versification without force and rather monotonous. (I suspect, too, that the form chosen is intrinsically unsuitable to the subject matter. Old age demands a weightier, gloomier music than can be squeezed out of blank verse lightened of half its substance and prevented, by the stanza form, from winding its way into those sustained and complicated effects which are its special glory and principal “point.”)
Milton treats the subject rather drily and perfunctorily. Dramatically, this is as it should be; for it is an angel who thus describes the horrors of old age—a being incapable of experiencing what he so glibly talks about. Adam, thirty years later, would have spoken much more feelingly and, with Milton as his interpreter, much more movingly on the subject. As it is, the Miltonic thunders seem to rumble, in the angel’s mouth, a little mechanically. We are not profoundly moved.
In Baudelaire’s poem the Miltonic situation is reversed. It is not the angel who menaces man, it is man who menaces the angel—the angel who believes his youth to be everlasting, but who is in fact mortal and doomed. We are all, in our youth, that angel. Strong in the illusion of our eternity, we could laugh at the words of the man grown conscious of his mortality. Or if we wept, it was out of pure wantonness, because weeping was a change of pleasures, it is only when we are adult that we grasp the full significance of adult words.
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?
In the dark and splendid oratory of Baudelaire’s third stanza what is perhaps the worst of all the miseries of growing old finds its most accurate, its most completely adequate expression. Here are no deliciously mournful sunsets or distant bells, but a harsh pain made more agonizing by the beauty (for beauty has a penetrative force), by the grave perfection (for perfection is barbed and, having pierced, remains in the wound) of its poetical rendering.
Age is in some ways almost more appalling than death. For, in the words of Epicurus, “when we exist there is no death, and when there is death we no more exist”: whereas, when we are old, we still exist. Death cannot be experienced: old age can—“old age, abhorred, decrepit, unsociable, and unfriended”; κατάμεμπτον ἀκρατὲς ἀπροσομιλον γῆρας ἄφιλον. The Greeks were unanimous in their horror of old age; and it was an evil, moreover, against which they were almost defenceless. Philosophy is but a poor antidote to the miseries of age; for that disinterested serenity of mind preached by Stoic and Epicurean alike is a product of the will. But the will is a faculty which old age, working destructively on the mind through the body, may weaken and undermine beyond all possibility of recovery. The consolations of philosophy are for the strong; but old age is a time of weakness. Enfeebled old age looks for some source of strength outside itself. Discouraged and in decay, it asks for some abiding comfort.
(The whole subject is treated with an illuminating wealth of day-to-day clinical detail and metaphysical commentary in the Journal Intime of the philosopher, Maine de Biran. No one has written better or more scientifically than Biran on the process of growing old, none has described the influence of bodily upon mental states with more precision. And the mind that comments on these observations is a beautiful and original mind; the trajectory of its development from the sensualism of Condillac to a peculiar kind of mysticism, most interesting and enlightening to follow.)
No, the Greeks, I repeat, were almost without defence against old age. Only the votaries of the mystery religions possessed an antidote. For they had the comforting hope of resurrection and the certainty, if they were initiates, of being, by infusion of divine grace, equal in some mysterious way to the youngest, strongest, most prosperous, superior even to the virtuous, if the virtuous happened to be uninitiated. The abiding comfort, the source of strength, the “fruits and foliage, not their own”—these the mysteries provided. The strong men, who found the consolations of philosophy consoling, were annoyed. “Diogenes,” writes Plutarch, “may be called in to counteract Sophocles, whose lines about the Mysteries have filled innumerable minds with discouragement:—
O thrice blest they
That ere they pass to Hades have beheld
These Mysteries; for them only, in that world,
Is life; the rest have utter misery.
Diogenes, when he heard a similar statement, replied, “What do you mean? Is Pataikon the thief going to have a ‘better lot’ after death than Epaminondas, just because he was initiated.” It is the voice of low-church good-citizenship raised against Catholicism, the voice of Kingsley protesting against Newman. And of course the protest is eminently sensible and rational. Diogenes and Charles Kingsley are quite right. But that did not, and still does not, prevent the sick, prevent the old or ageing, prevent the miserable and uneasy from running to be initiated; or from regretting—if they cannot believe in the efficacy of sacraments, nor accept the unbelievable myths—regretting the intellectual impossibility of initiation. With the decline, perhaps only temporary, perhaps permanent, of the latest and greatest of the mystery religions, old age is becoming for us, as it was for the Greeks, the most serious of all the problems of existence. We defend ourselves against the inevitable creeping of the enemy in a variety of ways. Physiologically, first of all: the art of medicine permits us, in some measure, to postpone the onset of age and to alleviate its symptoms. By rendering the abiding consolations unnecessary, monkey-gland may rob Christianity of some of its most important functions. (I use “monkey-gland” generically to connote any rejuvenator. At the present time, church-going is certainly cheaper and may, in many cases, be more effective than Voronoff’s operation.) Our next line of defence is psychological: we do not admit old age; at a time of life when our ancestors would have been greybeards and venerable crones, we continue to dress, talk, behave as though we were young. The old are continually auto-suggesting themselves into youthfulness. Not too unsuccessfully, in many cases.
Finally, there are our philosophical and religious defences. These, for non-Christians, are very inadequate. The consolations of philosophy are, as they always were, only for the strong. There is, as yet, little solid comfort in the thought of progressing humanity—and the religion of progressing humanity is, with the exception of a few heresies, like Christian Science, the only new religion. As for the political religion-substitutes—even at the best of times they have made little appeal to the old. And at this moment, the liveliest of them, Fascism and Communism, deliberately reject and ignore the old. Fascism, it is true, encourages them to be Catholics, if they can; but Communism does not even allow them that resource. Old people in Russia have been robbed of all their spiritual defences without having been provided, in return, with any of the physiological defences available at any rate to the more prosperous members of our bourgeois community. Old age is bad enough anywhere; in contemporary Russia it must be an unmitigated horror.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! For the world which seems
To lie before us, like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here, as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
Uxor, vivamus ut viximus, et teneamus
nomina quae primo sumpsimus in thalamo;
nec ferat ulla dies, ut commutemur in aevo,
quin tibi sim juvenis tuque puella mihi.
AUSONIUS.
Love, the last defence against old age—the last, and for those whose good fortune it is to have some one person to care for, or who have learned the infinitely difficult art of loving all their neighbours, the best. For it can survive, in many cases, even the ruin of bodily and mental power, can break through the prevailing insentience and apathy like a flame through ashes. Vivamus ut viximus; let us be true to one another.
Memory
Tâche donc, instrument des fuites, ô maligne
Syrinx, de refleurir aux lacs où tu m’attends!
Moi, de ma rumeur fier, je vais parler longtemps
Des déesses; et par d’idolâtres peintures,
A leur ombre enlever encore des ceintures:
Ainsi, quand des raisins j’ai sucé la clarté
Pour bannir un regret par ma feinte écarté,
Rieur, j’élève au ciel d’été la grappe vide
Et, soufflant dans ses peaux lumineuses, avide
D’ivresse, jusqu’au soir je regarde au travers.
O nymphes, regonflons des souvenirs divers.
STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ.
Ah, sad and strange, as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.
Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love and wild with all regrets;
O Death
