CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE
Introduction[vii]
I.The Youth of Old Age[1]
The turn of the tide of life—Relative amount and importance of work accomplished before and after forty—The sexual life at the turn of the tide in man and woman—Osler’s views and critics (E. G. Dexter, D. A. N. Dorland, E. S. P. Haynes)—Illustrations from Tolstoi, Fechner, Comte, Swedenborg—The typical cases of Segantini, Lenau, von Kleist, de Maupassant, Gogol, Scheffel, Ruskin, and Nietsche—Michaëlis’ “dangerous age” in women—The difficulty of determining this age—The nature of the changes, conscious and unconscious, and the lessons that people in this stage of life should lay to heart—H. G. Wells and Ross.
II.The History of Old Age[32]
The age of plants and animals—The Old Stone Age—Treatment of old age among existing savage tribes—The views of Frazer—The ancient Hebrews and the Old Testament—The Greeks (including Sparta, the Homeric Age, the status of the old in Athens, the views of Plato, Socrates’ talks with boys, Aristotle)—The Romans—The Middle Ages—Witchcraft and old women—Attitude of children toward the old—Mantegazza’s collection of favorable and unfavorable views of age—The division of life into stages—The relation of age groups to social strata—The religion of different ages of life—The Vedanta—The Freudian war between the old and the young—History of views from Cornaro to our own time—Bacon—Addison—Burton—Swift.
III.Literature by and on the Aged[100]
Harriet E. Paine—Amelia E. Barr—Mortimer Collins—Col. Nicholas Smith—Byron C. Utecht—J. L. Smith—Sanford Bennet—G. E. D. Diamond—Cardinal Gibbons—John Burroughs—Rollo Ogden—James L. Ludlow—Brander Matthews—Ralph Waldo Emerson—Oliver Wendell Holmes—Senator G. F. Hoar—William Dean Howells—H. D. Sedgwick—Walt Mason—E. P. Powell—U. V. Wilson—D. G. Brinton—N. S. Shaler—Anthony Trollope—Stephen Paget—Richard le Gallienne—G. S. Street—C. W. Saleeby—Bernard Shaw—A few typical poems and quotations.
IV.Statistics of Old Age and Its Care[154]
I. Numbers of old people increasing in all known lands where data are available—Actuarial and other mortality tables—Expectation of life and death-rate at different ages—Longevity and fecundity—Death-rate in different occupations—Longevity in ancient Egypt and in the Middle Ages—Diversity of statistical methods and results. II. Growing need of care for the indigent old—Causes of improvidence—Ignorance and misconception of what old age is and means—Why the old do not know themselves—Old age pensions in Germany, Austria, Great Britain and her colonies, France, Belgium, United States—Industrial pensions and insurance, beginning with railroads—Trades unions—Fraternal organizations—Retiring pensions in the army and navy—Local and national insurance—Teachers’ pensions—The Carnegie Foundation—Criticism of pension systems—Growing magnitude, urgency, and diversity of views and methods—The Life Extension Institute—“Borrowed Time” and “Sunset” clubs—Should the old organize?
V.Medical Views and Treatment of Old Age[195]
The self-knowledge that doctors give—Insidious approach of many diseases—Medical views of the old of body and mind (senile dementia)—Charcot—G. M. Humphrey—Sir James Crichton-Browne—H. M. Friedman—H. Gilford—H. Oertel—A. S. Warthin—W. Spielmeyer—I. L. Nascher—Sir Dyce Duckworth—Robert Saundy—Arnold Lorand—T. D. Crothers—C. G. Stockton—W. G. Thompson—M. L. Price—G. S. Keith—J. M. Taylor—C. W. Saleeby—C. A. Ewald—Raymond Pearl—Protest against the prepotence of heredity in determining longevity.
VI.The Contributions of Biology and Physiology[248]
Weismann’s immortality of the germ plasm and his denial of the inheritance of acquired qualities—The truth and limitations of his views—The theories of Hering and Simon—Metchnikoff’s conception of the disharmonies in man, of the rôle of intestinal fauna and their products, of euthanasia, and of the means and effects of prolonging life—C. S. Minot’s conception of the progressive arrest of life from birth on as measured by declining rate of growth, and his neglect to consider the dynamic elements—C. M. Child’s studies of rejuvenation in lower and higher forms of life in the light of the problems of senescence—J. Loeb’s studies of the effects of lower temperature, of toxins and ferments—The preservation of cells of somatic tissues potentially immortal under artificial conditions—Account of the studies of Carrel, Pozzi, and others—Investigations upon the effects on sex qualities and age of the extracts and transplantations of glands, from Claude Bernard—Investigations of Eugene Steinach on the interchange of sex qualities and rejuvenation by glandular operations in animals and man—G. F. Lydston’s work—Serge Voronoff’s experiments and his exposition of the achievements and hopes of glandular therapy—Some general considerations in view of work in this field.
VII.Report on Questionnaire Returns[319]
Their value suggestive but only for a class—(1) Age and effect of the first realization of the approach of old age—(2) To what do you ascribe your long life?—(3) How do you keep well?—(4) Are you troubled by regrets?—(5) What temptations do you feel, old or new?—(6) What duties do you feel you still owe to others or to self?—(7) Is interest in public affairs for the far future and past, as compared with what is closer at hand, greater or less?—(8) In what do you take your greatest pleasures?—(9) Do you enjoy the society of children, youth, adults, those of your own age more or less than formerly?—(10) Would you live your life over again?—(11) Did you experience an “Indian summer” of renewed vigor before the winter of age began?—(12) Do you rely more or less upon doctors than formerly?—(13) Do you get more or less from the clergy and the church than formerly?—(14) Do you think more or less of dying and the hereafter?—A few individual returns from eminent people.
VIII.Some Conclusions[366]
The early decades of age—The deadline of seventy—The patheticism of the old—The attitude of physicians toward them—Fluctuations of youth—Erotic decline—Alternations in the domain of sleep, food, mood, irritability, rational self-control, and sex—The dawn of old age in women—Dangers of the disparity when December weds May—Sexual hygiene for the old—Mental effects of the dulling of sensations—Lack of mental pabulum—The tedium vitæ—Changes in the emotional life—Age not second childhood—Women in the dangerous age—Need of a new and higher type of old age—Aristotle’s golden mean and the magnanimous man—The age of disillusion—Increased power of synthesis—Nature’s balance between old and young—Superior powers of the old in perspective and larger views—New love of nature and the country—Their preëminence in religion, politics, philosophy, morals, and as judges—Looking within and without—Merging with the cosmos.
XI.The Psychology of Death[439]
The attitude of infancy and youth toward death as recapitulating that of the race—Suicide—The death-wish—Necrophilism—The Black Death—Depopulation by the next war—The evolutionary nisus and death as its queller—Death symbolism as pervasive as that of sex—Flirtations of youthful minds with the thought of death—Schopenhauer’s view of death—The separation of ghosts from the living among primitive races—The thanatology of the Egyptians—The journey of the soul—Ancient cults of death and resurrection in the religions about the eastern Mediterranean, based on the death of vegetation in the fall and its revival in the spring, as a background of Pauline Christianity—The fading belief in immortality and Protestantism which now at funerals speaks only of peace and rest—Osler’s five hundred deathbeds—Influential, plasmal, and personal immortality and their reciprocal relations—Moral efficacy of the doctrine of future rewards and punishments—Belief in a future life for the individual being transformed into a belief in the future of the race on earth and the advent of the superman—Does man want personal immortality—Finot’s immortality of the decomposing body and its resolution into its elements—The Durkheim school and the mana doctrine—Schleiermacher—The Schiller-James view of the brain and consciousness as repressive of the larger life of the great Autos—The views of Plato and Kant—Have God and Nature cheated and lied to us if the wish to survive is false?—Noetic and mystic immortality by partaking of the deathlessness of general ideas—Views of Howison, Royce, and others—Is there a true euthanasia or thanatophilia?—Diminution of the desire for personal immortality with culture and age.

SENESCENCE

CHAPTER I
THE YOUTH OF OLD AGE

The turn of the tide of life—Relative amount and importance of work accomplished before and after forty—The sexual life at the turn of the tide in man and woman—Osler’s views and critics (E. G. Dexter, D. A. N. Dorland, E. S. P. Haynes)—Illustrations from Tolstoi, Fechner, Comte, Swedenborg—The typical cases of Segantini, Lenau, von Kleist, de Maupassant, Gogol, Scheffel, Ruskin and Nietzsche—Michaëlis’s “dangerous age” in women—The difficulty in determining this age—The nature of the changes, conscious and unconscious, and the lessons that people in this stage of life should lay to heart—H. G. Wells and Ross.

The easiest division of every whole is into two halves. Thus day and night are bisected by noon and midnight, the year by both the solstice and the equinox; the racer turns in the middle of his course; curricula, apprenticeships, and long tasks have, from immemorial time, celebrated the completion of their first moiety, and halfway houses divide established courses of travel. So, too, we speak of middle age and think vaguely of it as half way between birth and death or between adolescence and senescence. If we think of life as a binomial curve rising from a base line at birth and sinking into it at death, midway is the highest point with the longest ordinate; and as the crest of a wave has its spindrift, so life at this point often foams, or at least shows emulsive tendencies. We come in sight of the descent while the ascent behind is still visible. The man of thirty-five hopes to live the allotted span of seventy and at forty he knows that in another two-score years his work will cease; and thus some comparison of the past and future is inevitable. Some begin taking stock of what has been and what remains to be done, reckoning only from the date of entering upon their careers and trying thus to judge its future by its past. Thus sooner or later there comes to all a realization that the tide that “drew us from out the boundless deep” begins to “turn again home.”

These meridional perturbations usually come earlier in women than in men, and this has been called their “dangerous age.” Both sexes realize that they face the bankruptcy of some of their youthful hopes, and certain temperaments make a desperate, now-or-never effort to realize their extravagant expectations and are thus led to excesses of many kinds; while others capitulate to fate, lose heart, and perhaps even lose the will-to-live. Osler was the evil genius, the croaking Poe raven of this period. If such pronouncements as his stimulate talent, which is longer lived, they depress genius, which blossoms earlier. On the height of life we ought to pause, circumspect, turn from the dead reckonings of the start, and ascend as into an outlook tower to see, before it is too late, if we need to reorient our course by the eternal stars. Here we begin the home stretch toward the finish. Change, or at least thoughts of change, arise even in those most successful, as biography so abundantly shows, while even partial failure impels many to seek new environments and perhaps callings and some are driven to mad new ventures. Most, however, despite a certain perturbation, go on perhaps a score of years, and instead of anticipating old age wait till it is upon them and they have to restrict their activities or retire; then only do they accept the burden of years. The modifications in the vita sexualis which middle life brings are only now beginning to be understood in their true significance. Its first flush has come and gone and some settle to the tranquil fruition of a happy married life, while others stray into secret and forbidden ways or yield to the excitements of overindulgence just when Nature begins to suggest more moderation, so that love often grows gross just when its sublimation should begin to be most active. One close and experienced observer points out that the forties is the decade of the triangle, of the paramour, and of divorces for men, and that the preceding decade is so for women; but of course we have no confirmatory statistics for such a conclusion save only for divorce. The following epitomes represent the chief aspects and treatments of this period, although illustrations of its phenomena might be indefinitely multiplied.

The sensational press has so perverted the statements made by Dr. William Osler in his farewell address on leaving the Johns Hopkins University in 1905, and his remarks are so pithy, thinly and ineffectively as he tried to mask his earnestness with humor, that it seems worth while to quote his words, as follows:[2]

I have two fixed ideas well known to my friends, harmless obsessions with which I sometimes bore them, but which have a direct bearing on this important problem. The first is the comparative uselessness of men above forty years of age. This may seem shocking, and yet, read aright, the world’s history bears out the statement. Take the sum of human achievement in action, in science, in art, in literature—subtract the work of the men above forty, and, while we should miss great treasures, even priceless treasures, we should practically be where we are to-day. It is difficult to name a great and far-reaching conquest of the mind which has not been given to the world by a man on whose back the sun was still shining. The effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty years—these fifteen golden years of plenty, the anabolic or constructive period, in which there is always a balance in the mental bank and the credit is still good.

In the science and art of medicine there has not been an advance of the first rank which has not been initiated by young or comparatively young men. Vesalius, Harvey, Hunter, Bichat, Laennec, Virchow, Lister, Koch—the green years were yet on their heads when their epoch-making studies were made. To modify an old saying, a man is sane morally at thirty, rich mentally at forty, wise spiritually at fifty—or never. The young men should be encouraged and afforded every possible chance to show what is in them. If there is one thing more than another upon which the professors of the university are to be congratulated, it is this very sympathy and fellowship with their junior associates, upon whom really in many departments, in mine certainly, has fallen the brunt of the work. And herein lies the chief value of the teacher who has passed his climacteric and is no longer a productive factor; he can play the man midwife, as Socrates did to Theætetus, and determine whether the thoughts which the young men are bringing to the light are false idols or true and noble births.

My second fixed idea is the uselessness of men above sixty years of age, and the incalculable benefit it would be in commercial, political, and in professional life if, as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age. Donne tells us in his “Biathanatos” that by the laws of certain wise states sexagenarii were precipitated from a bridge, and in Rome men of that age were not admitted to the suffrage, and were called depontani because the way to the senate was per pontem and they from age were not permitted to come hither. In that charming novel, the “Fixed Period,” Anthony Trollope discusses the practical advantages in modern life of a return to this ancient usage, and the plot hinges on the admirable scheme of a college into which at sixty men retired for a year of contemplation before a peaceful departure by chloroform. That incalculable benefits might follow such a scheme is apparent to any one who, like myself, is nearing the limit, and who has made a careful study of the calamities which may befall men during the seventh and eighth decades!

Still more when he contemplates the many evils which they perpetuate unconsciously and with impunity! As it can be maintained that all the great advances have come from men under forty, so the history of the world shows that a very large proportion of the evils may be traced to the sexagenarians—nearly all the great mistakes politically and socially, all of the worst poems, most of the bad pictures, a majority of the bad novels, and not a few of the bad sermons and speeches. It is not to be denied that occasionally there is a sexagenarian whose mind, as Cicero remarks, stands out of reach of the body’s decay. Such a one has learned the secret of Hermippus, that ancient Roman, who, feeling that the silver cord was loosening, cut himself clear from all companions of his own age, and betook himself to the company of young men, mingling with their games and studies, and so lived to the age of 153, puerorum halitu refocillatus et educatus. And there is truth in the story, since it is only those who live with the young who maintain a fresh outlook on the new problems of the world.

The teacher’s life should have three periods—study until twenty-five, investigation until forty, professional until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance. Whether Anthony Trollope’s suggestion of a college and chloroform should be carried out or not, I have become a little dubious, as my own time is getting so short.

E. G. Dexter[3] disputes Osler’s conclusions by referring to such well-known cases as Gladstone, Bismarck, von Moltke, Rockefeller, Morgan, etc., and finds that according to the last census there are 4,871,861 persons over sixty in the United States. He recognizes the fact, however, that many corporations refuse to add new men to their working force who are beyond forty years of age. Dexter had previously tabulated the age of the nearly 9,000 persons mentioned in the 1900 edition of Who’s Who and found that comparatively few who were under forty attained the distinction of being included in this list. Of 6,983 men the median age was 54, only one in six being below 40; that is, some 16 per cent were within Osler’s period of most effective work. But he concludes that in Who’s Who younger men did not receive the recognition given to their older confrères. This ratio he finds to be as follows:

20–2930–3940–4950–5960–69
3.9%39.5%36.4%17.6% 2.4%

Thus the decade from 30 to 39 shows only very slightly greater productivity than the next one, and less than one-half made good, so far as public recognition is concerned, before the age of 40. This is irrespective of vocation.

In all the studies of genius[4] it would seem that musicians do their best work earliest and prodigies are most common in this field. In those callings that require a long preparation, science promises earliest recognition because this line of work is entered with better intellectual equipment. Here, too, belong professors, librarians, and teachers. Next come actors and authors, in whom ability is partly born and partly made. Compared with science, inventive genius gains a foothold on the ladder of fame late in life. The business man and financier, the lawyer, doctor, and minister, must often enter their profession from the bottom, and almost no great inventor is below forty. For woman, however, recognition comes earlier, and attractiveness of person has a greater premium here than with her brother. Having outlived her youth, however, progress is harder.

W. A. Newman Dorland[5] studied the histories of four hundred great men of modern times and concluded that they refute Osler’s theory, the large majority of them being still active at sixty, although he distinguishes between workers and thinkers. He tells us that only that which is fittest survives and almost seems to imply that man became man when he was able to live and work productively after 40.[6] He considers old age one of the choicest products of evolution. His painstaking article is divided into three sections: (1) enumerating the great things done by men after 70; (2) by those between 60 and 70; (3) by those between 50 and 60. He thinks that if Osler’s dictum has any validity, it is found among manual laborers. It doubtless had its influence in the practice of so many industries that employ no new men above the age of 40.

E. S. P. Haynes[7] resents the idea that people should retire from public affairs at forty, although he recognizes that near this age in both men and women there is often an impatience with a future that promises to be just like the past and there is a peculiar liability to amorous, financial, or other adventures. If people do anything, they are labeled and so get into grooves, and their friends, if they break out in new lines, as for example, Ruskin did, are shocked. But the groove is liable to grow narrow, and when this is realized, abrupt changes may occur. Nature protests against decay and hence it is that we often see the spectacle of impatient old people who are in a hurry, due perhaps to a subconscious effort to feel young again. This is akin to the “dangerous age” in women. Life is not a bed of roses for those who have succeeded, for it is sometimes as difficult to retain as it is to achieve success. Very often our ideas, when we are young, are ahead of our age but the world may catch up with us in middle or later life. Very often, too, by ostentatiously turning their backs upon some new movement the old thereby compel the young to take it up in order to deploy themselves.

In this connection one may reflect, with Louise Creighton, that as older people caused the late war, while the younger fought it, when the latter came home the places that had to be found for them involved a great deal of displacement, so that the tension between old and young has been greatly increased since the close of the war. We also recall the view of George R. Sims,[8] that the effect of the war upon the old was depressing because they felt they must die when the world was in darkness and without realizing the prayer of Simeon. The young anticipated the harvests of peace, but for the old the prospect of dying before this harvest was garnered was often pathetic.

Charles W. St. John[9] résumés the experimental studies of Ranschenburg and Balint which show that all activities of judgment, association, etc., are retarded, errors increased, and ideas impoverished in old age. De Fursac tabs the traits of normal senile dementia as (1) impaired attention and association; (2) inaccurate perception of the external world, with illusions and disorientation; (3) disordered memory, retrograde amnesia, and perhaps pseudo-reminiscence; (4) impoverishment of ideas; (5) loss of judgment; (6) loss of affectivity, along with morbid irritability; and (7) automatism. There may be ideas of persecution or delusions of greatness. Youthful items of experience hitherto only in the fringe of consciousness now press to the center, and youthful contents are revived. There is a tendency to depart from inductive procedure toward a priori methods, where feelings and beliefs are criteria, and especially, as Fechner showed, to introversion. There is less control and regression first shows itself in the intellect, which is last to develop.

St. John proceeds to characterize four eminent men who underwent more or less radical transformations in the early stages or youth of old age, as follows. Tolstoy[10] was a typical convert. He witnessed the horror of his grandmother’s death, which profoundly affected all his later views. When he was about twelve, a schoolmate told him that there was no God and that all thought about Him was an invention; and he accepted this news and went on in a few years to Nihilism. In later life he asked himself if he should become “more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, and Molière, what then?” and he could not answer. The ground crumbled under him. There was no reason to live. Every day was bringing him nearer to the precipice and yet he could not stop. He felt he could live no longer and the idea of suicide as a last resort was always with him and he had to practice self-deception to escape it. Yet he had a pagan love of life. He found his status summed up in an Eastern fable of a traveler who is attacked by a wild beast and attempts to escape by letting himself down into a dried-up well, at the bottom of which he finds a dragon, and so is forced to cling to a wild plant that grows on the wall. Suddenly he sees two mice (one black and one white—day and night) nibbling the plant from which he hangs and in despair he looks about, still with a faint hope of escape. On the leaves of this wild plant he sees a few drops of honey and even with fear at his heart he stretches out his tongue and licks them. Thus the dragon of death inevitably awaits him, while even the honey he tries to taste no longer rejoices him for it is not sweet. “I cannot turn my eyes from the mice or the dragon. Both are no fable.”

Thus the fear of death which had long haunted him now excluded everything else and he was in despair. He turned to the working people, whom he had always liked, to study them and found that although they anticipated death they did not worry about it but had a simple faith that bridges the gulf between the finite and the infinite, although they held much he could not accept. Thus for a year while he was considering whether or not to kill himself, he was haunted by a feeling he describes as searching after God, not with his reason but with his feelings. Kant and Schopenhauer said that man could not know Him. Tolstoy at first feared that these experiences presaged his own mental decline. He had joined the church and clung to orthodoxy for three years but in the end left and was later excommunicated. He became a peasant and finally left his pleasant home for a monastery, and as the church had failed he turned to the Gospels, the core of which he found in the Sermon on the Mount. Here was the solution of his problem. If everyone strives for self there is no happiness. Nor is there any love of family and friends alone, but love must extend to all mankind and even to being, and this must be all-embracing. No doubt of immortality can come to any man who renounces his individual happiness. Instead of God he now worships the world-soul and attains the goal of perfection he once sought in self-development.

Fechner,[11] born in 1801, made professor of physics in 1833, turned to more psychological studies in 1838. He had visual troubles and could not work without bandaging his eyes, lived in a blue room, had insomnia, and seemed about to die. But in 1843 he improved and felt he was called by God to do extraordinary things, prepared for by suffering. His philosophical inclinations now came into the foreground. He was on the way to the secret of the universe. He believed in insight rather than induction, and this was in the decades when German philosophy was at its lowest ebb. So his works fell dead. Not only Buchner and Moleschott but Kant belonged to what he called the “night side,” for the latter’s Ding-an-Sich was a plot to banish joy. Fechner knew no epistemology and thought we could come into direct contact with reality itself. Man lives three times: once before birth and in sleep; second alternating; and finally in death comes to the eternal awakening. The spirit will then communicate with others without language and all the dead live in us as Christ did in His followers. The earth will return its soul to the sun. Visible phantoms may be degenerate souls. In his Zendavesta (Living Word) he gives us a philosophy that he deems Christian and that really sums up his final view of things. The childish view is nearest right and the philosopher only reverts to it. Fechner died November 18, 1887, at the age of eighty-six, and after his crisis was really more poet than scientist.

Auguste Comte, born 1798, married at the age of twenty-seven and was divorced at forty-four. He experienced losses by the failure of his publisher and had his first crisis when he was forty. He met Clotilde de Vaux when he was forty-seven but she died a year later. He then became the high priest of humanity, developing his Politique Positive and a new religion. His father, a government official, had given him an excellent scientific education, but during his early years his emotional life was entirely undeveloped and this now took the ascendency.[12]

Emanuel Swedenborg was born in 1688. He had his first vision in London in 1745 at the age of 57, became a seer and mystic, and changed from a subjective to an objective type of thought and developed his doctrine of correspondencies. The change was due to overwork and eye-strain, as was the case with Comte.[13]

Giovanni Segantini[14] affords us perhaps the very best picture of a man who died at the age of forty-three of what might be called meridional mental fever. His life was a struggle against an obsessive death thought and a compensatory will-to-live. His first painting, at the age of twelve, was of a child’s corpse, which he tried to paint back into life. Haunted by the idealized image of his mother, who died when he was very young, and which he fancied he at length found in a peasant girl whom he made his model for years, this life-affirming motif was always in conflict with the thought of death, which in later years became an obsession. His struggle for sublimation was typified by his removal from the world and retirement to a high Alpine village where the mountains, in the ideal of which it was his final ambition to embody all the excelsior motives of life, so drew him that he had a passion for exploring their heights and once slept in the snow, to the permanent impairment of his health. He had several narrow escapes from death, which afterwards always provoked greater activity. He painted an upright corpse, the fall of which he thought (with the characteristic superstition of neurotics) was ominous. Death became, in the end, his muse as his mother had been in the earlier stages of his development. He seemed fascinated with the idea of anticipating death in every way, even though this was a more or less unconscious urge. It was as if he revolted against the ordinary fate of man to await its gradual approach with the soporific agencies that old age normally supplies, and was anxious to go forth and meet it face to face at the very summit of his powers. At times he let down all precautions and took great risks, so characteristic a result of acute disappointments or of general disenchantment with life.

