“There’s not a
joy the world can give
Like those
it takes away,”
were, in his experience, quite untrue, and he added that his own old age had been like a pleasant holiday to him.
It is strange to reflect how seldom such a figure of gracious age has ever been represented in a book. I cannot recall a single instance. In Dickens the old are generally either malignant or hypocritical, or simply imbecile; in Thackeray they are either sentimental or of the wicked fairy type, full of indomitable relish for life. In Shakespeare they are shadowy and broken; in Wordsworth they relentlessly improve the occasion. What one desires to see depicted is some figure that has gained in gentleness and tolerance without losing, shrewdness and perception; who is as much interested as ever in seeing the game played, without being enviously desirous to take a hand. The thing is so perfectly beautiful when it occurs in real life that it is hard to see why it should not be represented.
XLV
I seem to remember having lately seen at the Zoo a strange and melancholy fowl, of a tortoise-shell complexion, glaring sullenly from a cage, with that curious look of age and toothlessness that eagles have, from the overlapping of the upper mandible of the beak above the lower; it was labelled the Monkey-eating Eagle. Its food lay untasted on the floor; it much preferred, no doubt, and from no fault of its own, poor thing, a nice, plump, squalling baboon to the finest of chops without the fun!
But the name set me thinking, and brought to mind a very different kind of creature, from whom I have suffered much of late, the Eagle-eating Monkey by which I mean the writer of bad books about great people. I had personally always supposed that I would rather read even a poor book about a real human being than the cleverest of books about imaginary people; at least I thought so till I was obliged to read a large number of memoirs and biographies, written some by stupid painstaking people, and some by clever aggravating people, about a number of celebrated persons.