A friend who is a great admirer of Thomas Carlyle sent me an excerpt from a letter the Scotsman wrote to his mother on September 12, 1843:
“I spent a
forenoon with Jeffery who is very thin and fretful I think; being at any rate
weakly, he is much annoyed at present by a hurt on his shin – a quite insignificant
thing otherwise; which however disables him from walking. Poor Jeffrey! He does
not make a nice old man, he has too
little real seriousness in him for that.”
“Jeffrey” is
Francis Jeffrey (1773-1850), the Scottish judge, literary critic and co-founder
of the Edinburgh Review, who a month later would turn seventy – hardly ancient by our reckoning, but an advanced age by
his and Carlyle’s. I’ve never associated being a “nice old man” with seriousness, and Carlyle was never, at any age, a
paragon of niceness. Self-seriousness, a strain of humorless narcissism, if
anything, breeds misery, especially for others.
Two stereotypes
of old age persist, and not without some measure of truth. On one end of the behavioral
scale, curmudgeonly nastiness, intolerance, imperiousness. On the other, the
kind-hearted, sweet-natured fount of wisdom. We’ve all known pure embodiments
of both extremes among the young and old, and we, at least periodically, indulge in
every stop along that spectrum.
“[W]e ought to
inquire what provision can be made against that time of distress. What
happiness can be stored up against the winter of life? and how we may pass our
latter years with serenity and cheerfulness?” Dr. Johnson asks in his Rambler essay of November 13, 1750.
Never one to soft-soap reality, he continues:
“Piety is
the only proper and adequate relief of decaying man. He that grows old without
religious hopes, as he declines into imbecility, and feels pains and sorrows
incessantly crowding upon him, falls into a gulf of bottomless misery, in which
every reflection must plunge him deeper, and where he finds only new gradations
of anguish and precipices of horror.”
3 comments:
That last paragraph: Johnson should have known better than to spout that stuff.
The meaning of the word "nice" that Carlyle had in mind in 1843 is probably not "kind, considerate, or pleasant (to others)" (OED--the first citation for this meaning is from 1830). If being "nice" was connected to "real seriousness" in Carlyle's mind, then possibly he had in mind one of the other meanings that were still current at the time, such as "entering minutely into details; attentive," "finely discriminative," "minutely or carefully accurate," etc.
I would say that Johnson worked both sides of the avenue; pious, yes, but seemingly better acquainted with "gradations of anguish and precipices of horror." A nice turn of phrase, however, as one can always expect from the good Dr. J.
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