He seemed to revel in the stimulus of the hurry-up motive that so often supervenes, but far more slowly, in those who realize that they have reached the zenith of their powers. Love of his mother made him an artist and he early married a wife who was the mother-image, which was never marred by any childish jealousy of his father, of whom he had known little, but was sublimated into love of mankind and even of animals. But his later greater love of death obscured the mother image and even overcame his passion for home, which he had idealized, and dominated his exquisite feeling for and worship of nature, which he always regarded as charged with symbolic meanings.

At a crisis in the early thirties a prevalent depressive mood gave way to the joy of creation, and his character and the method of his art seemed to undergo a transformation. His resentment at his own fate seemed to vent itself in the desire to banish if not, as Abraham thinks, to punish his mother by representing her in scenes of exquisite suffering; and when at the age of thirty-six his Alpinism made him at home only with the mountains the break with his past life became more and more marked. The ordinary vicissitudes of life were not sufficient and he wished to gamble not with the mere abatement or reinforcement of life but with life and death themselves. Even his dreams were haunted by a thanatic mood, and his superstitions were such that they almost made life itself a hateful dream. He tells us of fancying himself sitting in a retired nook that was at the same time like a church, when a strange figure stood before him, a creature of dreadful and repulsive form, with white gleaming eyes and yellow flesh tone, half cretin and half death. “I rose, and with impressive mien ordered it away after it had ogled me sideways. I followed it with my eye into the darkest corner until it had vanished.” And this vision he thought ominous. When he turned around he shuddered, for the phantom was again before him. Then he arose like a fury, cursed and threatened it, and it vanished and did not return, for it was more obedient than Poe’s Raven. His ambivalent reaction against this was not only to work harder but to affirm that there was no death and thus to revive much of the earlier religiosity of his childhood. One of his pictures was of a dying consumptive which he transformed into one of blooming life. More and more the death thought mastered his consciousness—almost as much as it did the soul of the insane painter, Wertz—and provoked him to greater enthusiasm and ever longer and more arduous programs for his future life. But from the subconscious he was always hearing more and more clearly the call of death, for which his deeper nature seems to have passionately longed, while the opposite will-to-live became more and more impotent. All his prodigious activity in later life seems to have been thus really due to a subdominant will to die. When he fell ill for the first time in his life, “the dark powers of his unconscious nature came in to help the disease and make the disintegrative process easier and to invite death,” as if love of it were the consummation of his love of all things that lived, and the latter would not have been complete without the former.

Another case of a genius who hurried through the table d’hôte Nature provides and left the table sated to repletion when her regular guests were but half through the course was the German poet, Lenau.[15] Born in 1802, he studied philosophy, law, and medicine successively, sought contact with primeval nature in America at thirty, returned to find himself famous, and, after a period of prolonged chastity, became promptly infected with syphilis, falling a victim to insanity at forty-two and dying of progressive paralysis at forty-eight. Syphilis is perhaps the most psychalgic of all diseases that afflict man, for it not only poisons the arrows of love and makes its ecstasy exquisite pain but weakens all the phyletic instincts, like the climacteric, and like it brings hyperindividuation in its train. He knew both the joys and the pains of life, the depths of misery and the heights of euphoria. Eros and Thanatos were inseparable in his soul, and both had their raptures and inspired him by turns. Amorousness brought acute religiosity, and between his erotic adventures he lapsed far toward the negation of all faiths and creeds. When not in love his violin was treated as a paramour, and he forgot it when the tender passion glowed again in his soul. I doubt if any poet ever had a truer and deeper feeling for nature or was a more eloquent interpreter of all her moods and aspects. He exhausted both homo- and heterosexual experiences, remaining through a series of love affairs, however, true to his Sophie, who was like his mother and with whom his relations were pure and whose influence was beneficent. Even before his infection megalomania alternated with misanthropy, and he had all the fluctuations of mood that are such characteristic stigmata of hysteria. Spells of lassitude alternated with Berserker energy; masochism with sadism; excesses, including those of drink, with spells of depression. In his aggressive moods he stormed up mountains, which to him were symbols of mental elevation, until he was completely exhausted. Sometimes he fancied himself a nobleman or even a monarch and always strove to reduce all about him to servile satellites. The Job-Faust-Manfred motive often took possession of him, and sometimes he played his violin half the night, dancing in rapt ecstasy and unable to keep time. In his periods of self-reproach after orgasms of ecstasy he became ascetic. His poetry and converse were, especially for such a man, singularly pure. He said he carried a corpse around within him. Most insanities are only an exaggeration or breaking out of previous traits, and this was exceptionally so in his case. At one time he seemed to want to break with all his old and to find a new set of friends.

In the high temperature at which he lived, with so many impulses that were either frustrated or crucified, always hot with love or its ambivalent hate, he died—not like Segantini, because he was hypnotized by death at the very acme of his power and willed it actively, though unconsciously, as surely as if he had committed suicide, but he rather turned to it from sheer repletion of life, most of the experiences of which he had exhausted. It was as if a congeries of souls took possession of him by turns, so that in middle life he had himself already played most of the parts in the drama and thus knew it far more exhaustively than those who lead more unitary lives, however prolonged they may be. He was by no means theoretically a miserabilist or even a pessimist but was simply burned out (blasé, abgelebt). As if to anticipate the Weltschmerz that his diathesis made it certain would later become acute, his passionate love for nature, deep and insightful as it was, did not prove an adequate compensation, and we cannot but wonder whether, if he had lived more normally and without infection to four-score, his life would not inevitably have ended with the same, though less acute, general symptoms. Yet even he never cursed the fate that brought him into life or inveighed against his parentage. His life was like a candle in the wind blown every way by turns, now and then flaring up and emitting great light and heat, now almost put out, smoking, sputtering, and malodorous in a socket like a blue flame just before its final extinction.

The psychograph of the poet Heinrich von Kleist (d. 1811, a.e. 34) affords another example of a genius who died of premature old age near the period of its dawn or at the critical turn of the tide.[16] In the University his passion for omniscience impelled him to enroll for so many and diverse courses that his professors protested. Later he actually tried eight and attempted to sample other callings. “He would have liked to be everything.” In the space of fourteen years no less than nine women had engaged his fancy, although none had made a deep or lasting impression. He had also a veritable Lust for traveling and after every important event in his life resorted to this kind of fugue from reality to lose himself in new scenes. “There is nothing consistent in me save inconsistency.” His demands on his friends, and also his ambitions, knew no bounds. He would “tear the crown from Goethe’s brow.” He felt he must storm all heights and do it now or never.

He, too, was bisexual in his instincts. He glorified purity and sobriety as over-compensation for his shortcomings in both these respects. Much as he did, he never could complete the great work he had long planned, and despair at his impotence to achieve his ambitions made him at last take flight to insanity as a refuge and finally to joint suicide with a woman. Late in life he lost the power to distinguish between fact and fancy, so fully had his writing become a surrogate for life. Wagner said that if life were as full as we wish it to be, there would be no need of art, and von Kleist’s biographer seems to doubt whether to call his end a victory or a surrender. His wooing of death was not, like Segantini’s, a continuation and consummation of the thanatopsis mood of adolescence but was rather due to a growing endogenous lethargy and apathy. He lost his appetite for life, from which he had expected more than it has to give even to the most favored, and thus at the critical age when men are prone to weigh themselves in the balance, he found incompleteness and inferiority both within and without and so threw himself into the arms of the Great Silencer. Everything conventional had long since palled upon him. “His early fixation upon an unattainable goal was broken down and he pursued the unattainable until he fancied he found it in death.” The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War seemed, for a time, to afford him an outlet for his pent-up desires without compelling him to resort to illness.

In his ground motif De Maupassant[17] belongs to the same category as Lenau and von Kleist. He inherited neurotic trends from both parents and died in 1893 at the age of forty-three, having experienced most of the episodes of life and during his twelve productive years written fourteen volumes and climbed to the very summit of the French Parnassus. His morbidity was partly congenital and partly metasyphilitic. Had he lived his simple life in his Normandy home, instead of coming to Paris, he might have survived but he fell a victim to narcotics, ether, hashish, morphine, cocaine, Bacchus, and Venus. Like so many great men afflicted with the same disease, his symptoms showed many marked departures from its ordinary course, and before its active stage his divarications in the fields of various abnormal symptom-groups were many. His passion for the horrible is perhaps best illustrated in his shuddering “Horla.”

Gogol’s[18] life (d. 1852, a.e. 43) was full of contradictory completeness and incompleteness. He, too, desired not only to touch but to express life at every point, and his realism was in fact only self-expression. He lived through life as a fiction and tried to cast this fiction into the mold of actuality. He was a failure in nearly every department of life he tried and was a man whose character was made up of samples of every type of human nature. In him the creative impulse was not a retreat from life but was an attempt to make a bridge between it and his soul. He was haunted by a feeling of inferiority which it was the passion of his life to overcome. When his aggressive feelings were strongest, he produced most, and failed as actor, teacher, clerk, and succeeded as poet and novelist because thus he could best wreak his inmost self upon expression. He was finally obsessed by a religious mania, became a mystic, and sought salvation by fasting and self-denial. Fear of death was a life-long obsession and he strove to conquer both love and death together by seeking and defying the latter. He decided to die by fasting and kneeling before the picture of the Mother of God. “Groaning and crying out with his last strength, he had dragged himself to the symbol of the highest feminine completeness, and when he found the ‘Glorious Virgin’ of his dreams his dissolution came.” In his last moment he seems to have felt that he had overcome both death and woman, but only by yielding to them, and believed himself to be a martyr. It was the difficulty he found in bridging the chasm between his solitary, child-like self and the real world that made him a great creator of fiction, a practical failure, and a madman.

J. V. von Scheffel[19] exhibited a range of moods from humor and jollity to melancholia, and showed in his poems an entire absence of eroticism which was more or less compensatory. The bisexual instinct (he not only looked like a girl but sometimes disguised himself in woman’s attire) was evoked by an earnest effort to see the world as woman did. He had an extraordinary variety of morbid attacks, hypochondria, delusions, headaches, morbid fear of death, anxiety, nightmares, weeping, etc. Schurmann even goes so far as to think that a cyclothymic diathesis or a tendency to periodic attacks of various psychic morbidities is characteristic of genius, which finds occasional relief in attacks of insanity, like Cowper, Rousseau, Tasso, Hölderlin, and many others; and ascribes this in part to a hunger for a life larger and fuller than normality or sobriety can afford. This, however, is forbidden fruit, for nature punishes the enjoyment of it, if not by premature death at least by premature satiety with life.

John Ruskin’s lifeline had marked nodes, the chief of which may be characterized as follows. Up to the early forties he had lived and written under the dominant influence of his father, who held very conservative views of religion; but the foundations of the son’s faith were shaken and the tenet “which had held the hopes and beliefs of his youth and early manhood had proved too narrow. He was stretching forth to a wider and, as he felt, a nobler conception of life and destiny, but the transition was through much travail of soul.”[20] He wrote, “It is a difficult thing to live without hope of another world when one has been used to it for forty years. But by how much the more difficult, by so much it makes one braver and stronger.” And again, “It may be much nobler to hope for the advance of the human race only than for one’s own immortality, much less selfish to look upon oneself merely as a leaf on a tree than as an independent spirit, but it is much less pleasant.” Cook says that “he had been brought up as a Bible Christian in the strictest school of literal interpretation but he had also become deeply versed in some branches of natural science, and the truths of science seemed inconsistent with a literal belief in the Scriptures.” He had been much influenced by Spurgeon, whom he knew well in private life, but made no secret of his adhesion to Colenso’s heresies.

No one understood the inmost causes of his muse as he grew melancholic. He was exhausted, dyspeptic, wanted to reconstruct society, had “the soul of a prophet consumed with wrath against a wayward and perverse generation,” but also the heart of a lover of his fellowmen filled with pity for the miseries and follies of mankind. His mother recognized his tendency to misanthropy, and only at forty-two did he break away from parental discipline. “A new epoch of life began for me in this wise, that my father and mother could travel with me no more, but Rose [La Touche, the young girl with whom he was in love and who died when he was in the early fifties and left him forlorn] in heart was with me always, and all I did was for her sake.” This was his first “exile.” The clouds that had more than once lowered over his life settled in old age and he died in 1900 at the age of eighty-one. During most of the last ten years he presented one of the saddest of all the spectacles of old age, “dying from the top downward.” He was apathetic, monosyllabic, could write little, and spoke less; and but for the kindly ministrations of Mrs. Severn and the thoughtfulness of Kate Greenaway almost nothing either in Brantwood or the great world without retained interest for him.

The middle-age crisis in Friedrich Nietzsche’s life began when he left Bayreuth in August, 1876, after the performance of The Ring of the Niebelung. He was then thirty-two years of age. Now it was that his disenchantment with Wagner, whom he had regarded as a superman and often called Jupiter, “one who might bring the type of man to a higher degree of perfection,”[21] began. He had thought Wagner “near to the divine,” but he now found much of his music dull and recitative and thought that in Parsifal he had violated his own atheism as a concession to the public; and so he “refused to recognize a genius who was not honest with himself.” He abhorred Wagner’s new “redemption philosophy” but for months and years could not bring himself to an open break with him and was for a long time plunged in the depths of gloom. He now became truly lonely and went through a complete inner revolution. He realized that he must henceforth stand alone and work out the problem of life by himself. His anxiety as to how the venerable Wagner would receive his Human, All Too Human was pathetic. When he found he could not publish it anonymously, he revised and toned down many of his criticisms; and deep, indeed, was his grief when, despite the almost fawning letter that accompanied a copy of his book to Wagner, the latter lacked the greatness of soul to understand his sincerity and broke with him forever. At the same time he was emancipating his thought from Schopenhauer, who had hitherto been his sovereign master in the philosophic field.

Now it was that he almost completely wrecked his life by living according to the precepts of Cornaro, and his letters show the intense struggle with which he finally resolved to find his own way through life and to abandon his soul to self-expression. He finally resigned his chair of classic literature at Bâle and a little later sorted his manuscripts and commissioned his sister to burn half of them. This she refused to do, and it was just these that were the basis of some of the best things he wrote later. After trying residence in many places and various cures, and experimenting with many regimens, he finally resolved to become his own doctor, and it was by his own efforts that he succeeded in prolonging the efficient period of his life. But he felt he had at last struck the right road in The Dawn of Day, which marked the opening of his campaign against popular morality. From this time on, too, he had a deep, new, intense love of nature and was inspired henceforth by the conviction that he must be the midwife of the superman in the world. This apostle of a “New Renaissance” was not unlike his Zarathustra, who retired to the mountains at thirty and at forty came down to the haunts of men with a new message for them.

The theme of Rostand’s Chanticleer is the disillusion of that gorgeous barnyard fowl from the fond and at first secret conviction, which he later confessed to the pheasant hen, that it was his crowing that brought in the dawn and that if he failed in this function the world would lie in darkness. The tragedy of the play is the slow conviction that the sun could rise without him. In Nietzsche we see the exact reverse of this process. His delusions of greatness grew with years and eventually passed all bounds of sanity. He became jealous of Jesus and came to believe that he had brought the world a new dispensation and that his own work would some time be recognized as the dawn of a new era.

Robert Raymond[22] thinks it is pleasant to lie at anchor a while in port before setting sail for the last long voyage to the unknown. The passage from late youth to middle age has many of the same traits as growing old. We suddenly realize, perhaps in a flash, that life is no longer all before us. When youth begins to die it fights and struggles. The panic is not so much that we cannot do handsprings, but we have to compromise with our youthful hopes. We have been out of college perhaps twenty years. Napoleon lost Waterloo at 45, Dickens had written all his best at 40, and Pepys finished his diary at 37. We lose the sense of superfluous time and must hurry. We feel the futility of postponements and accept the philosophy of the second best as not so bad. We become more tolerant toward others and perhaps toward ourselves. We must not be too serious or yearn too much for a lost youth. It is like the first anticipations of fall in the summer.

F. von Mueller of Munich[23] says that we can never tell when old age begins. Involution is closely connected with evolution from the start. The lymphatics, tonsils, and thymus begin to atrophy as soon as the development of the sex organs comes. Among English button workers it was found that young men did most; between the ages of 40 and 45 they did 80 per cent of the work they formerly did; 60 per cent in the fifty-fifth year, and 40 per cent after sixty-five. The power of observation is so great in youth that seventy per cent of all our acquisitions are made at this stage. Originality comes later. Age is more serious. There is less adaptation because habit is growing rigid. The emotional life stiffens and the intellectual narrows. There are more doubts. There is a stronger-felt need of recognition from others that is very deeply experienced in many ways. The capacity for producing original ideas comes latest of all. It is generally thought that the highest physical development is before 30. Some investigators think that physical deterioration begins with the brain but this is doubtful.

Bruce Birch[24] thinks the wreckage of youth spectacular; that of old age less discernible because more subtle and internal. The old should come to the fullest possible maturity. Youth must be served. The church focuses on young men. The old age here chiefly regarded is from forty-five on. Most lack intelligent encouragement to go on. They are thought too old to need advice and to only want comfort. Habits are supposed to be formed. The old are not thought to be heart-searchers.

The fact is, senescence has very new and great temptations, namely, to go on in the old way of habit and belief. The temptations of the old are largely of the spirit but sometimes also of the flesh and the devil. It is hard to keep up the struggle for personal righteousness and there are periods of storm and stress. The church has not done its duty here. Most think the most dangerous period is that of wild oats—between 16 and 26—but this writer says it is between 45 and 65 when there is the most wreckage.

1. There is a tendency to low ideals. Youth tends to lofty ideals and to realize them, but now hope often fails. With the abbreviation of life there is loss of initiative, perhaps sickness of hope deferred. Age thinks it has become all it can hope to be; so enthusiasm wanes and the tedium vitae makes us feel the game is not worth the candle and we are not willing to pay the price of sacrifice and struggle to maintain high ideals. So we aim lower. The excelsior motive is lost. So there is often a degeneration of moral character. Cheap pleasures satisfy—perhaps even those of the table, for this is the easiest way of reviving some of the tendencies of former life.

2. Hence lowering and liberalizing of conduct creeds. The frontal lobes shrink as the period of endeavor wanes. The edge of desire is dulled and so is the power to distinguish right and wrong, true and false. “Twice a child, once a man.” The powers of imagination, aggression, and resistant effort flag, and we are content with the beaten path because the motor areas have decayed. There is ruttiness, the brain is set for habitual reactions, there are fixed points of view, the apperceptive mass is allowed to interpret all new ideas, and these cannot change it. Thus it is hard to adjust to progress. There is less resistance, self-control, courage for great deeds and high purposes, less tendency to ask advice of and be influenced by younger men. Politicians often recognize this in putting forward respectable elderly, pliant candidates. One is often weak where he thinks himself strong because there is no fool like an old one. He may yield to selfishness, acquisitiveness, curiosity, secretiveness, envy, jealousy, avarice, and other primitive traits. There is too frequent moral collapse here.

3. There is a lessening of emotional intensity or stodginess. The imitative, religious, adventurous, belligerent, imaginative, initiative traits are developed early, and the younger man is the greater in the dominion of the emotions. But later poets turn to prose and others to more didactic activities. Scientists, philosophers, and statesmen are best when they are through this period. Disappointed men now become cynical, morose, petulant, or vicious as the intellect only rules. If the social and gregarious instinct fails, society may bore, friendships decline, and age may be lonely. Or, again, it may fall a prey to many dispositional, emotional, and obsessive feelings which may become insane. The patient may live in a logic-tight compartment. The obsession may be a hobby or a system of connected ideas with a strong emotional tone (complex). These are tendencies arising from instinct. When the social and sane instincts lose in the conflict, interest in the present may decline to indifference, and the obsessions may focus on real or fancied errors of the past—duty to a dead child, a business failure, etc. At any rate, there is a tendency to indulge temperament.

4. Failure in religious teaching. Versus “Be sure your sin will find you out” all the old realize that they have done much sin that is not found out and which, if it were exposed, would bring suffering, disgrace, public execration, and loss of vocation, property and friends. To fear only the consequences of evil is bad, and since they have escaped they feel a certain contempt of secular and moral law and take greater risks. The old man prefers to be respectable and righteous, but he does not care if his unrighteousness is known or suspected if it is not made too public. Thus the old dread exposure more than they do sin.

5. The church offers too little to the old but wants to see old age tap new reservoirs of energy, vigor, joy, and enthusiasm. The best it can offer is faith in Jesus. Many would say it offers a larger intellectual view.

Karin Michaëlis[25] tells her story in the form of letters and a running journal. A poor girl, she early came to feel that with her beauty she could do anything and supremely longed for wealth. After just escaping marriage with a rich old man who educated her, she married a wealthy and most exemplary husband whom she divorced, after having lived tranquilly with him for a score of years, with no cause on either side but because she felt a growing passion for solitude. She retired to a desert island in a spacious new villa planned by an architect friend eight years younger than herself. After a year of isolation, slowly realizing that she is in love with the architect, as she had long been, she offers herself to him on any terms and is rejected. She then proposes to rejoin her husband but finds him engaged to a girl of nineteen.

The remarkable merit of this book that made it something of a sensation through all western Europe ten years ago is the masterly descriptions of the state of mind of women of a certain type, and perhaps to some extent of all, at the turn of life. While there is not a phrase in it that could shock the most fastidious, it is evident throughout that the author’s soul is permeated with a sex consciousness that finds numberless indirect expressions and that she knows life and man chiefly from this standpoint, condones most of woman’s errors, advises her friends to courses that convention forbids, etc. No one ever began to write such a book, not even Octave Feuillet in his La Crise. It all reads like a marvelous confession of things no woman ever said before or could say to a man. She says:

Somebody should found a vast and charitable sisterhood for women between forty and fifty, a kind of refuge for the victims of the years of transition, for during that time women would be happier in voluntary exile or at any rate entirely separated from the other sex.... We are all more or less mad, even though we struggle to make others think us sane.

There are moments when I envy every living creature who has the right to pair—either from hate or from habit. I am alone and shut out.

Women’s doctors may be as clever and sly as they please but they will never learn any of the things women confide to each other. Between the sexes there lies not only a deep, eternal hostility but the involuntary abyss of a complete lack of reciprocal comprehension.

It would be better for woman if she walked barefoot over red-hot ploughshares for the pain she would suffer would be slight, indeed, compared to that which she must feel when, with a smile on her lips, she leaves her own youth behind and enters the region of despair we call growing old.

It may safely be said that on the whole surface of the earth not one man exists who really knows woman. If a woman took infinite pains to reveal herself to a husband or a lover just as she really is, he would think she was suffering from some incurable mental disease. A few of us indicate our true natures in hysterical outbreaks, fits of bitterness and suspicion, but this involuntary frankness is generally discounted by some subtle deceit.

If men suspected what took place in a woman’s inner life after forty, they would avoid us like the plague or knock us in the head like mad dogs.

Are there honest women? At least we believe there are. It is a necessary part of our belief. Who does not think well of mother or sister, but who believes entirely in a mother or sister? Absolutely and unconditionally? Who has never caught mother or sister in a falsehood or a subterfuge? Who has not sometimes seen in the heart of mother or sister, as by a lightning flash, an abyss which the boundless love cannot bridge over? Who was ever really understood by mother or sister?

