Mr. Thomas Hardy, who has completed his 82nd year, has just given to the world a new volume of poems full of puissant criticism of life. He does not faint or fail.
It is wonderful, and the double event makes one ponder, not on longevity, but on the persistence of strength with labour and sorvow. How many middle-aged Writers of to-day—and most of our leading writers are middle-aged—hope to utter themselves with unabated force between the ages of eighty and ninety? What may we expect of them, and what may fairly be expected of us, as the' years go on? In his recent brilliant address to the students of St. Andrews, Sir James Barrie advised them, in effect, to give their elders the knock-out—if they can. But can they? Here is an aged Victorian, in our midst, writing better, and thinking more deeply, than our Georgian young men and women. He is universal where they are local. His curve encloses their curves, and his thoughts make theirs seem tentative and liable to revision.
Some years ago Sir William Robertson Nicoll wrote an admirable little book entitled The Round of the Clock: the Story of Our Lives from Year to Year," in which he brought much consideration and evidence to these questions. He divided life into twelve lustrums—that is to say periods of five years—and likened twelve lustrums, sixty years, to the round of the clock. Thus every year up to sixty is represented by one minute. He starts his clock at 6 a.m., and devotes a chapter to each hour. At seven o'clock we are five years old, at ten we are twenty, at 2 p.m. we are forty. Sir William endeavours to describe the characteristics of growth decline in each period of five years, and, drawing on a very wide knowledge of biography and prodigious memory, he brings together a great number of illuminating facts. But he is very careful not to dogmatize. Indeed, it is useless for anyone to do so, because in these matters every man is primarily interested in himself, and looks at life inwards rather than outwards. Sir William does not believe in the comparative uselessness of men over forty. He quotes some words of Lord Macaulay, another master of biographical evidence, in one of
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.