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:—

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.”