I envy every country wench or servant girl who goes off with her lover while I sit here waiting for old age.[26]

The author has been spoken of as a traitor to her sex, revealing all its freemasonry. Certainly no female writer ever emancipated herself more completely from man’s point of view. There is no masculine note here. It would seem as if she aspired to be a specialist in feminine psychology. M. Prévost calls it a cinematograph of feminine thought set down without interposing between the author’s mind and the paper the vision of a man. No extracts or epitome can do justice to the precision of style, the acuteness of self-observation, the range of social experience, and the depth of insight here shown in depicting the psychological processes that attend the beginnings of old age in women.

It is well at any stage of life, and particularly at its noonday, to pause and ask ourselves what kind of old people we would like, and also are likely, to be—two very different questions. In youth we have ideals of and fit for maturity. Why not do the same when we are mature for the next stage? Why should not forty plan for eighty (or at least for sixty) just as intently as twenty does for forty? At forty old age is in its infancy; the fifties are its boyhood, the sixties its youth, and at seventy it attains its majority. Woman passes through the same stages as man, only the first comes earlier and the last later for her. If and so far as Osler is right, it is because man up to the present has been abnormally precocious, a trait that he inherited from his shorter-lived precursors and has not yet outgrown, as is the case with sexual precocity, which brings premature age. Modern man was not meant to do his best work before forty but is by nature, and is becoming more and more so, an afternoon and evening worker. The coming superman will begin, not end, his real activity with the advent of the fourth decade. Not only with many personal questions but with most of the harder and more complex problems that affect humanity we rarely come to anything like a masterly grip till the shadows begin to slant eastward, and for a season, which varies greatly with individuals, our powers increase as the shadows lengthen. Thus as the world grows intricate and the stage of apprenticeship necessarily lengthens it becomes increasingly necessary to conserve all those higher powers of man that culminate late, and it is just these that our civilization, that brings such excessive strains to middle life, now so tends to dwarf, making old age too often blasé and abgelebt, like the middle age of those roués who in youth have lived too fast.

There are many who now think more or less as does H. G. Wells[27] that the human race is just at its dangerous age and has, within the last few years, passed its prime; also that henceforth we must trust less to nature and place all our hope in and direct all our energy to nurture if the race is to escape premature decay. There is only too much to indicate that mankind, in Europe at least if not throughout the world, has reached the “dangerous age” that marks the dawn of senescence and that, unless we can develop what Renan calls “a new enthusiasm for humanity,” a new social consciousness, and a new instinct for service and for posterity, our elaborate civilization with all its institutions will become a Frankenstein monster escaping the control of the being that devised and constructed it and will bring ruin to both him and to itself. Progressive eugenics, radical and world-wide reëducation, and the development of a richer, riper old age, are our only sources of hope for we can look to no others to arrest the degenerative processes of national and individual egoism. At any rate, we have to face a new problem, namely what is the old age of the world to be and how can we best prepare for it betimes?

As contrasted with Ireland, in which Ross[28] tells us “one-eighth of her people are more than sixty-five years old,” we have considered ourselves as par excellence the land of young people and ideas. Our growth has been phenomenal and began and proceeded most opportunely, so that we profited to the full by steam, rapid transportation, invention, by our coal, oil, forests, and virgin soil, and especially by the ideals of liberty that were brought here by the first waves of immigrants to our shores. These were followed later, however, by those who had failed in the old world, by inferior and often Mediterranean stocks imported as tools or coming only in the hope of gain; but even this tide is now ceasing to flow. We are within measurable distance of the limits of our natural resources. Although the great war, the most stupendous, was also the most inconclusive ever fought, and although we reached our pinnacle in the idealism of Wilson’s first visit to Europe, when the world came nearer than ever before since early Christianity, the Holy Roman Empire, and Comenius, to a merger of national sovereignty and a new world law backed by a new world power, this brief vision of a federated world has faded and we now realize that if we cannot make a break with history and leave much of it to the dead past, if we cannot transcend the boundaries that, especially in Europe, are now far too narrow for modern conditions, and if we cannot fearlessly enter upon the longer apprenticeship to life, which is now too short for mastery, we shall drift into far more disastrous wars that will leave even the victors exhausted, and mankind will either sink into an impotent senility or into a Tarzan bestialism, which from the standpoint of Clarence Day (The Simian World) would seem not impossible.

CHAPTER II
THE HISTORY OF OLD AGE

The age of plants and animals—The Old Stone Age—Treatment of old age among existing savage tribes—The views of Frazer—The ancient Hebrews and the Old Testament—The Greeks (including Sparta, the Homeric Age, the status of the old in Athens, the views of Plato, Socrates’ talks with boys, Aristotle)—The Romans—The Middle Ages—Witchcraft and old women—Attitude of children toward the old—Mantegazza’s collection of favorable and unfavorable views of age—The division of life into stages—The relation of age groups to social strata—The religion of different ages of life—The Vedanta—The Freudian war between the old and the young—History of views from Cornaro to our own time—Bacon—Addison—Burton—Swift.

Some plants live only a few hours; others, a few days; and very many only for a season. But trees are the oldest of all things that live. In the Canary Islands is an immense dragon tree, forty-five feet in circumference, which grows very slowly. This was vital enough to continue living fifty years after a third of it was destroyed. It must have been several thousand years old, but as its trunk was hollowed there was no way of ascertaining its age. In the Cape Verde Islands stood a tree thirty feet in diameter which Adanson estimated to be 5,150 years of age. Some of the old cypresses in Mexico are thought to be quite as old. The big trees of California are several thousand years old, the largest of which Sargent estimates to have lived 5,000 years. We have all seen cross-sections of the trunks of these monsters of the vegetable world with their concentric rings marked—“this growth was made during the year the Magna Charta was granted,” “this when Christ was born,” etc. Many botanists believe that trees of this sort do not die of old age as such, but of external accidents like lightning, tempests, etc.

As to animal longevity, no doubt there are real ephemerids. Life can also be prolonged by desiccation or by freezing. Certain it is that many species do not live to see their offspring. In many of the lower forms of life the larval is far longer than the adult stage. The seventeen-year locust, for example, lives out most of its time underground, the imago form continuing but little more than a month. Most butterflies are annual, although those that fail to copulate may hibernate and live through another season, while some are known to have lived several years. Worker bees do not survive the season but queens live from two to five years. J. H. Gurney[29] thinks the passerines are the shortest-lived birds, averaging from eight to nine years, that the lark, canary, bullfinch, gull, may live forty years, the goose fifty, and the parrot sixty. To the latter bird a mythical longevity is often assigned, one being said to have spoken a language that had become extinct. As to animals, domestication prolongs while captivity shortens their normal length of life. Longevity is often related to fertility. Beasts of prey breed slowly and live to be old, while the fecund rabbit is short-lived. But for increased fecundity species subject to high risk would die out. While there is a certain correlation between size and age, since large animals require more time to grow, it is extremely limited. Bunge thinks that in mammals the period the new-born take to double in size is an index of the normal duration of life; but this, too, has its limitations. Some stress diet as an essential factor and others think that length of life may be inversely as the reproductive tax levied upon the system. But of all these questions our knowledge is still very limited.

When Alexander conquered India, he took one of King Porus’s largest elephants, Ajax, and labeled it, “Alexander, the son of Jupiter, dedicates this to the sun.” This elephant is said to have been found 160 years later. This is the earliest record I find of animal longevity. We have many tables since Flourens attempted, with great pains, to construct one, and from the latest of these at hand I select the following of those animals popularly supposed to be able to attain one hundred years or more: carp, 100 to 150; crocodile, 100; crow, 100; eagle, 100; elephant, 150 to 200; parrot, 100; pike, 100; raven, 100; swan, 100; tortoise, over 100. In point of fact, as E. Ray Lankester[30] says, we know almost nothing definite of the length of life of larger animals. Flourens considered that in mammalia we could find a criterion of the end of the growth period in the union of the epiphyses of the bones throughout the skeleton, and laid down the law that for both mammals and man longevity is, on the average, about five times that of this period of growth. We know far more as to the span of the shorter- than of the longer-lived members of the brute creation. We also know far more of domestic animals than of their wild congeners. The former doubtless have lived longer because better protected. Darwin wrote that he had no information in regard to the longevity of the nearest wild representatives of our domestic animals or even of quadrupeds in general, and various experts whom Lankester addressed upon the subject informed him that almost nothing was known of reptiles or crustacea, while the ichthyologist, Gunther, said, “There is scarcely anything known about the age and causes of death of fishes,” and Jeffreys, a molluscan expert, says the same of them. Insects, on the other hand, are a remarkable exception. Their life is so short that it can sometimes be observed almost continuously from ovum to ovum. There is in general, however, Lankester believes, a much closer relation between the life span of individuals of the same than between those of different species, specific longevity meaning the average length of life of the individual of the species. Of all this we know far more of man than of any other creature.

If age went with size, the extinct saurians would have attained the greatest age of all animals, and in fact they seem to have grown all their lives. However it may have been in past geologic ages, it may yet appear that man, on the average, lives longer than any brutes. This he should do if the civilization he has evolved really gives him a more favorable environment than nature and instinct have provided for him. Species, like individuals, very probably have a term of life and become extinct with age, as paleontology shows us not a few have done. But here, too, there is no sufficient basis of fact at present to warrant the generalizations so often met with concerning phyletic immortality or senescence. To some aspects of this theme I shall recur later in this volume.

Of the length of life of the predecessors of modern man we know almost nothing. In evolving as he did from anthropoid forms, he probably also considerably increased his span of life. It would seem, too, as if again in the transition from the unsocial, short, and still somewhat simian Neanderthal to that of the tall and more gregarious Crô-Magnon type he must have still further increased his longevity. But through all the paleolithic ages (lasting some 125,000 years as H. F. Osborn calculates[31]) there are no data either in the skeletal remains or in the implements he used that shed any clear light upon the subject; and the same is true of the neolithic cults that flowered in the lake- or pile-dwellings. Bones show different stages of development, and teeth, always remarkably well preserved, often show the effects of use; a very few represent children but not one illustrates extreme old age according to the osseous or dental criteria of modern times. Hence we may conjecture that the attainment of great age under the conditions of life then prevailing was very rare. It would seem also that if life had been long and its experiences well ripened, preserved, and transmitted (so that each new generation would not merely repeat the life of that which had preceded it but profit by its lessons), progress would not have been so very slow, as it was. On the other hand, it might be urged perhaps with equal force that if, as with lower races now, most of the people who made prehistory not only matured but grew old early, and since age always tends to be conservative and unprogressive, it would make for retardation, even though it came in years that seem premature to us. Very probably even in these rude stages of life men who felt their physical powers beginning to abate—at least the more sagacious of them—had already hit upon some of the many devices by which the aging have very commonly contrived to maintain their position and even increase their importance in the community by developing wisdom in counsel, becoming repertories of tribal tradition and custom, and representatives of feared supernatural forces or persons, etc. But of all this paleo-anthropology has, up to date, almost nothing to tell us. Nor do we see much reason to believe it ever will. All these culture stages of the Old Stone Age have left us little but material vestiges of its industries—bones, a few carvings on cave walls or on bones and ivory, and very many chipped flints. Nothing of wood, skin, fiber or other material for binding, which must have been used, survives.[32] Much as these bones and stones tell us, they have really done more to increase our curiosity than to satisfy it. We know almost nothing of how these thousands of generations of men viewed life or nature, or in what spirit and with what knowledge they met disease, age, and death.

What is called belief in another life is for primitives or children only inability to grasp completely the very difficult fact of death and to distinguish it from sleep. The disposition of some of the troglodyte skeletons suggests that these ancient forbears of our race were unable to realize that death ends all. Despite the close analogy and even kinship between human and animal life so deeply felt in early days, it was probably always somewhat harder for early man to conceive death for himself as complete cessation than to so conceive it for the higher forms of animal life with which his own was so intimately associated. Our ignorance of all these stages of human evolution becomes all the more pathetic as we are now coming to understand that it was then that all the deeper unconscious and dispositional strata of Mansoul, which still dominate us far more than we are even yet aware, were being laid down, and it is upon these traits that the later and conscious superstructure of our nature has been reared. Only hard things survive the ravages of time, and psychic traits and trends are the softest of all soft things, although they are no less persistent by way of biological and social inheritance than skeletons and flints.

Turning to the lower races of mankind that now survive and are accessible to study, we find only very few scattered, fragmentary, and often contradictory data as to old age. Yarrow has made a comprehensive study of mortuary customs, both of savages and man in the earlier stages of civilization. Mallory brought together what we know of sign language. Ploss has given us a compend on the child among primitives and, with Bartels, on woman. I have tried to compile the customs and ideas of pubescent initiation;[33] while animism, marriage rites, property and ownership, systems of kinship, mana concepts, hunting and trapping, war weapons, dances, ideas of disease and the function of the “medicine man,” dwellings, dress, ornamentation, number systems, language, fire-making, industries, food, myths, and ceremonies galore, and many other themes have had comprehensive and comparative treatment. But I am able to find nothing of the kind (and Professor F. Boas, our most accomplished American scholar in this field, knows of nothing compendious) on old age in any language. Anthropology, therefore, has so far produced no gerontologists. I have looked over many volumes of travel and exploration among the so-called lower races of mankind, only to find nothing or brief and more or less incidental mentions of senescence. This neglect is itself significant of the inconspicuous rôle the old play in rude tribal life and also of the lack of vital interest in the theme by investigators.

From my own meager and inadequate gleanings in this field the unfavorable far outweigh the favorable mentions. The Encyclopedia Britannica tells us that from Herodotus, Strabo, and others we learn of people like the Scythian Massagetæ, a nomad race northeast of the Caspian Sea, who killed old people and ate them. For savages the practice of devouring dead kinsfolk is often regarded as the most respectful method of disposing of their remains. In a few cases this custom is combined with that of killing both the old and sick, but it is more often simply a form of burial. It prevails in many parts of Australia, Melanesia, Africa, South America, and elsewhere.

Reclus[34] tells us that among the various Siberian tribes aged and sickly people who are useless are asked if they have “had enough of it.” It is a matter of duty and honor on their part to reply “yes.” Thereupon an oval pit is roughly excavated in a burial ground and filled with moss. Heavy stones are rolled near, the extremities of the victim are bound to two horizontal poles, and on the headstone a reindeer is slaughtered, its blood flowing in torrents over the moss. The old man stretches himself upon this warm red couch. In the twinkling of an eye he finds that he is securely bound to the poles. Then he is asked “Art thou ready?” At this stage of the proceeding it would be folly to articulate a negative response. Moreover, his friends would pretend not to hear it. So his moriturus saluto is “Good night, friends.” They then stop his nostrils with a stupefying substance and open his carotid and a large vein in his arm, so that he is bled to death in no time. Among most races, Reclus tells us, children are killed by being exposed; the old, by being deserted.

In Terra del Fuego, Darwin tells how Jimmy Buttons, a native, described the slaughter of the aged in winter and famine. Dogs, he said, catch otters; old women, not. He then proceeded to detail just how they were killed, imitated and ridiculed their cries and shrieks, told the parts of their bodies that were best to eat, and said they must generally be killed by friends and relatives.

Among the Hottentots, when their aged men and women can “no longer be of any manner of service in anything,” they are conveyed by an ox, accompanied by most of the inhabitants of the kraal, to a solitary hut at a considerable distance and, with a small stock of provisions, laid in the middle of the hut, which is then securely closed. The company returns, deserting him forever. They think it the most humane thing they can do to thus hasten the conclusion of life when it has become a burden.

With at least one of the Papuan races in New Guinea, people when old and useless are put up a tree, around which the tribe sing “The fruit is ripe” and then shake the branches until the victim falls, tearing him to pieces and eating him raw. Among the Damaras the sick and aged are often cruelly treated, forsaken, or burned alive. In some of the East African tribes the aged and all supposed to be at the point of death are slain and eaten. One author tells us that among the Fijians the practice of burying alive is “so common that but few old and decrepit people are to be seen.” In Herbert Spencer’s anthropological charts we are told that among the Chippewas “old age is the greatest calamity that can befall a northern Indian for he is neglected and treated with disrespect.”

C. Wissler[35] says, “As to the aged and sick, we have the formal practice of putting to death among some of the Esquimaux and other races.” On the other hand, among all hunting people who shift from place to place the infirm are often of necessity left behind to their fate. Yet the reported examples of such cruelties can usually be matched by instances of the opposite tenor. He goes on to say that since the mythologies of various tribal groups contain rites showing retribution for such cruelties we must regard them as, on the whole, exceptional.

S. K. Hutton[36] says,

I found age a very deceptive thing. “Sixty-two” might be the answer from a bowed old figure crouching over the stove. I would have guessed twenty years more than that. The fact is, the Eskimo wears out fast. After fifty he begins to decline, and few live long after sixty. I have known a few over seventy, and the people told me with wonderment about an old woman who lived to be eighty-two and who worked to the last. But these are great rarities. It must be a unique thing in one’s lifetime to meet with an Eskimo great-grandmother. The very old people seem always to be active to the last. They have an unusual amount of vitality and die in the harness, dropping out like those too tired to go any further and passing away without illness or suffering. These are always those who have clung most closely to their own native foods and customs. Women who are too old and toothless to chew the boot-leather can still scrape the seal-skins, perhaps with a skill which the younger women lack; if they are too blind and feeble to scrape, they can sit behind a wall of snow upon the sea-ice and jig for the sleepy rock-cod through a hole.

C. A. Scott[37] tells us that in certain south Australian tribes it is taboo to catch or eat certain animals until a man has reached a prescribed advanced age, these animals being easiest to catch and the most wholesome and thus best adapted to old people’s use. One of the chief maxims in Tonga is to reverence the gods, the chief, and old people. In Java, among the Iroquois, Dakotas, Comanches, the Hill tribes of India (Santals and Kukis), the Snakes and Zunis, much respect is shown to the aged.

K. Routledge[38] says, “part of the deference paid to advancing years, whether in men or women, is due to fear. Old age has something uncanny about it, and old persons could probably ‘make medicine’ or work havoc, were they so inclined.” One chief said that in councils the old women would have their way because “it is a great work to have borne a child.” A young warrior is taught to get out of the road for an old woman. She does not, however, take part in the sacrifices, although one called herself the wife of God and seemed to have established a sort of cult. This was because she was a woman of much character. Here the mothers take full part in initiations. The dignity and self-reliance of the older women is remarkable. When a woman is so old that she has no teeth she is said to be “filled with intelligence” and on her death receives the high honor of burial instead of being thrown out to the hyenas.

A. L. Cureau[39] tells us that the Negro is short-lived and that if some lucky star enables him to reach forty he becomes a man of importance, although death does not usually permit him to enjoy this distinction long. “During more than twenty years I never knew more than four or five who could have been considered sixty-five or seventy years of age, and even persons who were from fifty to sixty are very uncommon. At the age of thirty-five or forty they all exhibit signs of premature decrepitude.” He thinks the death rate from forty to forty-five very high. Disease among the Africans is limited to only a few general troubles. Burial is usually by interment, although in some districts the dead are eaten, while elsewhere they are thrown into the river or left lying on the ground in some remote spot. Respect for the chief, however, continues to be observed even after his death. But customs are growing mild, and “if human sacrifice still takes place in locations that are most remote from our stations, the fact is kept a profound secret.”

H. A. Junod[40] gives a melancholy picture of old age, especially for the leading man of the tribe. His wives die, his glory fades, his crown loses its luster and if it is scratched or broken he cannot repair it, he is forsaken, less respected, and often only a burden unwillingly supported. “The children laugh at him. If the cook sends them to their lonely grandfather with his share of food in the leaky old hut, the young rascals are capable of eating it on the way, pretending afterwards that they did what they were told.” When, between two huts, under the shelter of the woods the old man warms his round-shouldered back in the rays of the sun, lost in some senile dream, his former friends point to him and say, “It is the bogie man, the ogre.” Mature people show little more consideration for the old than do the young ones. Junod knew personally an old man and woman who, when their children moved to another part of the country, were left under a roof with no sides, without food, and were almost imbecile. “In times of war old people die in great numbers. During the movements of panic they are hidden in the woods, in the swamps or palm trees, while all the able-bodied population runs away. They are killed by the enemy, who spare no one, or they die in their hiding places of misery and hunger. Thus the evening of life is very sad for the poor Thonga.” There are, however, children who to the end show devotion to their parents. Those old people are most to be pitied who fall to the charge of remote relatives.

A. Hrdlicka[41] says, “The proportion of nonagenarians, and especially centenarians, among the Indians is far in excess of that among native white Americans.” As to the source of error, he thinks this is somewhat offset by the “marked general interest centering about the oldest of every tribe.” He found twenty-four per million among the Indians as against three per million among native whites who had reached a hundred, and says, “The relative excess of aged persons (80 years and above) among the Indians would signify only that the infirmities and diseases known ordinarily as those of old age are less grave among them, a conclusion in harmony with general observation.” Among the fifteen tribes embraced in this very careful and valuable investigation, Hrdlicka found in the old far less grayness and baldness and far better teeth than among the whites. They had more wrinkles but their muscular force was better preserved. Many debilitating effects among the whites are less so among the Indians. In general there is some bending and emaciation and the hair grows iron gray or yellowish-gray, but never white. Nor did he find among those of ninety a single one who was demented or helpless. The aged were generally more or less neglected, and had to care for themselves and help the younger. Owing to the diminution of the alveoli and adipose tissue, “the jaw looks more prominent, prognathism disappears, and the face looks shorter.” There is an increase in the nasal index, the nose becomes broader and shorter, the malar bones more prominent. The eyes lose their luster and generally become narrowed, with adhesions at the canthi, particularly the external. The hardening of arteries is certainly not common. Of 716 well preserved males of 65, only 4 per cent showed baldness; and among 377 women there was but one slightly bald, the baldness being about equally common on vertex and forehead.

In W. I. Thomas’s Source Book for Social Origins containing articles by various authors, we are told that among some of the Australian tribes old age is a very prominent factor in preëminence. After they have become feeble the old may have great authority, somewhat in proportion to what they know of ancient lore, magic, medicine, and especially if they are totem heads. Their authority is not patriarchal, and yet among the Yakuts, whether they are rich or poor, good or bad, the old are sometimes beaten by their children, especially if feeble-minded. On the other hand, a weak man of seventy may beat his forty-year-old son who is strong and rich but in awe of his parent because he has so much to inherit from him. The transfer of authority and property to the son often comes very late. The greatest number of suicides is among the old people. A man who beat his mother said, “Let her cry and go hungry. She made me cry more than once and beat me for trifles,” etc.

In this volume we are told, too, that even the Fuegians, who in times of scarcity kill and eat their old women for food, are generally affectionate, and until the whites interfered with their social order the old often had considerable authority. They sometimes prepare programs for ceremonials, which are very strictly observed by a hundred younger men. In some Australian tribes, too, a man’s authority generally increases with age; and this is true, though less frequently, of women. The old enforce the strictest marriage rules and have much influence over the thoughts and feelings of the tribes. The old men often sit in a circle and speak on public matters, one after another, the young men standing outside in silence. A few old men may retire to discuss secret matters of importance. Offenders are often brought before them for trial and sentence. The old men of a tribe often band themselves together and by working on the superstitions of the tribe secure for themselves not only comfort but unbounded influence. In the famous Duk-Duk ceremonial they alone were in the secret, and all others were impressed with the supernatural character of the actors in these rites.

Ploss and Bartels[42] amplify the great changes senescence brings to women. Age not only obliterates race but sex. It often makes the most beautiful into the most ugly, for handsome old women among primitives are unknown. Children dread them. They often become careless of looks, the hand is claw-like, etc. A widespread German superstition is that if an old woman crosses the path of a hunter he will get nothing. They are ominous for marriages and some neurotics cannot look at them. They are sometimes said to have seven lives. Hans Sachs in poetry and Cranach in painting, in describing the fountains of youth, represent chiefly old women entering on the one side with every sign of decrepitude and coming out on the other beautiful, with wonderful toilets, and sometimes immediately engaging in orgies. Old women in early times sometimes had a guild, devised means of conjuration, made pacts or leagues with the devil, presided over the Walpurgis festivals, conjured with magic words, had evil eyes, knew strange brews, sometimes committed all kinds of lasciviousness with devils, might transform themselves into shapes as attractive as Circe for Ulysses or Medea for Jason, or take the more ominous forms of Hecate and Lamea. These maleficent creatures often allied themselves with black cats, serpents, owls, bats, had their salves and witch sabbaths, etc.

