Faded Enthusiasms

IN Mr. Scudder’s biography of Lowell there is a curious reminder of the change that overcomes us all, earlier or later as the case may be, in reaching what Dr. Holmes calls the table-land of life. The biographer says of Lowell that ‘ upon writing of Carlyle when he himself was nearing the line of fifty, there was an undercurrent of reminiscence of his own callowness. He remembered his devotion to the Carlyle of the Miscellanies, and was more or less conscious that he had outlived his first enthusiasm.’

This passage was forcibly brought home to me the other day when I took down from its shelf an old volume of the French dramatist, Sardou, whose lightest line I loved once to the point of adoration, and was impressed less by its supreme cleverness than by its theatrical artificiality. My own marginal notes, made at the time the original players were still performing in Paris, touched me no longer. Even the masterpiece, Patrie, the only play of all Sardou taken over to the Théâtre Français by right of eminent domain, seemed to me but fairly good melodrama, — its hero long-winded and tiresome and something of a poseur. I doubt if I could sit through to the end of him even in the theatre now!

Here is a change, indeed! How queerly we are all made up! Do we outgrow things thus every year or two, I wonder, and wake up to find them tedious and unprofitable? Do we live a while with our Carlyles, only to throw them over? Is mortal man so fickle that nothing of all he has done may grow familiar,nothing bear the test of repetition? Will the utterance of genius, some day, fail to stir him? The great lines of Othello and Hamlet, for instance, grow feeble and pall?

No! Those lines will live as long as there are tongues to speak and ears to hear them. We read them at all times and seasons, and they grow in beauty. They defy analysis, like the note of the nightingale.

The enthusiasms of the day and hour I suppose to be merely temperamental. They are signs of an active mind, and we should be grateful for them rather than otherwise, whether swiftly outgrown or not. For they are but surfaceeddies of the current, and have but the slightest relation to the depth below. Even if some of them endure to the point of permanence, they are more likely than not to hold their proper place, and do no harm. The effervescence of youth is an excellent thing, and the more of it we keep in middle age or later life, the better. Contrariwise, if, one by one, our images totter, fall, and break, no matter. We can sit in serene contemplation of their fragments. ‘Through plot and counterplot,’ through all time and change, the ‘Nightingale in the Study’ will still sing on.