“The face cannot betray the years until the mind has given its consent. The mind is the sculptor.”
I SAY to the years as I have said to the public, ‘Quand même, I shall conquer you.’” There speaks a spirit that will never grow old; and who that has recently seen Sarah Bernhardt can doubt that, as time passes, she continues to make good her challenge to the years, “Quand même.” At threescore, the great actress is in the prime of her powers, and does not look a day over forty.
It is not by any particular grace of nature that Madame Bernhardt and many others who are more advanced in years than she retain their youth, but because of their attitude toward the years. They refuse to let them count. They have made up their minds that they will not grow old in the ordinary sense.
“Better than the art of growing old gracefully is the secret of not growing old at all," says a writer in the Chicago Journal. “It is something worth knowing and worth remembering. The secret is concealed in the fact that men and women are as old as they make themselves to be. That implies will power, but what of it? The world is governed by will power.”
Julia Ward Howe is a splendid example of youthful activity and mental vigor and freshness in old age. So was Mary A. Livermore until her recent death. Henry Gassoway Davis, recently the octogenarian nominee of the Democratic party for the vice-presidency, exhibits an elasticity and vigor of mind and body that put many a man of forty to shame. George Meredith, on the celebration of his seventy-fourth birthday, said: “I do not feel that I am growing old either in heart or mind. I still look on life with a young man’s eye. I have always hoped that I would not grow old as some, with a palsied intellect, living backward, regarding other people as anachronisms, because they themselves have lived on in the other time and left their sympathies behind them with their years.”
When a man becomes wise enough to recognize his own divinity—that he is as indestructible a principle as a law of mathematics; that no accident of life, no friction, trouble, or difficulty can touch the divine part of him; and when he recognizes the truth of being, that he is a part of the infinite creative principle, he will not begin to show signs of mental and physical decrepitude when he should be in the prime of all his powers.
Age will never succeed in retaining a youthful appearance and mentality until people make up their minds not to let the years count; until they cease to make the body old by constant suggestions of the mind. We begin to sow seed thoughts of age in youth. We look forward to being old at forty-five, and to going down hill at fifty.
The very act of preparing for old age hastens it. As Job said, “The thing I feared most has come upon me.” People who prepare for a thing and look for it, anticipating, fearing, dreading it in their daily lives, usually get it.
“Any person continually in fear of something will bear the marks of such fear graven in his or her face,” says Prentice Mulford. “If you so look forward to such decay of the body as a thing that must come, it will come.”
Never for a moment allow yourself to think that you are too old to do this or that, for your thoughts and convictions will very soon outpicture themselves in a wrinkled face and a prematurely old expression. There is nothing better established than the philosophy that we are what we think, and that we become like our thoughts.
“How old are you? ” asks the Milwaukee Journal. “The adage is that women are as old as they look and men as old as they feel. That’s wrong. A man and a woman are as old as they make themselves to be. Growing old is largely a habit of the mind. ‘As a man thinketh in his heart so is he.’ If he begins shortly after middle age to imagine himself growing old, he will be old. To keep oneself from decrepitude is somewhat a matter of will power. The fates are kind to the man who hangs onto life with both hands. He who lets go will go. Death is slow to tackle only the tenacious. Ponce de Leon searched in the wrong place for the fountain of youth. It is in oneself. One must keep oneself young inside, so that while ‘the outer man perisheth the inner man is renewed day by day.’ When the human mind ceases to exert itself, when there is no longer an active interest in the affairs of this life, when the human stops reading and thinking and doing, the man, like a blasted tree, begins to die at the top. You are as old as you think you are. Keep the harness on. Your job is not done,”
“’Tis yet high day, thy staff resume,
And fight fresh battle for the truth;
For what is age but youth's full bloom,
A riper, more transcendent youth”
sings Oliver Wendell Holmes.
If you would live long, love your work and continue doing it. Don’t lay it down at fifty because you think your powers are on the wane, or that you need a rest. Take a vacation whenever you require it, but don’t give up your work. There is life, there is youth in it. “I cannot grow old,” says a noted actress, “because I love my art. I spend my life absorbed in it. I am. never bored. How can one have lines of age or weariness or discontent when one is happy, busy, never fatigued, and one’s spirit is ever, ever young? When I am tired it is not my soul, but just my body.” Think of Susan B. Anthony, the veteran reformer, in her eighty-third year, and of Mrs. Gilbert, the veteran actress, who died on reaching the same age! Who thinks of these splendid workers as old, or failing, or left behind by younger competitors? Miss Anthony is as vigorous and full of enthusiasm in her work to-day as she was half a century ago. At the International Congress of Women, held in Berlin, she was easily the most prominent among the representative women of the world gathered there, and one of the most active. Mrs. Gilbert, long the oldest actress on the stage, in her last season “starred ” in a new play. These women never thought of laying down their work or of growing old at fifty or sixty. They found the great drama of humanity too interesting to give up their parts.
“One of the finest things about our generation,says Margaret Deland, “is an awakening to the fact that age ought to be only a matter of the body, a matter of spectacles and stiff joints, not of dulness and distaste for living, not of days in which we shall say we have no pleasure in them. There is a growing belief that this second age can be avoided: nay, more, with some high natures there is even a realization that such age is a confession of sin, a confession that life has been selfish, narrow, unimaginative, and without living ideals. Such age is shame. Little by little this belief is growing in human creatures.”
The sentiment is expressed in these verses by Frank M. Vancil:
“Never grow old. Time's furrowed lines
Of pain, of sorrow, of tears
Must leave their impress, wide and deep,
On the face of declining years.
But the gentle spirit, fraught with love—
Bright deeds of happiness unfold;
Grows brighter, lovelier with age—
More winsome still—grows never old”
“We do not count a man’s years,” said Emerson, “until he has nothing else to count.” It is not the years that age us so much as the use we make of them, and the way we live them. Excesses of any kind are fatal to longevity or the prolongation of youth.
Bitter memories of a sinful life which has gone all wrong make premature furrows in the face, take the brightness from the eyes and the elasticity from the step, and make one’s life sapless and uninteresting.
The Bible teaches that a clean life, a pure life, a simple life, and a useful life shall be long. “His flesh shall be fresher than a child’s. He shall return to the days of his youth.”
It is the useless complexities in which vanity and unworthy ambition entangle us that weir away life and make so many Americans old men and women at forty. The simple life can be the fullest, noblest, and most useful. Rev. Charles Wagner says that a simple life and a strenuous life are not inconsistent, as a peaceful life and a vigorous life are not In his little book, “The Simple