Frazer approaches this subject from a different angle. In the second chapter of his volume entitled The Dying God he tells us that in Fiji self-immolation is by no means rare, and the Fijians believe that as they leave this life they will remain ever after. This is a powerful motive to escape from decrepitude or from a crippled condition by voluntary death. “The custom of voluntary suicide on the part of the old men, which is among their most extraordinary usages, is connected with their superstitions regarding a future life.” To this must be added the contempt that attaches to physical weakness among a nation of warriors, and the wrongs and insults that await those who are no longer able to protect themselves. So when a man feels age creeping on, so that he can no longer fully discharge the duties or enjoy the pleasures of life, he calls his relations, tells them he is worn out and useless, that they are ashamed of him, and he is determined to be buried. So on an appointed day they meet and bury him alive. In the New Hebrides the aged were buried alive at their own request. “It was considered a disgrace to a family of an old chief if he was not buried alive.” A Jewish tribe of Abyssinia never let a person die a natural death, for if any of their relatives was near expiring the priest of the tribe was called to cut his throat. If this ceremony was omitted, they believed the departed soul had not entered the mansions of the blessed. Heraclitus thought that the souls of those who die in battle are purer than those who die of disease. In a South American tribe, when a man is at the point of death his nearest relatives break his spine with an axe, for to die a natural death is the greatest misfortune. In Paraguay, when a man grows weary of life, a feast is made, with revelry and dancing, and the man is gummed and feathered with the plumage of many birds and a huge jar is fixed in the ground, the mouth of which is closed over him with baked clay. Thus he goes to his doom “more joyful and gladsome than to his first nuptials.”

With a tribe in northeastern Asia, when a man feels his last hour has come, he must either kill himself or be killed by a friend. In another tribe he requests his son or some near relative to dispose of him, choosing the manner of death he prefers. So his friends and neighbors assemble and he is stabbed, strangled, or otherwise slain. Elsewhere, if a man dies a natural death, his corpse must be wounded, so that he may seem to be received with the same honors in the next world as if he had died in battle, as Odin wanted for his disciples. The Wends once killed their aged parents and other kinsfolk and boiled and ate their bodies, and the old folk “preferred to die thus rather than drag out a weary life of poverty and decrepitude.” Kings are killed when their strength fails. The people of Congo believed that if their pontiff died a natural death, the earth would perish, since he sustained it by his power and merit, and that everything would be annihilated. So his successor entered his house and slew him with a rope or club. “The king must not be allowed to become ill or senile lest with his diminishing vigor the cattle should sicken and fail to bear their increase, the crops should rot in the field, and man, stricken with disease, should die.” So the king who showed signs of illness or failing strength was put to death.

One of the fatal symptoms of decay was taken to be incapacity to satisfy the sexual passion of his wives, of whom he has very many distributed in a large number of huts at Fashoda. When this ominous weakness manifested itself, the wives reported it to the chiefs, who were popularly said to have intimated to the king his doom by spreading a white cloth over his face and knees as he lay slumbering in the heat of the sultry afternoon. Execution soon followed the sentence of death. A hut was especially built for the occasion, the king was led to it and laid down with his head resting on the lap of a nubile virgin, the door of the hut was then walled up, and the couple were left without food, fire, or water, to die of hunger and suffocation.

This custom persisted till five generations ago.

Seligmann shows that the Shilluk king was “liable to be killed with due ceremony at the first symptoms of incipient decay.” But even while he was yet in the prime of health and strength he might be attacked at any time by a rival and have to defend his crown in a combat to death. According to the common Shilluk tradition, any son of a king had a right thus to fight the king in possession, and if he succeeded in killing him he reigned in his stead. As every king had a large harem and many sons, the number of possible candidates for the throne at any time may well have been not inconsiderable, and the reigning monarch must have carried his life in his hand. But the attack on him could only take place by night with any prospect of success. Then, according to custom, his guards had to be dismissed; so the hours of darkness were of special peril. It was a point of honor for the king not to call his herdsmen to his assistance. The age at which the king was killed would seem to have been commonly between forty and fifty. The Zulus put a king to death as soon as he began to have wrinkles and gray hair. Elsewhere kings were often killed at the end of a fixed term, perhaps because it was thought unsafe to wait for the slightest symptom of decay.

A unique and transformed survival of many such customs, according to Frazer, lingered in the vale of Nemi, idealized in Turner’s picture. He tells us how in ancient times and long persisting there, like a primeval rock jutting out of a well shaven lawn, the priest-king watched all night with drawn sword. He was a murderer and would himself sooner or later be slain by his successor, for this was the rule of the sanctuary. The candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him he retained office until he himself was slain by one stronger or craftier. Although he held the title of king, no crowned head was ever uneasier. The least relaxation of vigilance put him in jeopardy. This rule had no parallel in historic antiquity but we must go farther back. Recent studies show the essential similarity with which, with many superficial differences, the human mind elaborated its first crude philosophy of life. Hence we must study outcrops of the same institution elsewhere, and Frazer tells us that the object of his book is, by meeting these conditions, to offer a fairly probable explanation of the priesthood of Nemi. Once, only a runaway slave could break off the mistletoe from the oak, and success in this enabled him to fight the priest in single combat; if he won he would become King of the Woods.

There are many unique features in the attitude of the Jewish mind toward old age. In Genesis 5:3 et seq. the ages of the antediluvian patriarchs are given. Adam lived 930 years; Seth, 912; Enos, 905; Cainan, 970; Mahalaleel, 895; Jared, 962; Enoch, 365; Methuselah, 969; Lamech, 777. All but four of them “begat” between 65 and 90—Adam at 130, Methuselah at 187, Jared at 182, Noah at 500. By nearly all modern scholars these great ages have been regarded as mythical, but so scientific and modern a student as T. E. Young,[43] who is very skeptical about all later records of great longevity, devotes a long chapter to these records, which he is almost inclined to credit. He goes to original sources, gives various hypotheses, epitomizes diverse writers on the subject, and finally raises the question whether or not in ancient days atmospheric conditions, food, and a different and more uniform climate might not have caused an unprecedented prolongation of human life. He does not, of course, credit the ancient literature of India, where holy men are said to have lived eighty thousand years and where in the most flourishing period of Indian antiquity the term of one hundred thousand was regarded as the average length of the life of saints. He fully recognizes, too, the influence of mystic numbers here, which persisted until the age of the higher criticism, and is incredulous about most of the modern records of centenarians. His point of view is that man has now passed his acme and that a slow decline of the human race, which will end in its extinction, has already begun, masked as it is by modern hygiene, which prolongs life beyond the average term it would otherwise have reached. Thus human vitality as measured by length of life is slowly but irresistibly waning.[44]

The correspondence between organism and environment, which makes life perfect, was probably once better than now. Bacteriology is a factor never to be forgotten and there may be a new acidity of juices. Perhaps the energy of the sun is decreasing and also the productivity of the earth. Indeed, it is very probable that the solar system has attained its maturity or midway stage. From such data Young concludes, “The average intellectual condition of the present period, I should be inclined to surmise, exhibits no sign whatever of an ampler development.” Knowledge has become mechanical and has lost its capacity as the instrument of self-cultivation. The highest faculties are decaying from cessation of activity and coherent function. Man has reached his limit. The utilities of civilization are also hindrances, so that the forces of evolution have spent their power.

The Hebrew conception of Yahveh generally made him old, the ancient of days without beginning or end; and the art of early Christendom where God the Father appears, usually represents Him as venerable with age, this trait being probably accentuated by contrast with His son, Jesus, who died in the prime of life. The ancient Hebrews had great respect for age, and many Biblical heroes from Abraham to Moses and some of the prophets were old in years and wisdom. The exhortation was to rise up before the hoary head and honor the face of the old man, and this has its nursery echo in the story of Elisha (II, Kings, 2:23–24) whom little children came out of the city and mocked, saying “Go up, thou bald-head.” He “turned back and cursed them in the name of the Lord, and there came forth two she-bears out of the wood and tare forty and two children of them.” No passage in all the literature of the world has had such influence as Psalms 90:10.[45] It is pathetic to see how incessantly this passage is quoted in the literature on old age and how not only among the Jews but perhaps quite as much, if not more, among the Christians, bibliolatry has made it accepted almost as a decree of fate.

Next most influential is the pessimistic view of senescence represented in Ecclesiastes, 12:1–8. We quote Professor Paul Haupt’s version,[46] with his explanations in parentheses:

Remember thy well (the wife and mother of thy children) in the days of thy vigor, ere there come the days of evil, and the years draw nigh in which thou wilt say I have no pleasure. Ere is darkened the sun (sunshine of childhood), and the light of the day, and the moon (more tempered light of boyhood and early manhood), and the stars (the sporadic moments of happiness in mature age), and the clouds return after the rain (for the old, clouds and rainy days increase); when the keepers of the house (hands) tremble, and the men of power (the bones, especially the backbone) bend themselves; the grinding maids (teeth) cease and the ladies that look out through the lattices (eyes) are darkened; the doors are shut toward the street (secretion and excretion cease); he riseth at the voice of the birds (awakens too early), and all the daughters of song are brought low (grows deaf), he is afraid of that which is high, and fears are in the way (avoids climbing and high places); the almond tree blossometh (he grows gray), the locust crawleth along with difficulty, the caper-berry breaketh up (the soul is freed), the silver (spinal) cord is snapped asunder, the golden bowl (brain) crushed in, the bucket at the well smashed (heart grows weak), and the wheel breaketh down at the pit (machinery runs down). Man is going to his eternal house (the grave), and the mourners go about in the street. Vanity of vanities (all is transitory), saith Ecclesiastes, all is vanity, and all that is coming is vanity.

L. Löw[47] collects from the Scripture and post-Biblical Talmud, German and other literature, instances of rejuvenescence in the old which ancient Hebrew writers seem to have stressed. We all know that sight sometimes comes back, perhaps to a marked degree, but Löw quotes cases where wrinkles vanished, the hair was restored to its youthful shade and increased in quantity, while teeth, after years of decay, have sometimes grown from new roots—occasionally more than once. In many cases sex potency has been restored as well as muscular strength, freshness of complexion, and, more rarely, hearing. Myths, of course, of many races detail cases where magic sleep lasting many, perhaps a hundred, years has converted age into youth, and in Semitic folklore this is often connected with the passage, “The righteous shall renew their strength like the eagle.” The Hebrews were perhaps even more fond than other people of dividing life into periods, usually in conformity to the magic numbers 3, 4, 7, etc. The comparison of age with the four seasons was very common, and here we may perhaps mention Lotze’s effort to harmonize the life span with the four temperaments. For him, childhood is sanguine on account of the ease of excitation, the keenness of response to sensation, the ready passage of impulse to action, and the fluctuations of mood. Youth he calls melancholic and emotionally characterized by Stimmungen. It judges the items of experience by their effect upon feeling and upon self, and oscillates readily and widely from pleasure to pain. Mature manhood is choleric, practical, executive, with definiteness of aim and fulfillment of ideas and even phantasies but with less excitability of emotion; while old age is phlegmatic, seeks repose, and has been taught by experience to abate the life of affectivity and take the attitude of laissez faire.

In the modern Jewish family the authority of and respect for the father is great, more among the orthodox and conservative than the liberal and reformed wing of Judaism. The grandfather and -mother are always provided for, although their authority and influence are generally greatly diminished.

Perhaps mention should here be made of the very interesting medieval legend of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, although it is of Christian origin. This cobbler, past whose shop Jesus bore the Cross on the way to Calvary, reproached Him, and Jesus, turning, sentenced him to “tarry till I come,” which meant that his punishment was to remain alive on earth until the second coming of the Messiah. In some of the many forms of this tradition he is represented at the time as being of about Jesus’ age and every time he reached a hundred as being set back again to this stage of life; while in others he is described with ever increasing symptoms of age, and in Doré’s illustrations he is depicted as wandering the earth, appearing here and there and, when recognized, generally mysteriously vanishing, ever seeking death, visiting graveyards and regions smitten with plague and famine, rushing into the mêlée of battles, etc.—but all in vain. He longs with an ever increasing passion to pay the debt of nature but is unable to do so and must rove the earth until the Judgment Day, when he hopes his penalty may be remitted and that he may keep some “rendezvous with Death.”[48]

In ancient Greece we may begin with Sparta and its very unique gerousia, the council of twenty-eight old men who must be over sixty, when the duty to bear arms ceased and when by the original law of Sparta men were put to death. This council of old men at the height of its power is sometimes compared with that of the boulé in Athens but was even greater, for although it held its mandate from the people and its members were annually elected, they could depose the five ephors and the kings and even cause them to be put to death. J. P. Mahaffy[49] condemns the parochial politics of Sparta, where ignorant old men watched over and secured the closest adhesion of the state to the system of a semifabulous legislator, and compares the rigidity of the Spartan system, not based on written laws, with the effects of excessive reverence of ancestors in China in retarding progress.[50] He thinks that here we have “one of the most signal instances in history of the vast mischief done by the government of old men. All the leading patriots, nay all the leading politicians, were past their prime. There was not a single young man of ability taking part in public affairs.” This, he thinks, was more or less true of Athens in the early days, and he goes on to say that if any young orator tried to advance new ideas, the old masters, who had the ear of the assembly, were out upon him as a hireling and traitor so that he had to retire from the agora into private life, and some were thus driven into exile. He even holds that the sudden growth of the philosophic schools a little later was due to the activities that but for this diversion would have been directed to politics.

But in Greece at its best opposite influences were at work and generally predominated. In the Homeric age “the king or chief, as soon as his bodily vigor passed away, was apparently pushed aside by younger and stronger men. He might either maintain himself by extraordinary usefulness, like Nestor, or be supported by his children, if they chanced to be affectionate and dutiful; but except in these cases his lot was sad indeed.”[51] Achilles laments that nearby chiefs are ill-treating the aged Peleus, and we see Laertes, the father of Ulysses, exiled to a barren farm in the country and spending the later years of his life in poverty and hardship. Hence when we see princes who had sons that might return any day to avenge them treated in such a way, we must infer that unprotected old age commanded very little veneration among the Homeric Greeks, so that worn-out men received scant consideration. Among friends and neighbors in peace and in good humor they were treated with consideration, but with the first clash of interests all this vanished. Interference of the gods to protect their weakness was no longer believed in. Thus the exact prescription of the conduct of the young toward the elders in Sparta was an exception, and their treatment of old age as illustrated by the well-worn story of an old man coming into the theater at Athens and looking in vain for a seat until he came near the Spartan embassy, which at once rose and made room for him, was suggestive. It was well added that while the Athenians applauded this act it is doubtful if they imitated it. Probably the disparagement of old age prompted Athenian gentlemen to resort to every means to prolong their youth. Zeus came to rule the turbulent and self-willed lesser gods on Olympus, who were perpetually trying to evade and thwart him, by occasionally terrifying them, and he seemed to be able to count on no higher principle of loyalty.

The Greeks loved wealth because it gave pleasure, and perhaps in this fact we have one key to another horror that old age had for them. Mimnermus tells us to enjoy the delights of love, for “when old age with its pains comes upon us it mars even the fair, wretched cares besiege the mind; nor do we delight in beholding the rays of the sun but are hateful to boys and despised among women, so sore a burden have the gods made old age.” “When youth has fled, short-lived as a dream, forthwith this burdensome and hideous old age looms over us hateful and dishonored, which changes the fashion of man’s countenance, marring his sight and his mind with its mist.” Pindar asks why those who must of necessity meet the fate of death should desire “to sit in obscurity vainly brooding through a forgotten old age without sharing a single blessing.” He and Aeschylus take a somewhat less unfavorable view of age, although even Pindar calls it “detested.” Sophocles is the only dramatist who, at least in one passage, welcomes its approach, although there are nowhere bitterer words concerning it than those of the chorus of Œdipus at Coloneus, “That is the final lot of man, even old age, hateful, impotent, unsociable, friendless, wherein all evil of evil dwells.” Thus, in general, Greek writers take a very gloomy view of it, never calling it beautiful, peaceful, or mellow, but rather dismal and oppressive. The best they say of it is that it brings wisdom.

R. W. Livingstone[52] says:

When youth wore away, he [the Greek] felt that what made life most worth living was gone. In part perhaps it was that old age had terrors for the Greeks which we do not feel. They were without eyeglasses, ear-trumpets, bath-chairs, and an elaborate system of apéritifs, which modern science has devised to assist our declining years. Yet even with these consolations it may be doubted whether the Greek would have faced old age with pleasure. At least to judge from Greek literature, he lamented its minor discomforts less than the loss of youth’s intense capacity for action and enjoyment. People who prize beauty and health so highly can hardly think otherwise when age comes.

Again, old men in Greece had to contend with the younger generation upon even terms and without the large allowance conceded them by modern sentiment and good manners. At Athens legal proceedings of children to secure the property of their parents were very common—and that, too, without medical evidence of incapacity. Aristophanes complains of the treatment of older men by the newer generation and in his Wasps makes an old man say that his only chance of respect or even safety is to retain the power of acting as a juryman, so exacting homage from the accused and supporting himself by his pay without depending on his children. When he comes home with his fee they are glad to see him. Indeed, thus he might support a second wife and younger children and not be dependent for his daily bread upon his son’s steward. In the tragedies the old kings are represented as acquiescing, though not without complaint, in the weakness of their position and submitting to insults from foes and rivals. There seems no such thing as patient submission for an aged sovereign. Nor did his own excellence nor the score of former battles secure for him the allegiance of his people when his vigor had passed. This was all because in spite of the modicum of respect that all must yield to old age at its best, the violent nature of the Periclean politics and the warlike temper of early days made vigor in their leaders a necessity. The nation was strong, always seeking to advance and enlarge, and its maxim seemed to be that of Hesiod, “Work for youth; counsel for maturity; prayers for old age.” The Greeks, realizing the danger of relying too much upon experience as the source of wisdom, saw that when the maturity of age is passed and the power of decision begins to wane, trusting to the leadership of the old may be dangerous. By a law often relied on, old men could be brought into court by their children and be found incapable of managing their property, which was then transferred to their heirs; and this helps to explain why sometimes old people, beginning to feel their uselessness, committed suicide rather than become an encumbrance.

Plato[53] makes one of his characters say:

I and a few other people of my own age are in the habit of frequently meeting together. On these occasions most of us give way to lamentations and regret the pleasures of youth, and call up the memory of love affairs, drinking parties, and similar proceedings. They are grievously discontented at the loss of what they consider great privileges and describe themselves as having lived well in those days whereas now they can hardly be said to live at all. Some also complain of the manner in which their relations insult their infirmities or make this a ground for reproaching old age with the many miseries it occasions them.

Plato did not himself agree with this view but thought the cause of this discontent lay not in age itself but in character. Still the humanist view of life does tend to some such position, and the Greeks really felt that it was better to be the humblest citizen of Athens than to rule in Hades.

Two unique characters stand out with great clearness and significance. The first is that of the Homeric Nestor, who had lived through three generations of men and in whom Anthon says Homer intended to exemplify the greatest perfection of which human nature is capable. His wisdom was great, as was his age, and both grew together. In his earlier years he had been as great in war as he became in counsel later. Very different is the figure of Tithonus, whom Tennyson has made the theme of one of his oft-quoted poems. He was a mortal, the son of a king, but Aurora became so enamored of him that she besought Zeus to confer upon him the gift of immortality. The ruler of Olympus granted her prayer and Tithonus became exempt from death. But the goddess had forgotten to crave youth along with immortality and accordingly, after his children had been born, old age slowly began to mar the visage and form of her lover and spouse. When she saw him thus declining she still remained true to him, kept him “in her palace, on the eastern margin of the Ocean stream, ‘giving him ambrosial food and fair garments.’ But when he was no longer able to move his limbs she deemed it the wisest course to shut him up in his chamber, whence his feeble voice was incessantly heard. Later poets say that out of compassion she turned him into a cicada.”

It is gratifying to turn from the depressing attitude toward old age that was characteristic of the Hellenic mind as a whole, because it came nearer than any other to being the embodiment of eternal youth, and to glance at the unique and, we must believe on the whole, very wholesome and suggestive relation that so often subsisted between men, not to be sure very old (unless in the case of Socrates) but aging and young men and even boys.

It was assumed that every well-born and -bred young male must have an older man as his mentor and to be without one was, to some degree, regarded as discreditable. Thus juniors sometimes came to vie with each other in their efforts to win the regard of their seniors, especially if they were prominent; while the latter, in turn, felt that it was a part of their duty to the community and to the state to respond to such advances, even to make them. These friendships between ephebics and sages were, at their best, highly advantageous to both. The man embodied the boy’s ideal at that stage of life when he realized that all excellencies were not embodied in his father and when home relations were merging into those of citizenship. To win the personal attention and interest of a great man who would occasionally exercise the function of teacher, foster parent, guardian, godfather, adviser, or patron, brought not only advantage but distinction if the youth was noble and beautiful. On the other hand, Plato thought no man would wish to do or say a discreditable thing in the presence of a youth who admired him but would wish to be a pattern or inspirer of virtue. He seems to have been the first to realize that there is really nothing in the world quite so worthy of love, reverence, and service, as ingenuous youth fired with the right ambitions and smitten with a passion to both know and be the best possible. The period between the dawn of sex and complete nubility has always been the chief opportunity of the true teacher or initiator of its apprentice into life.

Here we must recall the very pregnant sense in which, as I have tried in my Adolescence to set forth at greater length, education in its various implications began in the initiations of youth by their elders into the pubertal stage of life and slowly extended upward toward the university, and downward toward the kindergarten, as civilization advanced. The world has always felt that these pre-marital years, when the young have such peculiar needs and are subjected to so many dangers, are the great opportunity for the transmission of knowledge and influence from the older to the younger generation.

Thus while Socrates loved to mingle with men of all classes and ages, his most congenial companions were those of a younger generation. With the gracious boy, Charmides, “beautiful in mind and body, a charming combination of moral dignity and artless sprightliness,” he discussed temperance in the presence of his guardian, Critias. With Theætetus, “the younger Socrates,” like his master more beautiful in mind than in body, he conversed about the nature of knowledge, in the presence of his tutor. With the fair and noble young Lysis, invoked to do so by his lover, Hypothales, he discourses on the right words or acts best calculated to ingratiate himself with his ward, and the theme is friendship. In the presence and with the coöperation of four youths he discusses courage with General Laches, and to young Clineas and his adviser he narrates his amusing encounter with Euthydemus and his brother, the bumptious young Sophists, the “eristic sluggers.” He explains the true nature of his own art to Ion, the Homeric rhapsodist. In the Meno he brings out the essential points of the forty-seventh proposition of Euclid from the mind of an ignorant slave boy.[54]

This relation of old and younger men was thought to keep youth plastic, docile, and receptive, if not a trifle feminine. Plato would have these pairs of friends fight side by side to inspire each other with courage. But this relation, as we all know, had its dangers and often lapsed to homosexuality and inversion. In the Symposium, Alcibiades, that most beautiful and alluring of male coquettes, describes Socrates as a paragon of chastity because he remained cold and unmoved by all the seductive blandishments he could bring to bear upon him. This vice, now so fully explored by Krafft-Ebing, Tarnowski, Moll, Ellis, and Freud and his disciples, is favored by war, the seclusion of women as in Turkey, and even by female virtue; but the Platonic view was that true love was a wisdom or philosophy, although possibly they did not realize that even the custom of the Sophists, who first took pay for teaching—a practice they thought profanation—was nevertheless a step toward the reform of degraded boy love.

