GRAY-HAIRED UNAWARES.
Hosea vii. 9.
Among the reminders and remonstrances which it was the mission of the prophet, the son of Beeri, in the days of Ahaz and Hezekiah, to deliver to Ephraim, there was this significant passage, expressive of a reckless people’s unconscious decline, whose lapses were taken account of on high, and Ephraim knew it not—“Yea, gray hairs are here and there upon him, yet he knoweth not.”
Who, asks Hartley Coleridge, ever saw their first gray hairs, or marked the crow feet at the angle of their eyes, without a sigh or a tear, a momentaneous self-abasement, a sudden sinking of the soul, a thought that youth is fled for ever? “None but the blessed few that, having dedicated their spring of life to Heaven, behold in the shedding of their vernal blossoms a promise that the season of immortal fruit is near.” Gray hairs, in an advancing stage of the plural number, may be here and there upon us before we know of it. But the actual discovery of the first is a bit of an epoch in one’s life; and if one exclaims Eureka! it is hardly in the most jubilant of tones or the most exultant of tempers.
Falstaff was surprised into a full purpose of amendment of life when he lighted on the first white hair on his chin; but only to keep on renewing the purpose weekly, long after chin and head, too, must have been covered with silver or snow.
With some the humour is to pass off the discovery in seeming glee; and perhaps it is the saturnine, melancholy temperament that is likeliest to do this. For instance, Gerbier relates of Charles the First, that one morning “as the King was combing his head, he found a white hair, which he sent to the Queen in merriment. Henrietta Maria immediately wrote back that Don Carlos would cause many more to come up before the Emperor gave up the Palatinate.” Had the King not been himself combing his head on this not too auspicious occasion, the probability is, as courts and courtiers go, that his first white hair would not thus have been allowed to attract and invite attention. A courtly dresser would have been shocked to reveal what he saw, and would have kept the secret with ex officio conscientiousness. Many and many are the uncrowned heads upon which gray hairs are gathering here and there—a familiar sight enough to overseeing (and not overlooking) attendants or friends, but by the owners themselves unsuspected as yet. Mrs. Browning lets Aurora Leigh espy one such straggler, which even the neat-handed maid-in-waiting overlooks, at Lady Waldemar’s toilet:—
It is among the graver of his Recreations that a clerical essayist pictures to himself man or woman, thoughtful, earnest, and pious, sitting down and musing, at the sight of the first gray hairs. Here is the slight shadow, he puts it, of “a certain great event which is to come;” the earliest touch of a chill hand which must prevail at length. “Here is manifest decay: we have begun to die. And no worthy human being will pretend that this is other than a very solemn thought. And we look backward as well as forward: how short a time since we were little children, and kind hands smoothed down the locks now grown scanty and gray.” So in Mrs. Southey’s (Caroline Bowles’) tender, simple verses on the same trite theme:—
Mr. Thackeray makes his youngish widow, Amelia Osborne, take tranquilly enough this sort of revelation. “In these quiet labours and harmless cares the gentle widow’s life was passing away, a silver hair or two marking the progress of time on her head, and a line deepening ever so little on her fair forehead. She used to smile at these marks of time.” Which accords with her placid temperament. Quite otherwise constituted is Currer Bell’s Madame Beck. “A loud bell rang for morning school. She got up. As she passed a dressing-table with a glass upon it, she looked at her reflected image. One single white hair streaked her nut-brown tresses; she plucked it out with a shudder.” That is an early phase of the decadence of which Mr. Robert Browning graphically depicts a later stage:—
Mr. Trollope’s Captain Cutwater is the representative of a large constituency in at least this one salient particular, that he “had no idea that he was an old man. He had lived for so many years among men of his own stamp, who had grown gray and bald and rickety and weak alongside of him,” that when he moved into a younger circle, and settled there, he ignored the disparity of ages. In Juvenal’s emphatic phrase, old age steals upon us unawares,—unperceived, unrecognised: obrepit non intellecta senectus. This stealthy in-coming, or on-coming, of old age is an iterated topic in the classics. Cicero, indeed, had been beforehand with Juvenal, almost word for word: non intelligitur quando obrepit senectus. There is Ovid, again, with his “stealthy lapse” of age, beguiling as it wears away: labitur occulte, fallitque volubilis ætas; and with his elsewhere reminder, that time glides on, and with noiseless years we grow older till we grow old: Tempora labuntur, tacitisque senescimus annis. Without, as Hazlitt says, our in the least suspecting it, the mists are at our feet, and the shadows of age encompass us. Leigh Hunt somewhere comments feelingly on the difficulty of learning how narrow and dim a boundary separates mature from old age; and quoting his own personal experience, says, that a single illness made the line of demarcation clear to him. So M. de Ste.-Beuve: Rien n’est pénible à démêler comme les confins des ages: il faut souvent que quelque chose vienne du dehors et coupe court.
There is all the more force in the kindly wish of Mr. Tennyson’s Will Waterproof, that the plump object of it may live long, ere from his topmost head the thickset hazel dies; long, ere the hateful crow shall tread the corners of his eyes; all the more force as coming from one who has to own of himself—