Nobody grows old merely by living a certain number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.
—Sam Ullman, American poet and humanitarian.
Dr. Boli is being honest with you when he says that he had not expected the quotation to go that way. After reading the first sentence, he had expected something like this: “Nobody grows old merely by living a certain number of years. We grow old by learning from our experiences, by loving wisdom and nevertheless understanding that we are not yet wise, by sorting through our youthful enthusiasms and honestly discarding the follies among them. Without that labor, we can never be truly old; we can only be wrinkled children.”
But it seems that Dr. Boli, in spite of living in this country since before the Constitution, is not American enough to understand age the American way. He still thinks of age and experience as valuable things to be treasured, whereas the American ideal has it that life ends at twenty-nine. Aging is a catastrophe to be avoided; in fact, the only thing we avoid more zealously than aging is the only alternative to aging.
Well, Dr. Boli feels foolish now. But, to be fair to himself, he will point out that the attribution to an American poet and humanitarian comes after the quotation. The word “American” might have made him think differently. “The youth of America is their oldest tradition,” as one of Oscar Wilde’s characters observed a century and a quarter ago. “It has been going on now for three hundred years.”(1)
And indeed the sentiment of Samuel Ullman is not a new one. It is amusing to reflect that Mr. Ullman was fourteen years older than Oscar Wilde. It is even more amusing to reflect that he was probably not the author of this quotation.
Of course it is all over the Internet attributed to Ullman, but never with a citation, which is an observation that always leads us to suspect a misattributed quotation. “Youth,” from which it is taken, is usually described as a “poem,” which indicates that the people who quote it are so lamentably ignorant of literary history that they believe a man who died in 1924 could have written a prose essay and called it a “poem.”
Yet here is “Youth” quoted at the site of the Samuel Ullman Museum in Alabama. What more authority could you want? Except, perhaps, for a citation with date, which is nowhere to be found.
However, if we go back in time a bit, we find that the little essay—not described as a “poem”—was constantly reprinted in magazines in the early twentieth century. In a 1927 issue of the Michigan Education Journal we find it attributed to that venerable essayist “Anon.” In an elaborately illustrated page from Cosmopolitan in 1914 we find it attributed to Dr. Frank Crane, and that seems to be the earliest and most popular attribution.
In the February 12, 1927, edition of The Foreword, a Masonic journal, we find the essay, and then this explanation of its source:
Fred Harvey gave the preceding meditation on Youth to The Kansas City Star with the comment that it came in a letter from Sam Moore, formerly of Kansas City, now of New York. The Star asked Mr. Moore if he were its author. Mr. Moore said he wished he were, but he got it from George Reichel, Vice-president of the First National Bank. Mr. Reichel, appealed to, said he had it in a letter from E. C. Stuart, Vice-president of the First National Bank of St. Louis. Mr. Stuart replied:
“You overwhelm me with embarrassment. If I could justly lay claim to the authorship I would be quite willing to make the admission in big type on billboards. The article was cut from some newspaper and if the author’s name was appended, I didn’t notice it.”
As for the attribution to Ullman, that seems to have been made first in a book called The Silver Treasury: Prose and Verse for Every Mood, edited by Jane Manner and published by Samuel French in 1934.
Now, having corrected the Internet (which will nevertheless persist in its incorrectness, because the Internet pays no attention to us at all), we may still ask ourselves why Frank Crane or Anon or anybody else thought so much of youth and so little of age.
It seems to Dr. Boli that the peculiarities of American capitalism may explain much of the sentiment. In the nineteenth century, education slowly expanded until it became universal. Even poor children were given a liberal education: they learned history, they read Shakespeare, they practiced Beethoven on the piano. If they went on to college, the liberal arts were forced on them even if they went to a technical school like Carnegie Tech or MIT.
In other words, they spent their youth in the realm of ideals. They lived with the most glorious productions of human thought.
Then they left school, and they became factory workers and assistant clerks and bank tellers and accountants. They spent the rest of their lives in drudgery for usually unseen masters.
Under these circumstances, it is easy to understand how growing old would seem a curse, and youth would be the golden time of life. The only reasonably happy individual would be the one who could carry enough of those golden days of youth into the drudgery of middle age to have something of a mental life.
The good news is that good old American capitalism, our other most hallowed institution, may at last succeed in scraping the shine off youth in our imaginations. As capitalism muscles its way into the academic world, as universities and public schools are taken over by Masters of Business Administration, as the curriculum down to the kindergarten level is methodically adjusted to produce adequate servants for the masters of capital, new generations of Americans are rising who have no happy memories of a time when their lives were devoted to learning and the contemplation of beauty. They will see youth not as a golden age, but as the early stages of lifelong drudgery. Their only hope will be the possibility of a better future, and they may even, if they are ambitious, take steps to make that future a reality. Then, perhaps, we shall see a generation that knows how to grow old and relishes the process.
Footnotes
- From A Woman of No Importance. (↩)