The activity of youth soon passes, and its
slenderness. I remember still the shock I felt on hearing an athlete
say that he could no longer run races of a hundred yards; he was half
a second or a quarter of a second slower than he was last year. I
looked at him saying, "But you are only one-and-twenty," and he
answered, "Yes, that is it." A football player I believe is out of
date at eight-and-twenty. Out of date! What a pathos there is in the
words--out of date! _Suranne_, as the French say. How are we to
render it in English? By the beautiful but artificial word
"yester-year"? Yester-year perhaps, for a sorrow clings about it; it
conveys a sense of autumn, of "the long decline of roses." There is
something ghostlike in the out-of-date. The landscape about Plessy had
transported us back into antiquity, making us dream of nymphs and
dryads, but the gilt cornices and damask hangings and the salon at
Orelay had made us dream of a generation ago, of the youth of our
parents. Ancient conveys no personal meaning, but the out-of-date
transports us, as it were, to the stern of the vessel, throws us into
a mournful attitude; we lean our heads upon our hands and, looking
back, we see the white wake of the vessel with shores sinking in the
horizon and the crests of the mountains passing away into the clouds.
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