The chief function of wise and older men toward their juniors, they thought, was to prevent the premature hardening of opinions into convictions and to keep their minds open and growing. As we now often say that the chief function of religion and sex is to keep each other pure, so they thought that wisdom culminated in eros, which in turn found its highest deployment in the love of knowledge, which Aristotle later described as the theoretic life, the attainment of which he deemed the supreme felicity of man. From all this it follows that those who achieve complete ideal senescence are those who have entirely sublimated eroticism into the passion for truth and pursue it with the same ardor that in their prime attracted them to the most beautiful of the other sex; and that their chief function to the next generation is to lay in it the foundations for the same gradual transfer and transformation of it as old age advances.

Aristotle’s[55] physical theory of old age is that heat is lost by gradual dissipation, very little remaining in old age—a flickering flame that a slight disturbance could put out. The lung hardens by gradual evaporation of the fluid and so is unable to perform its office of heat regulation. He assumes that heat is gradually developed in the heart. The amount produced is always somewhat less than that which is given off and the deficiency has to be made good out of the stock with which the organism started originally, that is, from the innate heat in which the soul was incorporate. This eventually is so reduced by constant draughts made upon it that it is insufficient to support the soul. The natural span of life, he says, differs greatly in length in different species, due to material constitution and the degree of harmony with the environment. But still, as a general rule, big plants and animals live longer than smaller ones; sanguineous or vertebrates longer than invertebrates; the more perfect longer than the less perfect; and long gestation generally goes with long duration. Thus bulk, degree of organization, period of gestation, are correlated. Great size goes with high organization.

In his Rhetoric,[56] as is well known, Aristotle gives old age an unfavorable aspect. He says in substance that the old have lived many years and been often the victims of deception, and since vice is the rule rather than the exception in human affairs, they are never positive about anything. They “suppose” and add “perhaps” or “possibly,” always expressing themselves in doubt and never positively. They are uncharitable and ever ready to put the worst construction upon everything. They are suspicious of evil, not trusting, because of their experience of human weakness. Hence they have no strong loves or hates but go according to the precept of bias. Their love is such as may one day become hate and their hatred such as may one day become love. The temper of mind is neither grand nor generous—not the former because they have been too much humiliated and have no desire to go according to anything but mere appearances, and not the latter because property is a necessity of life and they have learned the difficulty of acquiring it and the facility with which it may be lost. They are cowards and perpetual alarmists, exactly contrary to the young; not fervent, but cold. They are never so fond of life as on their last day. Again, it is the absent which is the object of all desire, and what they most lack they most want. They are selfish and inclined to expediency rather than honor; the former having to do with the individual and the latter being absolute. They are apt to be shameless rather than the contrary and are prone to disregard appearances. They are dependent for most things. They live in memory rather than by hope, for the remainder of their life is short while the past is long, and this explains their garrulity. Their fits of passion though violent are feeble. Their sensual desires have either died or become feeble but they are regulated chiefly by self-interest. Hence they are capable of self-control, because desires have abated and self-interest is their leading passion. Calculation has a character that regulates their lives, for while calculation is directed to expediency, morality is directed to virtue as its end. Their offenses are those of petty meanness rather than of insolence. They are compassionate like the young, but the latter are so from humanity while the old suppose all manner of sufferings at their door. When the orator addresses them he should bear these traits in mind. Elsewhere[57] he says a happy old age is one that approaches gradually and without pain and is dependent upon physical excellence and on fortune, although there is such a thing as a long life even without health and strength.

Thus, on the whole, the Greeks took a very somber view of old age. They prized youth as perhaps no other race has ever done and loved to heighten their appreciation of it by contrasting it with life in its “sere and yellow leaf.” Pindar says in substance that darkness, old age, and death never seemed so black as by contrast with the glories of the great festivals and games which every few years brought together all those who loved either gold or glory. Socrates, who refused to flee from his fate and calmly drank hemlock at the age of seventy, and Plato, who lived to be an octogenarian, must, on the whole, be regarded as exceptions, and conceptions of a future life were never clear and strong enough to be of much avail against the pessimism that in bright Hellas clouded the closing scenes of life’s drama.

When we turn to Rome, we have, on the whole, a more favorable view. Even in the early stages of Roman life, family and parental authority were well developed and in Roman law the patria potestas gave the head of the family great dignity and power. This term designates the aggregate of those peculiar powers and rights that, by the civil law of Rome, belonged to the head of a family in respect to his wife, children (natural or adopted) and more remote descendants who sprang from him through males only. Anciently it was of very extensive scope, embracing even the power of life and death; but this was greatly curtailed until finally it meant but little more than a right of the paterfamilias to hold his own property or the acquisitions of one under his power.[58]

The Roman Senate was, as the etymology of the word suggests, a body of old men; and as the Romans had an unprecedented genius for social and political organization, the wisdom necessary for exercising successfully administrative functions, which age alone can give, had greater scope. In this respect the Catholic Church later and its canon law were profoundly influenced by and, indeed, as Zeller has shown in his remarkable essay on the subject, derived most of its prominent features directly from the political organization of ancient Rome, also giving great authority to presbyters, elders, and affording exceptional scope to the organizing ability that comes to its flower in later life. Jesus was young and Keim believes that all His disciples were even younger. Those who created ecclesiastical institutions, however, were far older.

In Cicero’s De Senectute[59] we have a remarkably representative statement put into the mouth of the old man, Cato, as to how aging Romans regarded their estate, and I think the chief impression in reading this remarkable document is the vast fund of instances of signal achievements of old men that are here brought together. This will be apparent from the following brief résumé.

Cato in his old age is approached by youths who want to know what he can tell them about life. He commends their interest in age and tells them he has himself just begun to learn Greek, on which he spent much time in later years. After the first few pages the treatise becomes almost entirely a monologue of Cato. Every state is irksome to those who have no support within and do not see that they owe happiness to themselves. We must not say old age creeps on after manhood, manhood after youth, youth after childhood, etc. Each age has its own interests—spring for blossoms, autumn for fruit. The wise submit and do not, like the giants, war against the gods. There are very many instances of those who outlived enjoyment and found themselves forsaken, but of more who won notable renown and respect. Perhaps the greatest merit of this book is the instances of noble old age that abound.

Many are great owing to the reputation of their country and would be small in other lands. To the very poor old age can never be very attractive. Think on your good deeds. When Marcus died, Cato long knew no other man to improve by. The four evils charged to old age are: (1) it disables from business, (2) it makes the body infirm, (3) it robs of pleasure, (4) it is near death. He takes these up in detail. The downfall of great states is “generally owing to the giddy administration of inexperienced young men”; and, on the contrary, tottering states have been saved by the old. The young are all ignorant orators. Memory fails in age only if not exercised, and this is true of all abilities. Sophocles wrote his Œdipus to defy those who called him a dotard. Democritus, Plato, Socrates, Zeno, and Cleanthes are cited. Many old men cannot submit to idleness but grow old learning something new every day, like Solon. Although the voice may be low, it may have more command. We should no more repine when middle life leaves us than we do when childhood departs. The adult does not mourn that he is no longer a boy. All must prepare themselves against old age and mitigate its natural infirmities.

The stage delights in weak, dissolute old fellows worthy of contempt and ridicule. Age must support its proper rights and dignities and not give them weakly away. We must recall at night all we have said or done during the day. As to the third, old age being incapable of pleasure, the great curse is indulgence of passion, for which men have betrayed their country. Governments have been ruined by treachery, for lust may prompt to any villainy. Reason is the best gift of heaven, but the highest rapture of feeling makes reflection impossible. Cato then describes with much detail the charm of country life—Cincinnatus, etc. We might well wish our enemies were guided by pleasure only for then we could master them more easily. The old man is dead to certain enjoyments. He does not so much prize the convivium for food as for talk. We must not choose only companions of our own age for there will be few of these left. A talk should turn to the subjects proposed by the master of the feast, the cups be cooling. He says “I thank the gods I am got rid of that tyranny” (venery). He does not want or even wish it in any form.

Far above the delights of literature or philosophy are the charms of country life, and he describes at length the various methods of vine culture, fertilization, improving barren soil, irrigation, orchards, cattle, bees, gardens, flowers, tree planting, etc. The farmer can say, like the ancient Semites when offered gold, that they wanted none for it was more glorious to command those who valued it than to possess it. Then follow many instances of old people who have retired to the country and perhaps even have been called from their farms to great tasks of state. He advises reading Xenophon. An old age thus spent is the happiest period if attended with honor and respect. Old men are miserable if they demand the defense of oratory. In the college of augurs old men have great dignity. Some wines sour with age but others grow better and richer. A gravity with some severity is allowed, but never ill nature. Covetousness is most absurd because what is left of life needs little.

The young should be trained to envisage death. Youth in its greatest vigor is subjected to more diseases than old age. If men too young governed the state, all government would fall. The old have already attained what the young only hope for, namely, long years. No actor can play more than one rôle at once. It takes more water to put out a hot fire than a spent one. The young are more prone to die by violence, the old by over-ripeness. The old can oppose tyrants because these can only kill; and their life, being shorter, is worth far less. The young and old should meditate on death till it becomes familiar and this only makes the mind free and easy. Many a soldier has rushed into the mêlée, with no result, when he knew he would be cut to pieces, and Marcus Atilius Regulus went back to his enemies for certain torture and death because he had promised. There is a certain satiety of each stage of life, and always one is fading as another warms up.

Perhaps, Cato concludes, our minds are an efflux of some universal mind, and there may be an argument for preëxistence. We have not only interest in, but a kind of right to, posterity. The wisest accept death most easily, although it is by no means clear whether we are dissolved or there is a personal continuation.

Roman authors quote “many cases of great longevity,” and Onomocritus, an Athenian, tells us that certain men of Greece, and even entire families, enjoyed perpetual youth for centuries. Old Papalius was believed to have lived 500 years and a Portugee, Faria, 300. Pliny tells us of a king who died in his eighty-second year. Strabo says that in the Punjab people lived over 200 years. Epaminondas had seen three centuries pass. Pliny tells us that when, in the reign of Vespasian, statistics of all centenarians between the Apennines and the Po were collected, there were more than a hundred and seventy of them out of a population of three million, six of whom lived over 150 years. According to Lucian, Tiresias lived 600 years on account of the purity of his life, and the inhabitants of Mount Ethos had the faculty of living a century and a half. He tells us of an Indian race, the Seres who, because of temperate life and very scanty food, lived 300 years, while Pliny tells of an Illyrian who lived 500 and the king of Cyprus who outlived 160 years. Litorius of Aetolia was happiest among mortals for he had attained 200 years. Apolonius, the grammarian, outdoes all others and tells of people who lived thousands of years.

Of the condition and status of old people all through the Christian centuries down to the age of authentic statistics we know very little.

Roger Bacon tells us of a remarkable man who appeared in Europe in 1245 and in whom everyone was interested. He claimed that he had attended the Council of Paris in A.D. 362 and also the baptism of Clovis. Bacon’s skepticism reduced the claim of this unknown man to 300 years. In 1613 was published at Turin the life of a man who is said to have lived nearly 400 years, enjoying full use of all his faculties; and in the seventeenth century a Scotchman, MacCrane, lived 200 years and talked of the Wars of the Roses. So the lives of the saints are rich in old people—St. Simeon is said to have lived 107 years; St. Narcissus, 165; St. Anthony, 105; the hermit, Paul, 113; while the monks of Mount Ethos often reached the age of 150, as did the first bishop of Ethiopia. Although there are, of course, no vital statistics, there are many reasons to believe that the average length of human life was shorter and that old people in general, although, of course, not without remarkable exceptions, enjoyed little respect. Descriptions of them sometimes appear in miracle plays, more commonly in the form of caricatures, as is often the case on the modern stage, where the personification of old people is often a specialty. There are dotards and fatuities galore and the more dignified figures like King Lear or even Shylock are represented as morally perverse or mentally unsound.

Here should be mentioned the remarkable theory of witchcraft elaborated by Karl Pearson.[60] W. Notestein[61] tells us that by accounting as carefully as the insufficient evidence permits it would seem that “about six times as many women were indicted as men,” and also that there were “twice as many married women as spinsters,” which is less in accord with tradition. From his account, as well as from the old chapter of C. Mackay on the “Witch Mania” (in his Popular Delusions) and also from an interesting study by G. L. Kittredge,[62] it would seem that the first accusations of witchcraft were made against old, middle-aged, and young women almost indiscriminately, while in a later stage of the delusion attention focused on old women, influenced by folklore, which tends to make them hags.

Pearson’s theory, developed with great ingenuity, is that witchcraft is a revival of a very old and widespread matriarchate wherein woman not only ruled but society was everywhere permeated by her genius, and paternity was unknown. The key to this older civilization was the development of woman’s intuitive faculty under the stress of child-bearing and -rearing. The mother-age in its diverse forms has been a stage of social growth for probably all branches of the human race. With its mother-right customs it made a social organization in which there was more unity of interest, fellowship, partnership in property and sex than we find in the larger social units of to-day. Hence feminists may well look back to this as a golden age, despite the fact that it was in many respects cruel and licentious. It shows that those who talk of absolute good and bad and an unchanging moral code may help to police but can never reform society.

Pearson proceeds to argue that certain forms of medieval witchcraft are fossils of the old mother-age and more or less perverted rites and customs of a prehistoric civilization, and even holds that the confessions wrung from poor old women by torture have a real scientific value for the historian of a far earlier stage of life. Primitive woman, thus, once had a status far higher and very different from anything she has since enjoyed. Man as husband and father had no place but came later. Aging women in the matriarchate were depositaries of tribal lore and family custom, and the “wise one,” “sibyl,” or “witch” passed all this along, as she did her herb-lore. She domesticated the small animals—goat, goose, cat, hen; devised the distaff, spindle, pitchfork, broom (but not the spear, axe, or hammer); and presided over rites in which there were symbols of agricultural and animal fertility and abundant traces of licentiousness and impurity in the sacred dances and ceremonies. “Witch” means “wiseacre,” “one who knows,” and some were good and some bad dames or beldames. The former brought good luck; the latter, famine, plague, etc. All witches have weather wisdom, and a descendant of the Vola or Sibyl is, in the Edda, seated in the midst of the assembly of the gods and could produce thunder, hail, and rain. Tacitus tells us of men who took the part of priestesses, probably in female attire. Kirmes is a festival lasting several days, primarily for dedicating a church, although it has many features of the celebration of a goddess, who in Christian demonology was first converted into the devil’s mother or grandmother and invested with most of the functions of old witches. These, in the witches’ sabbath, came more to devolve upon her son. In Swabia the witch stone is an old altar and the ceremonies about it suggest marriage. The devil is a professional sweetheart; his mother, a person of great importance, was supposed once to have built a palace on the Danube, to hunt with black dogs, and to be related to Frau Holda. She watered the meadows in “Twelfth Night” and punished idle spinsters. The devil’s mother is only a degraded form of the goddess of fertility and domestic activity and her worship was once associated not only with licentiousness but with human sacrifice. It was these women who were primarily in league with the devil and once a year must dance all night. The hag is the woman of the woods who knows and collects herbs, especially those that relieve the labors of childbirth. The priestess of the old civilization became a medicine woman and midwife, the goddess of fertility being killed in the autumn that she may be rejuvenated in the spring. Thus the witch is a relic of the priestess or goddess of fertility, and the hostility they sometimes exhibit for marriage was because at this stage it was not monogamic but group marriage.

Thus Pearson thinks that Walpurgis customs bring out most of the weak and strong points of ancient woman’s civilization, fossils of which lurk under all the folklore of witchcraft. Here we find the rudiments of medicine, domestication of small animals, cultivation of vegetables, domestic and household arts, the pitchfork—which was once the fire-rake—etc. All of these are woman’s inventions and were necessary for the higher discoveries. Although he did not invent them, man later made woman use them. The primitive savage knows nothing of agriculture, spinning, and herbs, but his wife does. It is not he but she who made these symbols of a female deity. The fertility, resource, and inventiveness of woman arose from the struggle she had to make for the preservation of herself and her child. Man was quickened by warfare of tribe against tribe, but that came later. The first struggle was for food and shelter. Thus the father-age rests on a degenerate form of an older group and is not the pure outcome of male domination. He thus believes in a direct line of descent from the old salacious worship of the mother-goddess and the extravagances of witchcraft, and he finds survivals of this even in the licensed vice of to-day. Thus this early civilization of woman handed down a mass of useful customs and knowledge, so that she was the bearer of a civilization that man has not yet entirely attained. If many things in her life are vestiges of the mother age, many in his represent a still lower stratum and the drudgery of the peasant woman in many parts of Europe represents the extreme of the reaction brought about by male dominance.

Otis T. Mason and A. F. Chamberlain have stressed the significance of woman’s work in the early stages of the development of the human race, and if it be true that in witchcraft we have a recrudescence of the reactions of man to this preëminence of the other sex, in which woman in her least attractive form—all shriveled, toothless, and as a vicious trouble-maker—is caricatured in the long war of sex against sex, we certainly have here considerable confirmation of some of the views now represented by John M. Tyler[63] that prehistoric woman led mankind in the early stages of its upward march toward civilization. In the eternal struggle of old people to maintain their power against the oncoming generations which would submerge or sweep them away, witchcraft on this view represents the very latest stage of a long and losing struggle of old women for place and influence who in the last resort did not scruple, handicapped though they were by ugliness, neglect, and contempt, to cling to the least and last remnants of their ancient prerogatives.

The attitude of children toward old people is interesting and significant, but it is very difficult to distinguish between their own indigenous and intrinsic feelings and the conventionalities of respect and even the outer forms of convention that society has imposed upon them. Many children live with their grandparents and the attitude of the latter toward the former makes, of course, a great difference. Both, especially grandmothers, are prone to be over-indulgent and often allow children greater liberties than the mother would—under the influence, doubtless, of the very strong instinct to win their good-will. But it is very doubtful if the average child loves the grandmother as much as it is loved by her.

Colin Scott[64] obtained 226 reminiscent answers from adults on the question of how as children they felt toward old people and found little difference in the sexes in this respect. No less than eighty per cent expressed negative or pessimistic views; that is, they disliked old people because they could not run and play; because they were sometimes cross, solemn, stupid, conceited; perhaps were thought to envy the young or interfere with childish pleasures, etc.; while not a few expressed points of aversion to wrinkles, unsteady gait, untidiness in dress and habits (particularly of eating), slowness, uncertain voice, loss of teeth, bad pronunciation, etc. Only twenty per cent took a favorable view of old people, regarding them as wise, not only about the weather but about other things; as free to do what they wished; having great power as storytellers; constantly doing little acts of kindness and sometimes interceding with parents in their behalf. For the majority of young children the pleasures of life seem to be essentially over at forty and they look upon people of that age as already moribund. Very often children are overcome by a sudden sense of pathos that old people are facing death, the process of which with lowered vitality seems to them to have already begun. To some, the very aged, even conventionally loved, are inwardly repulsive because their weakness and appearance already begin to seem a little corpse-like; while a few, on the other hand, are animated by the motive to make old people happy because their life seems to them so short or because little things please them so much. It would almost seem from such data as though the modern child was not sufficiently accustomed to grandparents to have fully adjusted to them; and, as everyone knows, there is a very strong and instinctive tendency in children to jeer at and perhaps attempt ludicrous imitations of old age. At any rate, we have here two tendencies evidently in greater or less conflict with each other.

Mantegazza[65] collected very many views from literature concerning old age and death and grouped them in two classes, favorable and unfavorable. The majority of his quotations stigmatize it as repulsive, crumpled in skin and form, perhaps tearful, squinting, with mottled skin, loose, distorted teeth, emaciation sometimes suggesting a skeleton, hardness of hearing, croaking voice, knotted veins, hemorrhoids, tending to drift into an apologetic attitude for living like a beggar asking alms or craving pity, with no strong desires, etc., so that even those who love old people in the bottom of their hearts often do not want them around. These quotations stress the garrulousness, untidiness in table manners, carelessness in dress or toilet, moodiness, exacting nature, and disparagement of present times in always lauding the past. “Old age is pitiable because although life is not attractive, death is dreaded.” People sometimes “seem to themselves and to others to live on because the gods do not love them.” Life is often described as a “long sorrow, the last scene of which is always death.” “There are only three events—to be born, live, and die. A man does not feel it when he is born but through life he suffers and death is painful, and then he is forgotten.” “Every tick of the clock brings us nearer to death.” “We part from life as from the house of a host and not from our own home.” “One after another our organs refuse their service and collapse.” “All that lives must die, and all that grows must grow old.” “Death begins in the cradle.” “The harbor of all things good or bad is death.” “The elements are in constant conflict with man, slowly demolishing everything he does and in the end annihilating him.”

On the other hand, some, like the Stoics, have not only affected to accept death with perfect equanimity but call it the highest good that God has given men. The Epicurean said death was no evil because as long as we live it is not present and when it is present we are not there. Pliny said the gods have given us nothing more to be desired than brevity of life. Others say that the old may have weak bodies but normally have good will and this compensates. Others stress the dignity of age or its steadfastness, its fondness for children and the young. Sometimes the old become epicures in eating and connoisseurs in drinking. Some commend as a laudable ambition the desire of the old to live as long, as well, and as fully as possible. Others think the love of beauty, especially in nature, is greater; still others find a new love of order, better knowledge of self, both physical and mental. He suggests that old age should be almost a profession, as we have to fit to new conditions. It is possible then to take larger views, and he says that of the three attitudes toward death, (1) not to think of it at all, the recourse of the common and the weak, (2) belief in immortality, a very pleasing and comforting delusion, and (3) to face and get familiar with it, the last is by far the highest and hardest. Thus the old must realize that they are as brittle and fragile as glass, cannot do what they once could, become ill from slighter causes and recover more slowly, must especially guard against colds, fatigue, change of habit, and must be always on their guard not to accept others’ precepts about keeping themselves in the top of their condition but work out those best for themselves.

In all ages since civilization began we have frequent outcrops of the tendency to divide human life into stages, many or few, more or less sharply marked off one from the other. L. Löw has given us a comprehensive survey of this subject. There has never been, however, any general agreement as to these age demarcations save two, namely, the beginning and the end of sex life, which divides life into three stages. Child life, as we all know, has lately been divided into various epochs—the nursling; the pre-school age; the quadrennium from eight to twelve; puberty; the age of attaining majority; nubility; the acme of physical ability (for example, for athletes circa thirty); the beginning of the decline of life, most often placed between forty and fifty, a stage that has many marked features of its own; the development of the senium, marked by impotence, with occasional subdivisions of this stage, as, for example in Shakespeare:

The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,

His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Our educational curricula are still far more logical in the sequence of their subject matter and their method than they are genetic whereas they should be essentially the latter, as will be the case when the paidocentric viewpoint has become paramount, as it should, over the scholiocentric. We have made much progress since Herbart in determining true culture stages, and while there are very many exceptions to the law that in general the individual recapitulates the stages of the race, this great principle has far wider scope than we have yet recognized. Again, we have made great progress along another line, namely, in distinguishing physiological and especially psychological from chronological age, but here we have little consensus of either method or result beyond the early teens. Yet no observer of life can fail to doubt that there is the same and perhaps even, on the whole, greater average diversity among individuals in mental age as they advance along the scale of years. Some minds are young and growing at seventy while others seem to cross some invisible deadline at forty. But of all this we have no settled criteria and the age of customary or enforced retirement is arbitrary, though very diversely fixed by various industrial concerns, pension systems, etc., without regard to mental age or youth. In fact, the world has so far attempted almost nothing that could be called a curriculum for the later years of life—physical, intellectual, moral, social, or even hygienic or religious, after the very variable period when the prime of life is reached and passed. Happily, however, we do have both vestiges and modern recrudescences of such a view in the field of religion, as may be briefly illustrated in the following paragraphs.

Many have held with DuBuy,[66] that different religions best fitted different ages. He believes that Confucianism, with its stress on respect for parents and ancestors and on the cultivation of practical virtues, best fits the nature and needs of young children; that Mohammedanism, with its passionate monotheism, has a certain affinity for the next stage of life; Christianity is best from adolescence on to the age when the marriage relation is at its apex; Buddhism comes next; and Brahmanism is for old age.

