Maturity, or the middle period of life, is in a sense the largest part of life, and is not to be viewed merely as the period after youth and before old age. It is relative only as all time is relative, but it is absolute, too. In truth, it is the time of that self-dependence which comes with the consciousness of power in maturity. It is the very body and substance of life and least relative,—for youth is its foreshadowing and old age the shadow which it casts behind. Middle age is not a link between 49youth and old age, but that period of life to which youth is an approach,—from which old age is an exit. Comparing life to a bridge, youth and old age might be likened to the piers which must be builded, but the linking together of the piers, the stretching of the cables over which the larger part of life’s pilgrimage must be made is the task of life’s middle period. Life is so constituted that it were almost within the limits of reasonableness to urge that life need not pass out of the middle stage into old age. Loath though one be to enter upon maturity, it need never be left behind in return for age if it be entered upon in the spirit of preparedness. Middle age is hard and bitter if youth have been misspent, 50if youth have not been the stage of conscious preparation for life.
Certain rules have been laid down for the governance of youth and the question may be asked whether these are pertinent to the needs and tasks of middle age,—namely the law that one must have an ideal by which to live, and that one must not merely live by it but up to it. As for the rules which are to be binding upon the middle period of life, who shall venture to prescribe them, save that certain things are obviously true,—that middle age shall continue that which youth initiates, and that there shall be no sharp frontier dividing youth from that which comes after. For middle age is not so much a part of life as it is life, and life absolute.
51Middle age is but a part of the same life-long journey which in its early stages is youth, which culminates in age. And yet in a sense a different type of rules and ordinances is applicable to every one of the three great periods of life. For life is not a journey, even and unvarying, over a wide plain. Life may best be likened to the ascent of a mountain and in turn the descent from its summit, and the laws that govern life must be variously modified in order to meet the needs of the different periods along the journey.
In the early stages, during the hours of the ascent, the imperative thing is that a man shall not over-tax his strength, that he shall not overstrain his powers in the initial stages of the 52journey, that he shall not attempt too much, that he shall not travel at too wearying a pace. As man nears the summit of the mountain, it becomes needful for him to conform to other rules. He must not lose the stride, he must know how to go on, he must climb and climb without succumbing to the heat of the day. Once the descent is begun, yet other rules apply, if one is with safety to reach the end of the long journey. The glory of the morning no longer upbears him, the splendor of the noonday sun no longer maintains his strength. But as he leaves youth’s vigor and the power of maturity behind him, the glow of the passing day may irradiate his vision and reveal to him the distant horizon.
53Middle age seems too often a painful reluctance to leave youth behind and to be a more painful hesitancy in the matter of facing the oncoming of age. Unhappily for itself, middle age oft combines the childishness of immaturity with the senescence of post-maturity so that it lacks alike the charm of youth and the grace of age. Old age that is not worthy of reverence is contemptible. Not less worthy of contempt is middle age, if it have brought from youth nothing save youth’s foibles and frailties. We not unseldom see—and it is always a pitiful spectacle,—men and women whose bark of life is unballasted by the poise that comes with strength and unsteadied by the serenity which ought to be the mark of the maturer 54period. While men speak of the dignity of old age, it is in truth the middle age which is in need of dignity, which alas it too often lacks.
Men frequently refer to the emptiness and the barrenness of old age, when it is oftenest middle age that is empty and meaningless, for it is the time when life’s emptiness is disclosed. It is in middle age that men are made to face the bitter truth that theirs is not to achieve and to serve because they have not set up any standards worthy of the name, because their goal, such as it is, is too immediately accessible,............