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Middle Age and Other Things
Harper’s Weekly (January 18, 1913) : 21
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      The almost inevitable result of reading memoirs or collections of letters is a sad query as to whether friendships are compatible with old age. The almost inevitable result of reading memoirs or collections of letters is a sad query as to whether friendships are compatible with old age. The principal charm of such volumes is the generous view we get of warm friendships. The early lives of most famous men make us keenly envious of their Olympian companionships. In their poorest days they are rich with vital delight in one another. It is their friendships which render their talents fecund as well as their talents seeming almost predominantly for friendship. They make their recreation of weekly meetings over cold sausages in winter woods. They travel distances that they may share meager lodgings and sit up half the night for the joy to be found in talk.
      Through all such periods the reader follows them with delight that so many appreciations met together and formed stockade upon stockade about one another in this bleakly arranged world. Then gradually these relationships disintegrate, and though there are the kindliest efforts on the part of all concerned to conceal the dying out of these generous fires, the chill is very real to the reader.
      The causes are intangible and difficult to assess at their relative values. As each of the friends mature their individual duties increase. Their growing personal importance makes for more work and more superficial relationships. They can no longer scatter themselves broadcast; they must shield their powers for use in their work. They even harbor themselves a shade grudgingly, and an insidious rise in their standard of comfort takes place which causes them to stay at home and content themselves with writing chastened apologetic notes of affectionate regret. There is a constraint between those who have once gone at quickened speed in each other’s society as though they could not forget that by past standard they are lesser people now, no matter what aggrandizement has seemingly taken place.
      They are pallid and meanly self-contained when compared with the youthful self who flamed at another’s wrongs, praise, suggestions, future. It is less self-revealing to be with a comfortable new acquaintance in the period of evaded friendships. In one’s salad days one is strong enough to stand the lash of critical minds; one has the quick circulation to carry off the healthy sting of honest friendship. It is one of the temptations of maturity to limit one’s relationships to the enervating ones of family life, with their indissoluable bonds which make the finer tact unnecessary or rather unused. One must understand one’s friend if friendship is to continue. One need not understand one’s family; the sharing of daily habit will do instead. One cannot quarrel with a friend; for what guarantee has one that the break would ever be mended and made seemly? One has to live with one’s family, consequently one must make harmonious all jangled nerves, and as they are always made right they occur more frequently than if cures were less part of family routine.
      But friendship does not put up with self-indulgent bickerings. It holds itself in a higher sphere. If one is unworthy in one’s treatment of a friend, one is unworthy of the friendship and it ceases. If one is unworthy in one’s behavior before one’s family, one is a trial to be borne bravely by the family and on such grounds is one’s slacking endured.
      We exchanged hazards and queries, but when we have garnered conclusions and experiences we keep them to ourselves. Our journey through life makes us content with the small amount of life we find in ourselves and kills our desire to encompass more in the life of a friend. It is an unlovely gray form of argument, and the loneliness of middle age shows what small backing it has and what small comfort it brings. If friendship which seems so gallant, so probably the unguessed peak of achievements, is considered but the need of our hotly personal youth, when the necessity for expression pushes us hardest, that surely is an interpretation of cold maturity explaining away its lacks. The plea that middle age is more impersonal and has learned its hard lesson of self-sufficiency is to argue that we give when our gifts are of little value. We exchanged hazards and queries, but when we have garnered conclusions and experiences we keep them to ourselves. Our journey through life makes us content with the small amount of life we find in ourselves and kills our desire to encompass more in the life of a friend. It is an unlovely gray form of argument, and the loneliness of middle age shows what small backing it has and what small comfort it brings.
      To let the freest of relationships go and live on a multitude of material distractions is to prepare for ourselves disillusionment, self-scorn, and vain regrets. Youth is not selfish, for in youth one has friends; after thirty, one has routine. After thirty, one really needs a friend; after thirty, one should begin to be worthy of one, and if it takes divine understanding to have one and much self-pricking to realize it, think of the contentment which would lie in saying at the end, “I have kept a friend.”

      No one works in London and no one lives in London. Countless people think they do, but they do not. One goes to their offices at nine, one goes again at ten; at eleven one returns with a vicious determination to rout them out from wherever they are. The clerk is attacked. He admits that they do sometimes come to the office, but he does not think they intended to to-day. In fact, they are down in the country, and he feels almost sure that they would not care to be disturbed. You insist that he call them up by telephone. You hear him arguing and reasoning with them. It is clear that they are protesting against being made to come in and earn their living.
      The clerk coaxes and insists and pleads, and finally they say they will come up in the afternoon. The clerk feels that he has done a rather clever thing, and you feel that you have made yourself unpopular. You would feel remorseful if you did not feel so shocked. What do all these impecunious young people do who arrive at work at eleven? Where were they the night before? Has no one told them that they are living like princes? Even when they come it is difficult to talk business to them, for one feels so strongly that it is one’s duty to reprimand them for their ways.
 

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