Max Müller[67] says that in very ancient India it was recognized “that the religion of a man cannot and ought not to be the same as that of a child, and that the religious ideas of an old man must differ from those of an active man in the world. It is useless to attempt to deny such facts,” and we are reminded that we all have to struggle and have to pass through many stages of clearing up childish conceptions in this field. Most cultivated men come out of these struggles with certain rather firm convictions, but these later may be found to need revision.

But when the evening of life draws near and softens the light and shade of conflicting opinion, when to agree with the spirit of truth within becomes far dearer than to agree with a majority of the world without, the old questions appeal once more like long forgotten friends. The old man learns to bear with those from whom formerly he differed, and while he is willing to part with all that is non-essential—and most religious differences seem to arise from non-essentials—he clings all the more firmly to the few strong and solid planks that are left to carry him into the harbor no longer very distant from his sight. It is hardly creditable how all other religions have overlooked these simple facts, how they have tried to force on the old and wise the food that was meant for babes, and how they have thereby alienated and lost their best and strongest friends. It is therefore a lesson all the more worth learning from history that one religion at least, and one of the most ancient and powerful and most widely spread religions, has recognized this fact without the slightest hesitation.

According to the ancient canons of the Brahmanic faith, each man must pass through several stages. The youth is sent to the house of a teacher or Guru, whom he must obey and serve implicitly in every way and who teaches what is necessary for life, especially the Veda and his religious duties. He is a mere passive recipient, learner, and believer. At the next stage the man is married and must perform all the duties prescribed for the householder. But during both these periods no doubt is ever heard as to the truth of religion or the authority of laws and rites. But when the hair turns white and there are grandchildren, “a new life opens during which the father of the family may leave his home and village and retire into the forest with or without his wife. During that period he is absolved from the necessity of performing any sacrifices, although he may or must undergo certain self-denials or penances, some of them extremely painful. He is then allowed to meditate with proper freedom on the great problems of life and death, and for that purpose is expected to study the Upanishads,” to learn the doctrines in which all sacrificial duties are rejected, and the very gods to whom the ancient prayers of the Veda were addressed are put aside to make room for the one supreme impersonal being called Brahm. These mahatmas, like some medieval hermit-saints commemorated in the voluminous hagiology of the Bollandist Fathers, were reputed to have often attained very great age and wisdom and to be sought out in their retreats to solve great problems by men still in active life. The bodies of a few of them were fabled to have undergone a subtle process of transubstantiation and thus to have achieved a true mundane immortality.

Thus the religion of childhood and manhood for the venerable sage is transmuted into philosophy or meditation on the most general problems and the very nature of not only life but being itself, that Plato described as the cult of death. The old man, thus, in the classic days of ancient India directed his thoughts toward absorption. His religion was pantheism, and the theme of his contemplation was the source of all things and their return to this source as their goal. Perhaps we might now say that according to this view, if evolution is the inspiration of the intellect in its youth and its prime, involution was its muse in the stages of decline as it awaited resumption into the One-and-All. Modern pragmatists, like the best of the ancient Sophists, hold that the truth that best fits and expresses Me is and must be held with the completest conviction, and the genetic idea is that different philosophies and different faiths fit and express not only different temperaments but different stages of life, and that, therefore, creeds can never be fixed and stationary but must be constantly transformed. There is no absolute or final form of truth for all save in the dominion of pure mathematical and physical science, and it is one of the most tragic aspects of our modern culture that we so often find mature and even aging men and women arrested in infantile or juvenile stages of their development in regard to the larger problems of life, for where and just in proportion as the latter is intense there is incessant change. Christianity is the best of all religions through the entire stage of the vita sexualis from its inception to its decline. Its essence is the sublimation of love. It is the religion of personalization culminating in the faith in another individual life. It is not the religion for old men, and the revival of its attitudes, which we often see in them, is a phenomenon of arrest or reversion and not one of the advance that senescence should mark if the last stage of life is to have its complete unfoldment.

Some writers believe that age differences constitute one of the important bases, if not the chief one, in the primitive segmentation of society into layers. It is a common observation that the young tend to be progressive and radical, and the old, conservative, intent that no good thing of the past be lost. Indeed, this is often called the most natural and wholesome basis of division into parties, religious as well as political. In a sense there is eternal war between the old and young, as illustrated, for example, by Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. The young are always inclined to brush aside their elders and are psychologically incapable of taking their point of view. So in many a mixed assemblage we have a clash of temperaments that divides fathers and sons, mothers and daughters.[68] In some Australian tribes there is an absolute dominance of the elders, and among some American Indians of the plain there is incessant antagonism between the young braves eager to distinguish themselves in raids against hostile tribes and the older chiefs seeking to prevent a hazardous war. F. Schurtz[69] thinks this antagonism between the older and younger generation, which separates parents from children, forms the germ of classifications of age and is the oldest type of associated groups. Lowie, however, does not think that the kind of age groupings found in such cultures have a purer natural basis but rather that they represent a blending of psychological and conventional factors. It is very hard to transcend the intuitions of one’s years. Where these segmentations occur they may or may not be fully organized, but they generally go back to a more primitive social division into boys, bachelors, and married men, very common among savages. More elaborated age distinctions probably arose a little later.

R. S. Bourne[70] also realizes that there is always a half-conscious war going on between the old and the young and believes this is a wholesome challenge that both should recognize to justify themselves. Older men should not be led captive by the younger and should neither over-emphasize nor waive their own cherished convictions, which are the best results of age and experience. To-day the older generation is more inclined to stress duty and service and to hark back to Victorian ideals. Perhaps in general they tend a little to over-individuation but they should choose the golden mean between insisting upon their own point of view and complete capitulation to youth.

Indeed, we may go much further and say that just as, despite the love of man and woman, there has always been a war of sex against sex, so despite the love of parents and children, there is also eternal war between the old and young. The small boy loves, reveres, and obeys his father but often oscillates to the opposite state of fear and even hate under the law of the so-called ambivalence of feeling. Each age tends to assert itself and to resent the undue influence of another age. Youth pushes on and up and seeks to make itself effective and to escape or resist control by elders. This is very fully brought out in the recent literature of psychoanalysis. In primitive society the boy soon transfers this attitude toward his parents to the chief of the tribe, and then perhaps to a supreme being, for all gods are made in the father image. Indeed, we are now told that the primal, generic sin in its extreme form is patricide, and one of the deepest fears is directed against authority. The pre-Abrahamic sheik was his own priest and king and that of his tribe. There was no law save his will. Enlarged, perfected, and projected into the sky, the patronymic sire became a deity. Part of the ancient reverence for fathers accumulated from generation to generation was thus transcendentalized into deities and part of it developed in the mundane sphere as reverence for rulers, heroes, the great dead, or perhaps into the worship of ancestors. But one very essential part of it survives in adult life in the attitude toward authority, every instrument and bearer of which is thus generically a father-surrogate. Thus older people feel toward their deities much as younger children do toward earthly parents and the greater men in their environment. There is always a measure of love and dread merging into each other. Ancient tribes that Robertson Smith and Frazer describe, after selecting and feeding fat their rulers for a time, ascribing to them divine prerogatives, giving them extraordinary freedom in certain respects while restricting them by severe taboos and in other ways, finally slew them ritually as sacrifices offered with piacular rites. All this illustrates the same dual trend of affectivity within and so does the fate of every deity who is slain, perhaps with every indignity and torture, and afterwards resurrected, transfigured, and glorified.

All government in a sense, too, springs from paternalism, and so does all human power, dignity, and prerogatives, so that the French revolutionist and even Nihilist, who is chronically and constitutionally against all the powers that be and who feels that every command or prohibition is a challenge to defy or violate it, only illustrates the extreme of revolt now sometimes designated as kurophobia.[71]

Of course rebellion against tyranny is commendable. Many fathers are bad and this cumulative fact has greatly intensified the instinct of rebellion. In an extreme form this may be expressed in negativism or anti-suggestibility, but sooner or later there is a revolt of all sons against all sires. This, too, acts as a challenge to originality and gives its élan to the passion for boundless freedom, which may even degenerate into forms of affectation and a passion for over-individuality. Thus next to hostile nature herself, fathers and what they symbolize have been the objects of man’s chief opposition in the world’s history. The very words “obey” and “conform” hardly exist in the vocabulary of some recusants. The devil, too, always denies and defies and all through the history of religions has been the typical rebel. The kurophobe is the evil genius of republics and democracies. He prates of rights and has little or nothing to say of duties and on this view he is the product of all the bad fathers in his pedigree.

In many patriarchal and tribal societies the father or chief monopolized the women, whom the sons dared not approach. Hence we are told that they were compelled to seek mates outside, whence exogeny arose. Freudians hold that the son’s rancor against the father is rooted in this inhibition of the mating instinct. This doubtless did contribute very much to intensify it as the boy grew to man’s estate but it is going too far to say that in the very intricate grammar of revolt, no less complex than Newman long ago showed the grammar of assent to be, other factors did not come in and that there no other social inhibitions of the will-to-live than those of the will to propagate. This rivalry and antagonism, which is probably more deep and multiform than we have yet realized, is seen at every age from early childhood—in the hostility of Freshman and Sophomore, those under and over age for citizenship or for war, in struggles of men in the meridian of life to depose or supplant those a little older, in the countless devices of those who are aging to maintain their power and influence, which perhaps never in history had such an efficient bulwark as when they became secure in the right of testamentary bequest of their property as they wished—and is only mitigated in the case of the very old because they are few and feeble and have already in many ways been superseded and relegated to inefficiency.

Metchnikoff in his essay on Old Age tells us that at Vate the “old men have at least this consolation—that during the funeral ceremonies it is customary to attach to their arms a pig which may be eaten during the feast given in honor of the departure of the soul for the other world.” After citing other similar cases, he tells us that civilized people are not unlike savages for although they do not kill superannuated members of the community they often make their lives very unhappy, the old often being considered as a heavy charge, which causes great impatience at the delay of death. This is expressed in the Italian proverb that old women have seven lives and the Burgomasks think that old women have seven souls, besides an eighth soul, quite small, and half a soul besides; while the Lithuanians complain that an old woman is so tenacious of life that she can not be even ground in a mill. He cites the protest of Paris medical students against the decision of the state superseding the law prescribing a limit of age for the professors, saying, “We do not want dotards.” A convict in the Saghalien Islands condemned for the assassination of several old men said, “What is the use of making such a fuss about them? They are already old and would die anyway in a few years.” In Dostoievsky’s Crime and Punishment one student declared in a group of his mates that he would kill and rob the cursed old woman without the slightest remorse, and continues, “On the one side we have a stupid, unfeeling old woman, of no account, wicked and sick, whom no one would miss—on the contrary, who is an injury to everyone and does not herself know why she keeps on living and who perhaps will be good and dead to-morrow; while, on the other hand, there are fresh young lives wasting for nothing at all, without being helped by anyone, that can be numbered by thousands.” Old men, too, often commit suicide. Prussian statistics show that people between 50 and 80 commit suicide about twice as often as those between 20 and 50, and the same is true of Denmark. “The young and strong adults furnished, therefore, 36½ per cent of the suicides, while the number furnished by the aged amounted to 63½ per cent.” Metchnikoff finds that “the desire to live, instead of diminishing tends, on the contrary, to increase with age.” “The old Fuegian women, aware that they are destined to be eaten, flee into the mountains, whither they are pursued by the men and carried back home where they must submit to death.” “The philosopher in me does not believe in death; it is the old man who has not the courage to face the inevitable.” And so it is that old professors rarely wish to abandon their chairs. Nor do they even always renounce the tender passion, a fact illustrated by Goethe, who at the age of 74 fell in love with a girl of 17, proposed marriage to her, and failing in the project wrote his pathetic Elegy of Marienbad, in which he said “For me the universe is lost; I am lost to myself. The gods, whose favorite I lately was, have tried me,” etc. The weakening of his powers in the latter part of Faust and at the end of Wilhelm Meister was abundantly shown.

We resume our historical notes with Luigi Cornaro (1464–1566),[72] a wealthy Venetian nobleman, who, as a result of a wild and intemperate life, found himself at forty broken in health and facing death and so radically changed not only his mode of life but his residence and devoted himself, after this crisis, with the “most incessant attention” to the securing of perfect health, studying every item of diet and regimen for its effects upon him. At eighty-three, after more than forty years of perfect health and undisturbed tranquillity, he wrote his La Vita Sobria, an essay that was later followed by three others, one written at eighty-six, another at ninety-one, the last at ninety-five; the four completing a most instructive life history and one which the most earnest desire and hope of his life was that others might know and follow. He believed that the kind of life most people lead is utterly worthless and emphasized the great value of the later years of life as compared with the earlier ones. His message to the world has been a classic. He hoped that he had made the moderate life so attractive that the attitude of the world toward old age and death would be changed.

In his first discourse he gives many details of how he conceived life in the simple way nature intended it and how we must learn to be content with a little and experience all the joys that come from self-control. When the passions are subdued, man can give himself up wholly to reason. His physicians told him that he must partake of no food save that prescribed for invalids but he found that he must carefully study each article of diet and decide for himself because no general prescriptions avail. By dint of long observations upon himself he started with the belief that “whatever tastes good will nourish and strengthen” and learned that “not to satiate oneself with food is the science of health.” He guarded particularly against great heat, cold, and fatigue; allowed nothing to interfere with his rest and sleep, would never stay in an ill-ventilated room, and avoided excessive exposure to wind and sun. At the age of seventy he was severely injured by a carriage accident so that all his friends expected his death and the physicians suggested either bleeding or purging as forlorn hopes. He refused both and trusted to the recuperative effects of his well regulated life. He recovered completely as he, indeed, fully expected to do, although it was thought by his friends to be miraculous. Later, yielding reluctantly to the urgency of physicians and friends, he increased his daily intake of food so that instead of twelve ounces, including bread, the yolk of an egg, a little meat and soup, he now took fourteen ounces; and instead of fourteen ounces of wine, as before, he raised his ration to sixteen ounces. Under this increased diet he grew seriously ill (at seventy-eight). But on returning to his old dietary he recovered.

Hence, he concludes that “a man cannot be a perfect physician of anyone except of himself alone” and that by dint of experimenting he may “acquire a perfect knowledge of his own condition and of his most hidden qualities and find out what food and what drink and what quantities of each would agree with his stomach.” “Various experiments are absolutely necessary, for there is not so great a variety of features as there is diversity of temperaments and stomachs among men.” He found he could not drink wine over a year old, and that pepper injured but cinnamon helped him, something which no physician could have anticipated. He shows the fallacy of the notion that such a life leaves nothing to fall back upon in time of sickness by saying that such sickness would thus be avoided and that his dietary is sufficient so that in sickness, when all tend to eat less, he has still a sufficient margin, although probably the quantity or quality of food that suits him, he admits, might not suit others. The objection that many who lead irregular lives live to be old he refutes by saying that some have exceptional vitality but that all can prolong life by his method. He tells us that he rides without assistance, climbs hills, is never perturbed in soul, is occupied during the entire day, changes his residence in warm weather to the country which he thinks important, enjoys the society of able, cultivated, and active-minded men, and all his senses have remained perfect.

He tells us that he improved upon Sophocles, who wrote a tragedy at seventy-three, for he has written a comedy; of his seven grandchildren, all offspring of one pair; how he enjoys singing (probably religious incantations), and how much his voice has improved; that he would not be willing to exchange “either my life or my great age for that of any young man,” etc. He praises his heart, memory, senses, brain, and is certain that he will die, when the time comes, without pain or illness and hopes to enjoy the other world beyond.

In his later discourses he tells us that although naturally of a very choleric disposition he entirely subdued it. He corrects the notion that the old must eat much to keep their bodies warm; says as old age is a disease we must eat less, as we do when ill; refutes the maxim “a short life and a merry one” and the fallacy that one cannot much prolong or shorten life by regimen; tells us exactly what foods he prefers—soup, eggs, mutton, fowl, fish, etc. At ninety-one he says, “The more my years multiply, the more my strength also increases,” and he preaches an earthly paradise after the age of eighty; while at ninety-five he writes that all his faculties “are in a condition as perfect as ever they were; my mind is more than ever keen and clear, my judgment sound, my memory tenacious, my heart full of life,” and his voice so strong that he has to sing aloud his morning and evening prayers. He enjoys two lives at the same time, one earthly and the other heavenly by anticipation.

As Cornaro advanced in years he grew very proud of his age, and his four discourses give us the impression that regimen and hygiene were his true religion, although he was very pious according to the standards of his age. His diet, the houses he built to live in for each season, his charities, the public works he instituted, and even the friends he cultivated, like everything else he said and did, were determined largely by what he thought were their effects upon his physical and mental health. No young man or young woman was ever prouder of his youth than he of his age. He gloried in it as manhood and womanhood do in their prime, and no evangelist was more intent on convicting the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment than he was in exhorting men to change their mode of life to make it more sane, temperate, and abstemious—and that in a day and land when gluttony and riotous living were rife. For him a feast, rich repast, or a formal dinner was suicidal; and so were late hours, irregularities, excitement, and every form and degree of excess. So superior is senescence to all the other stages of life that he believed men should be dominated from the first by the desire to attain it as the supreme mundane felicity, because no one can be truly happy but the old. His mission was evidently to be the apostle of senescence.

True, he repeats himself, is often very platitudinous, no doubt, like most old men, greatly overestimates his powers, and if a poor and ignorant man would have been, very likely, a tedious old dotard. But as it is, his treatment of the problem of life is of great and lasting significance.

Lord Bacon[73] was evidently influenced by Cornaro, as he in turn was by the abstemious practices of monks and ascetics. Among the very practical suggestions of his paper we strike many quotations that have become familiar to all—Men fear death as children fear to go into the dark, and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other; since life is short and art is long, our chiefest aim should be to perfect the arts, and the greatest of them all is that of long life. Diet receives chief consideration. Bacon seems almost to believe that the ancients acquired a mode of putting off old age to a degree that has now become a lost art “through man’s negligence.” He stresses the power of the “spirits” and its waxing green again as the most ready and compendious way to long life but tells us that it may be in excess or in defect as, indeed, may every other activity; while the middle or moderate way is always to be sought. He discourses on the necessity of sufficient but not too much exercise, which must never be taken if the stomach is either too full or too empty. “Many dishes have caused many diseases,” and many medicines have caused few cures. “Emaciating diseases, afterwards well cured, have advanced many in the way of long life for they yield new juice, the old being consumed, and to recover from a sickness is to renew youth. Therefore, it were good to make some artificial diseases, which is done by strict and emaciating diets.”

Sleep is an aid to nourishment and it is especially important that in sleeping the body always be warm. Sleep is nothing but the reception and retirement of the living spirit into itself. We must also be cheerful in relation to both sleep and eating and he has many admonitions upon the advantages of pure air, the right affection, hope not too often frustrated, and especially a sense of progress, for most who live long have felt themselves advancing. Old men should dwell upon their childhood and youth, for this means rejuvenation. Hence association of the old with others whom they knew when young is most helpful. Habits, customs, and even diet, must be changed, but not too often or too much. One must constantly observe and study the effect upon himself of all the items of regimen. Grief, depression, excessive fear, lack of patience, are passions that feed upon and age the body. Each must acquire a wisdom “beyond the rules of physic; a man’s own observation, what he finds good of and what he finds hurt of, is the best physic to preserve health, and with regard to many things he must wisely and rightly decide whether or not they are good or bad for him, and that independently of all precepts and advice.”

Thus in his quaint style, and for reasons most of which science of to-day would utterly discard, he had the sagacity to reach many of the conclusions that are quite abreast of and in conformity with the most practical results of modern hygiene.

Addison,[74] avowedly more or less inspired by Cornaro, after condemning the prevailing gluttony says, “For my part, when I behold a fashionable table set out in all its magnificence, I fancy that I see gouts and dyspepsias, fevers and lethargies, and other distempers lying in ambuscade among the dishes.” He delights in the most plain and simple diet. Every animal but man keeps to one dish—herbs are the food of this species, fish of that, and flesh of the third. Man alone falls upon everything that comes in his way. “Not the smallest fruit or excrescence of the earth, scarce a berry or mushroom escapes him.” Hence he advises that we make our whole repast out of one dish and that we avoid all artificial provocatives, which create false appetites. He advises, too, that since this rule is so hard, “every man should have his days of abstinence according as his constitution will permit. These are great reliefs to nature as they qualify her for struggling with hunger and thirst and give her an opportunity of extricating herself from her oppressions. Besides that, abstinence will oftentimes kill a sickness in embryo and destroy the first seeds of an indisposition.” He then quotes the temperateness of Socrates, which enabled him to survive the great plague. He finds that many ancient sages and later philosophers developed a regimen so unique that “one would think the life of a philosopher and the life of a man were of two different dates.”

Robert Burton[75] thinks old age inherently melancholy, for “being cold and dry and of the same quality as melancholy it must needs come in.” It is full of ache, sorrow, grief, and most other faults, and these traits are most developed in old women and best illustrated by witches. The children of old men are rarely of good temperament and are especially liable to depression. He expatiates most fully upon the tragedy of old men and young wives, and gives many long incidents of jealousy and unfaithfulness of women who, although carefully guarded, have made old husbands cuckold. This is often worse in dotards, who become effeminate, cannot endure absence from their wives, etc. On this theme he elaborates for many pages, with scores of incidents from literature and history.

Jonathan Swift[76] describes the Struldbruggs or immortals whom he met in a far country. They were distinguished by being born with a red circle over the left eye, which changed in color and grew in size with age. These beings, he thought, must be a great blessing, and he described to those who had first told him of them what he would do were it his great good fortune to be born a Struldbrugg. First of all, he would amass wealth so that in two hundred years he would be the richest man in the realm. Next he would apply himself to learning, which in the course of time would make him wisest of all men. Then he would note all events and become a living treasury of knowledge and the oracle of the nation. He would be able to warn rising generations against all impending evils and thus prevent degeneration.

Having heard his ideals, he was told that in fact the state of these immortals was very different; indeed, so pitiful was it that their example mitigated the universal desire to live, so that death was no longer the greatest evil but, on the contrary, undue prolongation of life was a far greater one. The Struldbruggs acted like mortals till about thirty, then grew melancholy until four-score, when they had “not only the follies and infirmities of other old men but had many more which arose from the dreadful prospects of never dying.” “They were not only opinionative, peevish, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friendship and dead to all natural affection, which never descended below their grandchildren.” “Envy and impotent desires are their prevailing passion, but the objects against which their envy seems principally directed are the vices of the younger sort and the deaths of the old. By reflecting on the former they find themselves cut off from all possibility of pleasure, and whenever they see a funeral they lament and repine that others are gone to a harbor of rest to which they themselves can never hope to arrive.” “They have no remembrance of anything but what they learned and observed in their youth and middle age and even that is very imperfect, and for the truth or particulars of any fact it is safer to depend on the common traditions than upon their best recollections.” “The less miserable among them appear to be those who turn to dotage and entirely lose their memories; they meet with more pity and assistance because they lack many bad qualities which abound in others.” If they marry one of their own kind, the marriage is dissolved as soon as the younger comes to be four-score, for they “should not have their misery doubled by the load of a wife.”

“As soon as they have completed the term of eighty years they are looked on as dead in law; their heirs immediately succeed to their estates, only a small pittance being reserved for their support, and the poor ones are maintained at the public charge. After that period they are held incapable of any employment of trust or privilege, cannot purchase land or take leases; neither are they allowed to be witnesses in any cause either civil or criminal.” “At ninety they lose their teeth and hair, they have at that age no distinction of taste but eat and drink whatever they can get, without relish or appetite.” In talking, they forget the common appellation of things and the names of persons, even of those who are their nearest friends and relatives. “For the same reason they can never amuse themselves with reading because their memory will not serve to carry them from the beginning of a sentence to the end. The language of the country, too, is slowly undergoing a change so that the Struldbruggs of one age do not understand those of another but live like foreigners in their own country.” They are despised and hated by all sorts of people. When one of them is born it is reckoned ominous and the birth is recorded very particularly, but in general the record is lost after a thousand years. “They were the most mortifying sight I ever beheld, and the women were more horrible than the men. Besides the usual deformities in extreme old age, they acquired an additional ghastliness in proportion to their number of years.”

