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Wearing Qualities
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (March 16, 1912) : 26
Purdue copy/scan (hathitrust) : link
archive.org : link
 

      It is amazing and a little depressing to see how few persons have qualities which, becoming in youth, are still so in middle age. There is, happily, a group of people pleasantly scattered so that one is always aware of a reassuring few who, the longer they wear their characters, the more gracefully fit them, wear and tear but seeming to mellow the colors, smooth the surfaces, and add interest and picturesqueness to the whole. It is wise and usual to dwell on this graceful minority when but we think of maturity and old age, it is human and perhaps permissible to regret a little ruefully the way in which we others manage this matter of going on. We all mean to open out and improve markedly — that is, if we mean anything; but what we somehow arrive at is a hardening, almost a caricaturing of what we were when we were younger. Our qualities seemed so malleable then, there was a flush over us that made our stupidities rather amusing. But when we feel them in ourselves settling down to terrible permanency, and see them in our friends becoming irremediable traits to be overlooked, there comes such a big welling protest and prayer, “Oh, may we not be at forty grotesque contortions of that nice person we were at twenty-five.”
      What was our keen enthusiasm then is becoming slightly unkind partisanship and may be crotchety dogmatism. We feel the stiffening process in our hearts and fear that we see the recognition of it in the eyes of our friends. If we bubbled forth nonsense with endearing irrelevancy and good-humor at twenty and continue to do it at thirty, it has somehow turned into jocularity fatuously liking its own fun. If we were attractively langorously feminine, we become rather weightily parasitical. If we were polished and quiet enough to please our elders, we take on a crushing respectability with a threat of coming pomposity. If we were a lot of things that seemed quite harmless at the time, we become an unexpected lot of other things that seem unfairly harsh as results. It is, perhaps, a realization of this kind that stops our happy-go-lucky footing of the highway, and that change known as the steadying effects of middle age is nothing else than the horrified and heart-sick pause when you realize the cropper that you and middle age between you have made of the thing.
      Later on you do not care. Later on you do not care. When you reach forty and find yourself with all your old stupidities and failings forever ingrained a resignation of a kind takes place. You see the hopelessness of your case and you set about to make the best of it. Your first step is to insist that every one show you great respect, which is extremely wise and has much precedence behind it. The divine right of kings theory is a precaution of precisely the same kind. Napoleon said that the first thing a clever ruler did, especially if he intended to do as he pleased, was to establish his own infallibility by claiming a supernatural origin. Questions thus prevented, one’s path is clear. What could be more like the average human being at forty? He claims to have done precisely as he should in his youth — which is surely a claim to supernatural qualities; then be demands that he should be looked up to, and after that he gives up worrying and has a very good time indeed. Of course the gaiety of middle age — a fact commented on often before — is in part the abandon of despair. But they get over the despair and only keep up the abandonment. Of course the gaiety of middle age — a fact commented on often before — is in part the abandon of despair. But they get over the despair and only keep up the abandonment.
      Thirty is the time when the despair is most keen. It is then we feel the awful thing happening. We are still fighting to prevent the crust of our limitations from closing completely over us. We still have ideals and regret it on that ground; we are still breathing frantically, with those big inhalations of youth, at the open spots remaining in our hardening armor. When we are young we believe that changes can be brought about and so we fight against this bungled business of settling down. We still feel fresh shame at the right places and have not yet learned to make what is only inevitable appear seemly and honorable. It is just our clear vision of how hopelessly we are trapped that makes us balk a year or two more. For after that we will not be dear people looking on, at least partly from the outside, at ourselves becoming comfortable and dogmatic and jocose. We will be comfortable, dogmatic, jocose people looking on at things in general, through natures hardened in the shape of these characteristics, beyond all hope of rescue.
      The final and really most dastardly trick that is played upon us in the imbedded belief that, though other people may be shipwrecked or grow fat or become tiresome, such things can never happen to us. The thing that is strongest in each of us is the sense of his own immunity. It is stronger even than self-protection, though it may sometimes work in partnership with it, for it governs us when the other does not and prevents our protecting ourselves by instilling the treacherous faith that there is no need for protection. Our sisters and our cousins and our aunts and our friends and the stupid world at large, everything we read about is true of them, but of us why, how can it be? We are we and we are all right.
      either way we either delude ourselves or delude others or remain in unhappy doubt; and all ways it is awfulIf we only knew definitely when the last gap closed! But we never can. We may have a little longer to go or the catastrophe may already have taken place. No one will tell us, and if they do it will not help us, for if they say it has not yet closed we will, if we are still open, believe them to be kindly deceiving us; and if they say it has closed and speak the truth we will believe them to be unkindly misunderstanding us, so either way we either delude ourselves or delude others or remain in unhappy doubt; and all ways it is awful.
 

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