xi
the human panorama than most of us do. And he has the queerest illusions. I have seen him throw down a newspaper in distress because, as he said, he found no word of Beauty in it. And when I explained to him, patiently, that that particular newspaper was not published with any such intention, he said "Then why publish it at all?"
Some of my friends, to whom I have talked about this unsettling phantom, have complained that he is too elderly to be a really helpful companion; that his politics were formed under a Bad Old Dynasty; that he is too flippant and volatile to be congenial to Young Intellectuals in whom unorthodoxy has become severe, surly, and compulsory. But I am not one of those who believe that because a man is elderly he is necessarily shallow. Everyone doubtless considers himself to be wiser, riper, more tolerant, now, than he was one year, five years, ten years ago. And if we think that to be so of ourselves, why may we not credit it as a fact in others? When I meet and talk with some of the youngest and most scathing of the rising Intellectuals, I amuse myself by imagining them as they will be, say thirty years hence. As I listen politely, I can see their faces change and wither. Those candid young foreheads a little corrugated; those jovial thunderbolts of opinion a little less detonative in effect; those busy superlatives grown a trifle grizzled with service. No—I have known so many older heads who really are wiser and wittier than ourselves that I cannot help concluding Time may be a tonic