Thus from what the author saw and heard, his keen appetite for perpetuity of life was much abated and he realized that there was no form of death to which he would not run with pleasure in order to escape such a life. He concludes that it is fortunate that his desire of taking specimens of these people to his own country was forbidden by law, and reflects that their maintenance might prove a grievous public charge, for since “avarice is the necessary consequent of old age, these immortals would, in time, become proprietors of the whole nation and engross the civil power, which a want of abilities to manage must end in the ruin of the public.”

CHAPTER III
LITERATURE BY AND ON THE AGED

Harriet E. Paine—Amelia E. Barr—Mortimer Collins—Col. Nicholas Smith—Byron C. Utecht—J. L. Smith—Sanford Bennett—G. E. D. Diamond—Cardinal Gibbons—John Burroughs—Rollo Ogden—James L. Ludlow—Brander Matthews—Ralph Waldo Emerson—Oliver Wendell Holmes—Senator G. F. Hoar—William Dean Howells—H. D. Sedgwick—Walt Mason—E. P. Powell—U. V. Wilson—D. G. Brinton—N. S. Shaler—Anthony Trollope—Stephen Paget—Richard le Gallienne—G. S. Street—C. W. Saleeby—Bernard Shaw—A few typical poems and quotations.

As a psychologist I am convinced that the psychic states of old people have great significance. Senescence, like adolescence, has its own feelings, thoughts, and wills, as well as its own physiology, and their regimen is important, as well as that of the body. Individual differences here are probably greater than in youth. I wanted to realize as fully as was practicable how it seems to be old. Accordingly I looked over such literature, both poetry and prose, as I found within reach, written by aging people describing their own stage of life, and by selection, quotation, and résumé have sought, in this chapter, to let each of them speak for him- or herself.

Some find a veritable charm in watching every phase of the sunset of their own life and feel even in the prospect of death a certain mental exaltation. More are sadly patient and accept some gospel of reconciliation to fate. Some distinctly refuse to think on or even to recognize the ebb of the tide. A few find consolation in beautifying age with tropes and similes that divert or distract from the grim realization of its advance. But perhaps the most striking fact is that so many not only deliberately turn from the supports offered to declining years by the Church but have more or less abandoned faith in physicians, for age is a disease that their ministrations may mitigate but can never cure. Men of science find least solace in religion, to which women are much more prone to turn than men. In most, love is more or less sublimated into philanthropy and very often into a new and higher love of nature in all her aspects. All, with hardly an exception, pay far more attention to health and body-keeping than ever before and many evolve an almost fetishistic faith in the efficacy of some item of food or regimen to which they ascribe peculiar virtue. They want to prolong life and well-being to their utmost goal for, with all the handicaps of age, life is still too sweet to leave voluntarily.

Many old people fortify themselves against the depressions and remissions of old age by familiarizing their minds with quotations from the Scriptures, hymnology, poetry, and general literature. We have a good illustration of this in Margaret E. White’s volume.[77] It consists mainly of selections, determined of course by the author’s point of view—that of a liberal religionist—which has given her, and is well calculated to give others with her point of view, mental satisfaction. She wants to have “prisms in her window” to fill the room with rainbows. As the shadows lengthen she believes the climacteric should supervene without any break at all with the prime of life, although there are really two curves that run a very different course, one of physical strength and another of experience. When one stands on the summit of his years, he is buoyed up by great plans for life; but when he retires, there is nothing ahead save death and this involves a great and often critical change. The successful life is one that solves the problems that meet it here without patheticism and without self-delusion.

The author’s anthology of quotations and her own reflections are not a cry in the dark but, on the whole, strike a note of courage and her book is of psychological value because it gives us a good idea of how many authors have thought and felt. Most want to be quiet and at home. They console themselves with intimations of a lofty and spiritual, if remote, idealism. Perhaps of all the young people we knew not one will accompany the late survivors. Old age is a benefaction because service to it ennobles all who render it. When wrinkles come in the mind, one sings, the old is ever old; another, it is ever young. One conceives it as the portal to a higher life, while for another it is solely reversionary.

Harriet E. Paine,[78] a retired maiden teacher, had grown deaf and her sight was dim at sixty, when this book was written. Her attitude is one of the very best illustrations of the consolations that are open to those in whom old age is like a summer night, who can maintain their optimism when the senses cut us off from the external world and we have to “economize the falling river” and take in sail. The author has much to say of old people with defective senses and thinks deafness particularly irritating both to the individual and to those about, especially if, as in her case, there is also weakness and diffidence. These impel one to take refuge in the “Great Comrade.” Like so many others, she finds great satisfaction in the familiar cases of great things done by old people and thinks that “the higher powers of the mind go on ripening to the last,” instancing the remarkable fight made for life by Pope Leo XIII when he was ninety-four, the chief items in whose enlightened policy were inaugurated after he was seventy. Samuel Whittemore, at eighty, killed three British soldiers on April 19, 1775, and then was himself shot, bayoneted, and beaten seemingly to death but had vitality enough to live on to the age of ninety-eight. Sophocles wrote his Œdipus at ninety; Mrs. Gilbert acted till over seventy; Mrs. Livermore, Julia Ward Howe, and others furnish examples that hearten her, etc. When the hair grows white it is possible, especially for women, to do many things impossible before.

Being herself in straitened circumstances, she is interested in, for example, the provisions of the New Zealand Parliament in 1898 granting a pension of eighteen pounds per annum to all people over sixty-five of good moral character who had resided in the country twenty-five years and whose income did not exceed thirty-four pounds; and also in Edward Everett Hale’s plea for a limited old-age pension bill, whereby a man paying a poll tax for twenty-five years and not convicted of crime should be given a pension of two dollars a week, the state to set aside a part of the poll tax for this purpose. He claimed that the savings to poorhouses would offset the expenditure. But still this author realizes that the old can be happy in comparative poverty if they strive to make their corner of the world brighter. At no time of life are the advantages of culture and experience more precious. She thinks the relations between old and young, so hard to adjust, need special attention. The two can live together only by sacrifices on both sides and this can never be successful unless each is able to take the other’s point of view. She rather surprisingly concedes that with true insight the young have more sympathy with the old than the latter, by memory, can have with the young, perhaps because bodily vigor increases love. She would mitigate the stage of criticizing mothers, through which she thinks all girls tend to pass, for old age gives a wisdom that is far harder to acquire and more precious than knowledge.

The very old are very different from the old; for example, an old lady of eighty-nine called on one of ninety-eight and felt rejuvenated. Very few do, when they are old, what they have planned for their old age. The weapon against loneliness is work. “When the world is cold to you, go build fires to warm up.” We strive to renew the emotions but find it very hard to do so and feel burned to the socket. In answering the question how far we should let the dead past bury its dead, she deplores the fact that young persons, especially young women, often give to their elders, particularly mothers or fathers, a devotion that involves a complete sacrifice of their own lives and thinks that to accept this is the acme of selfishness in the old. Old age is especially hard, she thinks, for those who have enjoyed the senses most.

Amelia E. Barr[79] says that on March 29, 1911, she awoke early to see her eightieth birthday come in. “I wish to master in these years the fine art of dying well, which is quite as great a lesson as the fine art of living well, about which everyone is so busy.” A good old age is a neighbor to a blessed eternity. An English physician said, “If you wish to have a vigorous old age, go into the darkness and silence ten hours out of every twenty-four, for in darkness we were formed.” “Never allow anyone to impose their pleasures upon you; if you have any rights, it is to choose the way you will spend your time.” “On the margin gray, twixt night and day,” the author finds special comfort in the lines

There is no death.

What seems so is transition.

This life or mortal breath is but the suburb of the life elysian

Whose portal we call death.

It is a sin, she says, to become so mentally active that we are unable to keep quiet and go to sleep. The Greeks knew little of insomnia and the English have been great sleepers and dreamers, holding perhaps with Wordsworth that “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,” etc.

This author is an astrologist and tells us that nine insane rulers were born when Mercury or the moon, or both, were affected by Mars, Saturn, or Uranus, and five people of genius were ruled by the same planets and became insane. She really mourns less for what age takes away than what it leaves behind.

The tone of her work differs radically from that of Miss Paine. The latter seeks and finds compensations so satisfactory to herself that she ventures into print with them, apparently for the first time, hoping that she may thereby help others to live out their old age better; while the former indulges her literary instincts to produce another book and is far more inspired by the muse of Death than that of Life. The kismet motive, which is expressed in her recourse to astral fatalism, manifests not a pis aller resource first found when she was old but one that had long been with her, and it is an interesting recrudescence of the same psychological motivations that in the East made fatalism and among Calvinists made the doctrine of divine decrees and foreordination so attractive.

At the age of eighty-three she worked six hours a day instead of nine as formerly, avoided routine, tried to give her mind new thoughts, and thought this mental diet kept her strong. She took two cups of coffee in the morning and more at night, persisted in lying abed ten hours although she slept but seven, eschewed all preserved fruits, etc. She had a constant sense of the Divine and her whole standpoint is very different from that, for example, of Burroughs.

Mortimer Collins[80] looks back on a prolonged life with calm philosophic poise and concludes that length of life is wholly dependent upon ideas. The theory of Asgill that it is cowardly of man to die appeals to him. Sylvester calculated the lives of nine mathemeticians with an average age of 79, but Collins finds nine literary men whose average age was 85, and so concludes that “imagination beats calculation.” We are islands in an infinite sea; only the instant is ours. The soul makes the body. He holds that in England there is no mode of life healthy enough to secure longevity, either in the city or country, while London is a slow poison. He wants a Utopia, but without religion. He would have a journal kept in every locality noting length or brevity of life, with the causes thereof, as a kind of vade Mecum for the inhabitants. All should live in the open, with plenty of water and hills, enough sleep and good food. Marriage should be congenial and love a liberal education; in short, marriage should be completion. Parents early spoil their children and later fear them. Politics should be eschewed for it shows only the worst side of human nature. We should have books telling us how to enjoy summers, the secret of which even the English gentleman has not yet found. Literature, especially the classics, helps to longevity, and in old age people should do that which they most love, that is most natural and that gives greatest freedom to the play instinct—not that which pays best. Gardening takes us into partnership with God and he prescribes country walks with the sun and the sea. The country gentleman should live an almost Homeric life. The large number of octogenarians in Westmoreland, the lake region of Wordsworth, which has often been noticed, is very significant. The laziest man usually lives longest, but lazing is an art.

The style of this author is in places almost lapidary, his views are quaint and abrupt and the reader is impressed with the idea that he is supremely satisfied with old age as he has found it. His radicalism is good-natured and his love of paradox suggests an affectation of originality that does not, however, much impair his fundamental sincerity. He illustrates a type of precocious maturity that finds pleasure in ideas not very well matured.

Colonel Nicholas Smith[81] is a homely philosopher of old age who has brought together a vast body of items to hearten the old and to support the thesis that all can greatly prolong their lives if they will. He thinks that as years advance the average brain does more work, and the body less. With remarkable industry he has gathered records of scores and hundreds of old people living, or recently dead, who have maintained their vigor and remained “invincible children,” who never became wholly sophisticated but still dream, wonder, and believe. He almost seems to agree with Emerson that a man is not worth very much until he is sixty.

Most of his book consists of brief records of men who maintained their activity to a great age. Many of these are familiar enough but we sample a few. Mommsen, for example, frail and small, lost his library by fire when he was sixty, a calamity that all thought would end his career. But he did much of his best work later, toiling on his History of Rome nearly to his death in his eighty-sixth year. George Ives, when his friends congratulated him on attaining his hundredth year, was found at work in the field and said that even if he knew he were to die the next day he should “carry on” as if he were immortal. Mrs. H. W. Truex on her 96th birthday in 1904 finished a quilt of nine hundred and seventy-five pieces and during the previous year had completed six such. Sir Joseph Hooker, the botanist, worked almost up to his death at 87, holding that rich natures develop slowly. Carlyle published the last volume of his Frederick the Great at the age of 69; Darwin, his Descent of Man at 62; Longfellow wrote his Morituri Salutamus for the fiftieth anniversary of his graduation; W. C. Bryant published his translation of the Odyssey at the age of 76; O. W. Holmes wrote his “Guardian Angel” at 70 and “Antipathy” at 76, while the “Iron Gate” was for a breakfast given in honor of his seventieth birthday; George Bancroft at 82 published his History of the Foundations of the Constitution of the United States; Frances Trollope, failing in business at the age of nearly 50 and a stranger in this country, turned to a literary career, and between the ages of 52 and 83 wrote upwards of a hundred volumes, mostly novels of society; Humboldt, at the age of 74, began his Cosmos, the fourth and last volume of which was issued the year before his death, in 1858, at the age of ninety; Cervantes published the last part of his Don Quixote at 78; Goethe wrote till he was 80 and finished the second part of Faust only shortly before his death; Victor Hugo wrote his Annals of a Terrible Year at 70, and his Ninety-Three, which some regard as his best story, at the age of 72; Mary Sommerville kept up her scientific activities and at 92 said she could still read books on the higher algebra four to five hours in the forenoon; Weir Mitchell wrote his Hugh Wynne at 66 and Constance Trescot, a very remarkable psychological study of a woman, when he was 76. A deposed minister began the study of medicine at 72 and practiced for several years, dying in the harness. A. J. Huntington was acting professor of classics till he was 82. Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney published her twenty-seventh volume at the age of 80, etc.

There are two views of age. One is Hogarth’s picture—a shattered bottle, cracked bell, unstrung bow, signpost of a tavern called the “World’s End,” shipwreck, Phoebus’s horses dead in the clouds, the moon in her last quarter, the world on fire. It only remained to add to this the picture of a painter’s palette broken. This was his last work and he died at 67. Over against this we might place E. E. Hale, who late in life said his prospects cast no shadow and became very anxious to see the curtain rise. When he was 80 he published his Memoirs of a Hundred Years and at 82 was chaplain of the United States Senate. Gladstone locked every affair of state out of his bedroom and said that when we sleep we must pay attention to it, for a workless is a worthless life.

This author agrees with J. H. Canfield, who protested that the old should stay in the harness and not step out to give the young men a chance, for they never had a better chance than to work with their elders, as colts are best broken in with old horses. As we grow old we see that nothing, after all, matters as much as we had thought. Smith finds comfort in the fact that, according to the census of 1900, one in every two hundred becomes an octogenarian and that out of a population of 36,800,000 there were 176,571 reputed to be 80 years of age or over.

He finally gives us his own empirical observations about foods and concludes that three-fourths of all the poor health in the country is due to dietary errors or to “carrion and cathartics.” The old should eat no meat, take no drink with meals, avoid starch, recognize the error in the belief that they need stimulants, and should not try to be fat but realize that progressive emaciation is normal. Appetite should be our guide although we should eat only about half what we want. He, too, praises laziness as a concomitant of longevity and recognizes a vast difference in dietary needs. He would never use laxatives but depends upon two glasses of water half an hour before breakfast and two in the afternoon, and would never mix cooked vegetables nor fruit.

The popularity and wide sale of this book must have been extremely gratifying to the author as not only showing wide and deep interest in the subject but as also supplying, by copious data and illustrations, the kind of encouragement the old often sorely need. The author makes no pretenses of being scientific and accepts cases of reputed great age with no critical scruples.

Byron C. Utecht[82] thinks the day is dawning when one hundred and fifty years will be the usual span of life. He gives many statistics to show that the average age is slowly increasing, particularly in Switzerland, where in the sixteenth century it was 21.2 years whereas in the nineteenth it was 39.7. He quotes Finkenberg of Bonn, who concludes that “the average length of life in Europe in the sixteenth century was 18 years and now it is 40,” the average in India being now about 23.6 years as against 19, two hundred years ago. These figures, it should be noted, however, are little more than conjectural.

Utecht, like Colonel Smith, has collected data about many people who have reached the age of 100, some of whom he photographs. He believes man not only lives longer but is more vital than formerly. He seems to accept without proof that a Montana Indian lived to be 134; an Oregon woman, 120; and a Mrs. Kilcrease of Texas, 136. He tells us of one Arkansas woman who reached 112 years, keeping a large garden almost to the end of her life, who at the above age walked six miles and back to see her great-great-granddaughter married. She claimed her age was due to clean, honest living, plenty of work, a desire to help, keeping busy, and caring for others. A. Goodwin of Alabama (106) walks five miles a day and works several hours in his garden. He eats what he likes, reads without glasses, and is the head of one of the largest families in the country, their reunions being attended by more than eight hundred persons. He had been a hunter and still uses his rifle and ascribes his longevity to interest in out-of-door sports as a young man. He has been so busy he can hardly realize he is old, wants fifty years more of life if possible and feels that he is going to have it. He has been temperate, sleeps much and regularly, and has a horror of worry. Mrs. Mary Harrison of Michigan celebrated her hundredth anniversary and did not seem as tired as any of her two hundred guests. She had been a humorist and would never look on the dark side of things. An Ohio lady of 91 who has been devoted to a motorcycle cannot bring herself to give up her joyrides, although she now has a young man to guide the wheel. She has always lived in the country and worked hard and ascribes her longevity chiefly to her rides.

Utecht has collected perhaps two-score more instances of people well over ninety and concludes that all of them were, in their prime, more or less athletic—at least none were weaklings. He thinks the longest-lived people are average men and women who have a good hygienic sense. None were intemperate, few were highly educated, and most were inured to hardships and even drudgery in youth, so that the study of all their lives practically tells the same story of simple life in the free air, with enough but not too much work and with exemption, for the most part, from worry.

It would be interesting to know if a more critical study of the actual age of many of these and other quoted centenarians would substantiate their claims. No such investigation, however, has ever been made into the many cases reported by this and the preceding author.

I append a few special records that seem peculiarly challenging. The first is that of James L. Smith,[83] a veteran of the Civil War. Twenty years ago he weighed two hundred and twenty pounds, was warned against excitement, and his friends and physician were horrified when he proceeded to run his flesh off. It was a great effort for so heavy a man but in six months he had reduced his weight to one hundred and ninety and was running more than six miles a day, his daily work being the directing of two hundred district messengers. Yielding to the protests of his friends he ceased his exercise, because he was told that he could not punish his heart and lungs thus and not suffer and was liable to drop dead. Growing fleshy again, with increased shortness of breath, he began to run again daily, reducing his weight once more to a hundred and sixty and developing a physique and complexion like that of a far younger man. At seventy he ran never less than five and often ten miles a day, holding that senility is a disease of the mind and that youth and its vigor can be maintained if one only believes in himself. He has raced in many parts of the country and has a standing offer to run any ten survivors of the Civil War in relays of one to a mile, he himself running the whole ten. His offer used to be accepted; it is so no longer. The day he was seventy he “covered a half mile faster than a roller-skating champion,” and at seventy-three ran half a mile in 2 minutes and 44 seconds. On a dirt road he has run ten miles in 1 hour, 13 minutes, and 48 seconds, exactly the same time in which he ran the same distance in the Grand Army marathon at Los Angeles six years before, and says that he finished in fine condition.

Still more interesting, although perhaps not more authentic, is the autobiographic record of Sanford Bennett.[84] At the age of fifty he was broken in health and had to give up his position because of a feeble heart and dyspeptic stomach. After trying various cures he, like Smith, developed one of his own, consisting chiefly of very manifold exercises taken, for the most part, in a recumbent position to lessen the arterial strain upon his weak heart, and with little and finally no apparatus. By persistent adherence to this regimen the circulatory and digestive functions were slowly recuperated and his muscles underwent remarkable development in bulk and power. Many photographs of himself, with only a breech-waist, show him to have acquired a symmetry and fulness of physical development of which any young athlete might well be proud. Under self-massage wrinkles of face and neck disappeared, the growth of the hair on his head was somewhat increased, and its grayness was more or less modified. His spirits and the courage with which he faced life and reëntered business showed a rejuvenation of mind and feelings no less remarkable than that of the body. By more or less systematic methods he strengthened his eyes; improved the condition of his liver and kidneys; freshened the skin; greatly bettered the varicosities (photographed) of the veins of his legs; and materially improved the action of his heart, all the while recognizing the influences of the unconscious mind upon his physical condition. He has entirely overcome his tendency to adiposity, strengthened his voice, increased the girth of his chest and his respiratory capacity, etc.

It is impossible to con this book and its untouched photographs without the conviction, which has been strengthened by my own correspondence with the author, that he has undergone a remarkable physical transformation. We have already enough such instances to suggest that senescence normally releases in healthy natures new motivations for the conservation of health and that if these are given their due expression and if all aging men and women came to realize that as the decline of life sets in they must be, more and more, not only their own hygienists but their own physicians, far more might be accomplished in many if not most cases than the world at present suspects.

This suggests the lesson that Charles Francis[85] has drawn from his life, namely, that exercise is the chief cause of his vigor at seventy. His life in connection with his vocation as a printer has been extremely active and arduous and he ascribes his present condition to athletics and his exceptional fondness for dancing. He insists that next to this comes the avoidance of worry and thinks that every normal old man develops a more or less full creed of hygienic Do’s and Don’ts. Charles Cliff thinks the way to eighty is to work hard in youth and then gradually take it easy.

Many modern writers, like Cicero’s Cato, ascribe great efficacy to the accumulated examples of old men who have achieved exceptional success late in life, not only in business, arts, and letters but in the greatest art of all, that of conserving health and youth. We can easily conceive of a new temple of fame to immortalize those who have mastered the art of deferring senility and death.

Captain G. E. D. Diamond[86] claimed to be 103 and in his book tells us how he lived—no sweets, meats, stimulants, tobacco, tea, or coffee; had never married; found a panacea in olive oil taken internally and with which he once or twice daily rubbed his body; found great virtue in a cup of hot water at breakfast, grapefruit at luncheon, bread buttered with olive oil; used milk, and fish. He discants at length upon the kinds, purity, and mode of application of his panacea and is a polemic vegetarian.

The late Cardinal Gibbons[87] thinks no one ever died of hard work and says that he almost never had an idle moment. He forced himself to lie in bed at least eight hours and did not worry if he did not fall asleep. The foundations of health are laid in youth and he laid the greatest stress upon plenty of regular exercise suitable to one’s age, moderation in eating and drinking, plenty of sleep, an occupation, and avoidance of worry.

John Burroughs[88] said, in 1919, that he was better than thirty years before. Old age is no bugaboo but is a question of cutting out things, as he did with tea, coffee, eggs, raw apples, pastry, new bread, and alcohol, never having used tobacco. He was better by leaps and bounds when he omitted eggs, a suggestion he derived from Professor Chittenden. Malnutrition is the door through which most of our enemies enter. He retired at nine, rose at six in the winter and with the sun in summer, walked three hours in the forenoon, read from seven to nine in the evening, was much out-of-doors, and thought he wrote more and better in the last three than in any other three years of his life. And yet he did not come of a long-lived ancestry.

Rollo Ogden[89] thinks that in the first call the old man meets to take himself out of the way there is generally more pity than anger but he is too proud to accept pity. Nobody is so impetuous as an old man in a hurry. Vain longings for the sensations of youth make life after forty often a dangerous age, as physicians know. He believes there are many intellectual hazards and thinks it a delusion of the old that the young are different from those they knew in their youth. In judging the rising generation we oldsters must, at any rate, admit that they did well in the war. The old must make a serious effort to penetrate the secret of youth; they must put no end of questions to it even though they are not able to find answers to them. There must be a reorganization of life and a reorientation; and also, what is perhaps often harder, a new subordination. The old are, on the whole, more curious about the young than afraid of them.

Another suggestion arises from an autobiographic volume of a retired clergyman, which is dedicated to his grandchildren.[90] The book is unique in that it gives few details of his life but stresses certain strong impressions derived from early boyhood, school days, his first experience with death, gropings to solve the problems of life and of the choice of a vocation, etc. He confines himself, for the most part, to experiences that made the deepest and most lasting impression upon him, the mysteries that have haunted his soul, self-criticisms, the rest and other cures he has tried, friendships made, and the great causes he has espoused. On laying aside his ministerial duties he realized that we must not retire within ourselves but draw closer to kindred humanity, and felt at liberty to enjoy literature, art, nature, and travel, realizing that there were many powers that had not been vented in his vocation. He found himself taking sober and broader second thoughts of even religion, here discovering a new sense of freedom, as he believes retired lawyers do in reflecting on the differences between their own sense of absolute right and duty to their clients. He was glad, he says, that he could “now break with some of my past notions, go squarely back on some former, cocksure declarations,” and he realized that “I did not know a lot of things I once thought I knew.” There is a wonderful exhilaration in standing at the opening of views from which one has been previously barred by constitutional preoccupation and engagements. He realizes that “courtesy to the cloth leads most men to treat ministers as they would treat women—the seamy side of life is not shown them.” It is easy, as one grows old, to retain abstract knowledge and the ripe fruits of philosophy, history, and even science; and age, too, has its recreations.

Perhaps the chief suggestion of this book is that every intelligent man, as he reaches the stage of senescence, should thus pass his life in review and try to draw its lessons, not only for his own greater mental poise and unity but for the benefit of his immediate descendants, for whom such a record must be invaluable. Thus the writing of an autobiography will sometime become a fit hygienic prescription for a rounded-out old age.

Brander Matthews[91] says that when a man is in sight of Pier No. 70, as Mark Twain called it, he should take down sail and examine his log-book. He must not feel that young people are wanting to brush him aside but should realize that he can help them. He gives a very full account of his own experiences as a magazine writer and deplores the fact that many of our twentieth-century editors are newspaper men, whereas formerly they were literary men. The most serious lesson he draws from his own experience is that young writers should take only subjects in which they are profoundly interested and “not take down the shutters before they have anything to put in the shop windows.” He rejoices that he has never accepted a dictated subject but has always labored in fields attractive to him and so, in short, followed an inner calling.

Ralph Waldo Emerson[92] says the dim senses, memory, voice, etc., are only masks that old age wears. There are young heads on old shoulders and young hearts. The essence of age is intellect. “He that can discriminate is the father of his father” and Merlin as a baby found in a basket by the riverside talks wisely of all things. Is it because we find ourselves reflected in the eyes of young people that we feel old? “The surest poison is time.” Age is comely in coach, chairs of state, courts, and historical societies, but not on Broadway. We do not count a man’s years until he has nothing else to count. One says a man is not worth anything until he is sixty. “In all governments the councils of power were held by the old—patricians or patres; senate or senes; seigneurs or seniors; the gerousia, the state of Sparta, the presbytery of the church, and the like, are all represented by old men.” Almost all good workers live long. The blind old Dandolo, elected Doge at 84, storming Constantinople at 94, and afterward recalled again victorious, was elected at the age of 96 to the throne of the empire, which he declined, and died Doge at 97. Newton made important discoveries for every one of his 85 years. Washington, the perfect citizen; Wellington, the perfect soldier; Goethe, the all-knowing poet; Humboldt, the encyclopedia of science—all were old.

“All men carry seeds of all distempers through life latent and die without developing them.” But if we are enfeebled by any cause some of these sleeping seeds start and open. At fifty we lose headache and with every year liability to certain forms of disease declines. Now one success more or less signifies nothing because reputation is made. Success signifies much to a client but nothing to the old lawyer. Again, another felicity of old age is that it has found expression. Things that seethe in us have been born, so that the throes and tempests subside. “One by one, day by day, he learns to cast his wishes into facts.” We set our house in order, classify, finish what is begun, close up gaps, make our wills, clear our titles, and reconcile enemies. Thus there is a proportion between the designs of man and the length of his life. In February, 1825, Emerson called on John Adams, who was nearly 90, just as his son had been elected President at the age of 58, nearly the same as that of Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe.

Oliver Wendell Holmes[93] discourses in his clever, self-conscious, and desultory way upon old age, concerning which he says many smart, studied, and even quotable things that add, however, no new standpoint or idea. He personifies old age, for example, as first calling on the professor and leaving his card, that is, a mark between the eyebrows; calling again more urgently; and at last, when he is not let in, breaking in at the front door. He seems to feel that death is a sort of disgrace and ignominy and compares the child shedding his milk teeth with the old man shedding his permanent ones. He would divide life into fifteen stages, each of which has its youth and old age. As we enter each stage we do so with the same ingenuous simplicity. Nature gets us out of youth into manhood as old sea captains used to shanghai sailors. Habits mark old age but we should begin new things and even take up new studies. He gives an imaginary newspaper report of the address of Cato on Old Age, and several times lapses into poetry. He feels that he has less time for anything he wants to do, realizes neglected and postponed privileges, tells of the great charm he feels in rowing on the Charles, and gives us all the data for estimating that he is very proficient in the exercise. He praises walking but says saddle leather is preferable, though more costly. He is very grateful that he does not need eyeglasses.

In Over the Teacups he says that at sixty we come within the range of the rifle pits and describes the nine survivors of his class, which graduated fifty-nine members. But here he is most impressed with the amazing progress he has seen—the friction match, the railroad, ocean steamer, photography, spectroscope, telegraph, telephone, phonograph, anesthesia, electric illumination, bicycle, etc., telling us that all his boyish shooting was done with a flintlock and all his voyaging on a sailing packet. He has a tingling sense of progress that amounts to a kind of pity for his own youth; and although he cannot conceive how it is possible, he has a faint hope that progress may go on at the same rate. The thing to be avoided is automatism, which is habit gone to seed. We must be sure and take in sail betimes. In deciding between duties and the desire to rest, many have actually welcomed the decay of powers in order that they might rest. He bitterly condemns conservative religious dogmas, which have done so much to disorganize our thinking powers, and recognizes the happy tendency to soften and then throw off creeds as one grows old as if in order to return to the source of life as ignorant and helpless as we came from it. He ends with a meager array of facts to indicate that poets are not short-lived and that although their powers may wane, some of the best poems have come from people of advanced age.

The late Senator G. F. Hoar[94] thinks young people contemplate old age and death from a distance, as Milton’s “Hymn on Morning” was written at midnight. “I would indite something concerning the solar system—Betty, bring the candles.” Old age is a matter of temperament and not of years. In some, old age is congenital. Lowell says, “From the womb he emerged gravely, a little old man.” John Quincy Adams fought the House of Representatives at 83; Josiah Quincy attacked the “Know-Nothings” at 85—said the bats were leading the eagles. He broke his hip at 92 and when Dr. Ellis called, he was so charmed that he forgot to ask him how he was and went back to do so. Quincy said, “Damn the leg.” Gladstone, aged 83, faced a hostile government, House of Lords, press, aristocracy, university, and perhaps a hostile queen, and said, “I represent the youth and hope of England. The solution of these questions of the future belongs aright to us who are of the future and not to you who are of the past.” There are certain functions especially assigned to age, for example, the magistrate passes upon things after the controversy is over. Senators by law must be at least thirty but the average age of them is nearly sixty. Methuselah’s days must have been stupid. Age should cultivate unripe fruit. The greatest penalty of growing old is losing the friends of youth, dying in the death of others. But a large capacity for friendship atones. General Sherman’s friendship was like being admitted to an order of nobility or knighted. His circle of friends grew throughout the country although no one was more choice in his selection or more outspoken in his opinions. Of old, age was marked by splendor in dress and punctilious stateliness in manner, and art often thus represents it.

Each generation, as it passes, gets from its successor much more criticism than sympathy; the heir is not on good terms with the king. “Crabbed age and youth cannot live together.” No English monarch ever built a tomb for his predecessor. We should thank God that Abraham, Isaac, and David are well dead.

It is young men who deal most courageously with the doctrine of immortality; old men have made no contribution to it. They are silent or do not wish to be suspected of cant or hypocrisy, or perhaps fear striking their heads against a stone wall. If there is no immortality it is the great souls who will be most disappointed and the world will be “only the receptacle of a compost heap of the carcasses of an extinct humanity.” A cruel Highland chief shut his rebellious nephew in a dungeon, fed him on salt meat, then let down a cup which on opening contained no water, and left him to die of thirst. The Divine treats us this way if there is no future. Old men develop individuality. They reason less and less about the future and trust reason less. But “beside the silent sea I wait the muffled oar,” assured that “no harm from Him can come to me on ocean or on shore.”

W. D. Howells[95] said at eighty that he was less afraid of dying than when he was young. Virtues may become faults, for example, thrift may make a miser, his love of gold being more tangible than of greenbacks. It is, indeed, a shame to die rich. We are often young in spots, for example, on a spring morning. Slight acclivities seem to grow up into hills. After too long sitting, for example, in the theater, we realize that we have over-rested. The golden age, he thinks, is between fifty and sixty. Those who have made themselves wanted are still so. Our utmost effort is less. We are not dull, as the young think us because we seem so to them. A reader has exhausted most of the best literature and yet of rereading old books and reading new ones we never tire and have our favorite passages. We should interest ourselves in public questions. It hurts to be always told how young we look. We forget names we were most familiar with and recall them by their uses or perhaps by their foreign equivalents. He thinks old women, however, do not forget words. Tolstoi said that memory is hell and a future state that recalls all would be a bore. Titian outlived 99 and painted to the end. His masterpiece, the bronze doors of the sacristy at St. Mark’s, was done when he was 85. When tired he withdrew to a dark, warm place. John Bigelow in the nineties gave a charming lecture on Dumas. Versus the solitude of old age, the young do often seem dull. We do not help other old men enough. Woman’s sympathy goes far to bridge this interval. Some grieve that they cannot help with their own self-support. Howells says he is a great dreamer and forgets where he puts things, for example, his spectacles.

H. D. Sedgwick[96] thinks Harvard seniors more disposed to answer questions than to ask them. Youth may be worth living, but is old age so? Young men know nothing of youth; they cannot realize it objectively, for they despise it and want to hurry on. The “kid” would be a Freshman. He feels at first just outside the door of something delectable. The boy does not enjoy himself so much as the old man looking on “for such is the kingdom of Heaven.” The young are individualists absorbed in self. They form cliques excluding hoi polloi. They over-praise their own college, but their ego is always the center. It is really the spectator in the theater that gets the most out of it. Youth is exclusive in its foolish divisions. The old do not dwell on differences but common qualities. The old man finds no solace in isolation but in community. He loves humanity; seeks a refuge for self; passes lightly over differences of speech, clothes, and customs. Perhaps this is due to the slow approach of night, which makes all draw together for the warmth of friendship. The old man snuggles to the breast of humanity and is less prone to lose himself in random interests. If he cannot get about in space, he turns to the essential truth of the universe. The gods do not know the words “great” or “small.” The old see wonders in the iris. Youth seeks the top of the mountains because it cannot see the wonders in what is common and what is right about. The old are more religious and less subject to emotional crises. They do not see God in the fire or smoke but can see Him in the commonplace, and find beauty in cloud, flower, and tree; while youth is too busy with its own emotions and their tyranny. The records of earth tell of bestial cruelty. The globe is cooling and youth resists it like Prometheus. To youth the energy of the world is inexplicable. All is the product of brute force. Out of the dust came the eye and the brain and the mind, and all the turmoil is like labor-pangs to produce love, beauty, and happiness. Everything is full of aspiration. Out of the universe will come God, who is slowly evolving from the material without. If the matter of life has produced the passions of humanity, it is charged with potential divinity.

Walt Mason[97] says that until his system falls apart he will stay on deck, with his coat-tails in the air, refusing to be relieved, even though he may require overhauling every few days. When he was young he was careless in dress, but as he grew older he became very fastidious and was inclined to turn a new leaf in dress every day and give the best imitation possible of a young man. But we who were born during the Van Buren period cannot look like little Lord Fauntleroys. He studied old men and found that one did not believe in adding machines while most hated innovations in general. An old man who criticises anything present is always very unpopular and when he praises it, the attitude of everyone changes toward him. The young hate ancient history and want to lay it away in moth-balls. Eternal vigilance is the price of eternal youth.

Edison at the age of seventy-two said he worked eighteen hours a day and that it was hard for him to take a week-end off. When Colonel Death comes around the corner and says “Time’s up,” Mason says he wants him to find him in a hand-to-hand conflict with his trusty lyre. Every town has a coterie of “old boys” who are against everything; they write letters to the press, etc. Now, idleness is the worst thing for an old man and for his disposition. If he retires at 50 kindly, he will grow impossible by 70. The old are always blaming and brooding over the final showdown. It is always possible that the next cold or bit of rheumatism may break down the carburetor, but why worry?

E. P. Powell,[98] a Florida clergyman, cannot conceive old age for young Sidis and others like him. Charity should not help people to get rid of work but conceive a haven of rest. A workman damns epitaphs readable a few years hence. Humanity must not be loaded with a mass of pensions. Old age must not be a luxury. Good sleep should renew the world. Rev. Tinker improved sweet corn, Rev. Goodrich, potatoes. Worry is one road to the cemetery and idleness is another. The working problem is more important than that of diet. The author writes his sermons lying on the floor and spinning a top. A Florida June morning, he says, is far better than a month in Paradise. He does not care for heaven because he is more interested in the divine earth. The family should include four generations. We should all strive for perpetual youth. “Few children but better,” should be our motto. Premature old age is reprehensible. The world is full of half dead men. We shall never abolish death. Present society is death-hastening and life-wasting. Fisher would prolong by (1) eugenics, (2) personal hygiene, (3) public, (4) what might be called domestic hygiene.

U. V. Wilson[99] says that the seasons or nature were never so pleasant. He has the leisure that he toiled for all his life. Every year seems shorter (being now only one-seventy-third of all) so that he feels he is approaching the infinite point of view. Religionists tell us that it is hard for the Lord to save an old man but now that the days and years shrink we approach eternity. Seventy-three is the age of his physical being but he is really centuries older. His circle of friends is narrow but closer. He had a fad for hunting and fishing and photography and his sense of youth remains forever. He dreads decrepitude and helplessness and hates to see his body tumble down, like a man in a dungeon seeing the world only through a very small window. Second childhood suggests that if the eye fails, there are glorious things beyond it can see; that if the ear fails, there are inner harmonies. He feels like a youth shut up in an old body. Infirmities are forerunners of immortal health. So he does not fear death because it only removes barriers between him and the fullness of life.

D. G. Brinton[100] says “that old age is synonymous with wisdom is a comical deception which the graybeards have palmed off on the world because by law and custom they hold most of the property and want most of the power as well.” “As we grow old, we cease to obey our finer instincts” (Thoreau). “The experience of youth serves but to lead old age astray, and this is nowhere so plain as when an old man pretends a zest for the pleasures of the young. No fool like an old fool.” “Every age has pleasures sufficient which are appropriate to it, and these alone should be sought after.” If youth respects the laws of nature, old age is very tolerable. It brings many compensations for losses, and although not likely to be so happy as the best of middle life, it should be and often is superior in this respect to youth. “Probably it would generally be so were we more willing to learn the lessons appropriate to it.”

One writer says no man can be happy till he is past sixty, and another, “He who teaches the old is like one who writes on blotted paper.” A long life is the desire of all, and old age, which all abhor, is the hope of all. “It alone justifies a man to himself and before others.” “The sage is he whose life is a consistent whole and who carries out in his age the plans which he made in youth.” “The Jews of Frankfurt average ten years more of life than the non-Jewish citizens because they avoid unsanitary avocations and observe wiser rules of diet.” At seventy-five exposure to cold is thirty-two times more dangerous than it is at thirty years of age. “The sorrows of age are usually the returns of the investments of youth, these proving of that sort which levy assessments instead of paying dividends. A short life and a merry one is the maxim of many a youngster. The hidden falsehood at the core of this philosophy is the belief that happiness belongs to youth alone.” “The admiration of the early periods of life is one of a common class of illusions.” “He who would work securely for his own welfare will not be led astray by the belief that any one period of life contains solely or in any large measure the enjoyments of life as a whole. He will, therefore, not eat to-day the bread of to-morrow. He will guard the fires of youth that he may not in age have to sit by the cold ashes of exhausted pleasures.” The price of so doing is premature senility, loss of zest in life due to the early exhaustion of irrational enjoyments. “The only malady which all covet is the only one which is absolutely fatal, old age.” No passion is so weak but that a little pressed, it will master the fear of death. “He who is haunted by the dread of dying makes himself miserable for fear he cannot make himself miserable longer.”

Few modern writers have written more sagely on old age than N. S. Shaler, late professor of geology at Harvard.[101] He attaches great importance to the interval between the end of the reproductive period and death, which in lower creatures is very brief if it exists at all. In domesticated animals there is hardly any normal old age and they do not seem to know a climacteric. There is a great variation among different races in this period of senescence, which is so peculiar to man. This interval is very brief among savages. But with the beginning of speech all the relations of the individual to his group change. If old animals live on, they do so to themselves and not for the benefit of their kind. But in man the old individual becomes a storehouse of acquired or traditional knowledge, and wisdom has, for the first time, a distinct value in organic association. It was in this way that the reproductive period was shortened, or perhaps we had better say that life was prolonged beyond it. In civilized society the old are still members of the species, not aliens or enemies. When a people begins to have a literature or a religion and a large body of mores as social inheritance develops, the value of old age increases.

The old have to maintain a more dignified demeanor. They are readapted and can go on with life as before, especially as they now have eyes and teeth preserved. The best attitude toward the old is one that assures a broader view of life and better sense of values and marks the modern passage from the earlier division of men into ranks and occupations, in which women, youth, and old men were once separated from the active and militant class. Thus the position of the aged is now bettered by keeping in close relation with their fellows.

The growth of wealth has helped democratic individualization and thus helped old age. “The presence of three or four generations in the social edifice gives to it far more value than is afforded by one or two.” They “unite the life of the community and bridge the gap between successive generations.” “As the body of the tradition which makes the spirit of a people becomes the greater, it is the more difficult to effect the transmission of it from stage to stage in the succession.” Despite the volume of printed matter, including history, there is a spirit of society that cannot be preserved in books. Who can doubt that if veterans of our Civil War had been more numerous and influential, we should have plunged into the late war with Spain. There would have been more men who really remembered what war meant and its lessons, for the new generation lacked the true sense of what conflict was and went about it light-heartedly. So the need of strict military discipline generally has to be relearned with each war. The same is true of hygienic policies in the army. There are, thus, many political, social, and even business follies that would have been avoided had the wisdom and experience that only old age can bring been more dominant. Thus we could make our historic records not only more effective and more complete in regard to its matter but also more perfect as regards the lessons it conveys. History is often written by men who are separated from the times they chronicle and the best way to bridge the gulf is to keep in touch as long as possible with the generation that was making history.

But the endeavor to retain the aged is not merely an effort to preserve the lives of the old but part of the problem of avoiding premature death for everyone. Thus since man came there seems to be a sudden loss of longevity if we measure it solely in terms of the period of growth. If this really has occurred, it may be that the term is less fixed than we should expect it to be if the institution were of more recent date.

Anthony Trollope[102] tells us of a small republic, Britannula, situated somewhere in the South Pacific and which had freed itself from England, that had been induced by its leader, Mr. Neverbend, who was deeply impressed with the sufferings and dangers of old age, to pass a law that at a fixed period, which after much discussion was fixed at 67½ years of age, everyone in the colony should be taken with great honor to a college beautifully situated five miles from the capital city and there spend a final year, at the end of which he was to suffer euthanasia at the hand of the chief by being placed under an opiate and bled to death. Details are given of the many discussions that led up to this legislation, with the justifications for it and descriptions of the college. When the law was passed, there was no one in the community of great age. Deposition or relegation to the college was to be a matter of much pomp and dignity, with bells, banquets, and processions, and life within the walls was to be made attractive by every means.

The first to reach the required age, Crasweller, ten years the senior of the founder, was a man of immense vitality and wealth, the most efficient proprietor of a very large estate, and when the day of his deposition drew near he dismayed the founder by insisting that he was a year younger, although all knew his age, which was to be tatooed upon the skin of everyone. Meanwhile, an interesting love episode is described between his daughter and the son of the founder. There was much bitterness and recrimination and it is realized that it will never do to compel the withdrawal by force of the first victim, who was to set a high example to all others; and so finally the year falsely claimed is allowed to pass and then Crasweller is taken in state to the college itself, which another citizen was growing weary of tending because it was untenanted. There were many criticisms of its new and unfinished state and of the proximity of the cremation furnaces, which were said even to smell of the bodies of the animals that had been consumed in them.

Meanwhile, as the others were drawing near to their term, support of the plan passed over into covert and then overt opposition, and just as the first victim with his escort entered, an English man-of-war appeared—in response, it afterwards became known, to a petition of the citizens to stop such a proceeding, which thus cost the colony its independence. Thus Crasweller was freed and Neverbend, the founder, retired to England, where his musings at last convinced him that the world was not yet quite ready for his great reform. It might work if and when men were philosophers but it would doubtless have to be postponed at least during the lives of his grandchildren, and perhaps indefinitely. Thus the women, who had always opposed it, and the populace, who welcomed it when they were young but condemned it as they grew old, had their will and its realization is yet to come. The reasons that led to the scheme were that the misery, uselessness, troublesomeness, and often obstructiveness of old age still remain and are ever increasing in force, so that something like this must surely sometime be.

Stephen Paget[103] gives us an excellent description of what he thinks a typical state of mind of old age, but which I deem an excellent illustration of senile degeneracy. The old man, he says, wonders at his own existence, is bewildered at the feel of the pen in his hand, at the taste of his food; that he is alive when so many millions are dead or unborn; at a funeral is fascinated by someone’s whisper or the contour of a face or some other irrelevancy; is smitten with momentary surprise that he is or that it is it; finds an apocalypse on looking in the glass; is oppressed by a sense of mystery that is very far from philosophic contemplation; and realizes that when others observe him thus, they reflect that there is no speculation—“No speculation in those eyes that thou dost glare with”; finds himself growing out “of the world, of life, of time”; feels it not unreasonable to consider the one, the all, the infinite, if his mind drifts that way. His mind wanders while he wonders whether heaven lies about him in his second infancy. Perhaps it all brings the kind of smile we call wistful. He may go crazy over a human eyebrow or a breath of air; common things seem novel; the dull things fascinate. One enjoys a vagabond ease on the street; is irked at fine manners; is fond of news. The old problems of politics and religion lose their charm and in place of pure art we turn to that of the street. He says we old are thus a sentimental lot and for the sake of economy live on our emotions, which cost nothing. This point of view he deems more or less philosophic, etc.

This state of mind the psychologist would call dissociative, if not dissolutive. It is the dementia præcox of old age and can mean nothing but disintegration and befuddlement. True, childhood is often lost in wonder at items of experience that later are synthesized into wholes and become commonplaces. But this goes with a keen rapport with the environment, which the senses are developing, while this author’s musings reveal a falsetto last look before we are melted or diffused into the cosmos. Such reveries are letting go, not taking hold of life. They are the decadence of the philosophic spirit and belie the normal tendency of old age, which is to knit up experiences into synthetic wholes, to draw the moral of life, and to give integrity to the soul.

Thus Mr. Paget seems to be the victim of a kind of senile Narcissism, revering its chief traits in his symptoms, yielding himself with a kind of masochistic pleasure to any chance impressions that present themselves. He has ceased to strive and to will, and there is no justification of his point of view, that his state is akin to that of certain transcendentalists who have fallen into deep puzzlements over what Bronson Alcott called “the whichness of the what.”

Old age is neither helped nor understood by the cheap and chipper paradoxes about it of those who tell the old that they are not so save in years and that these do not count, or who affect to marvel at the passion to look and seem young. One writer[104] even tells us that the old are beautiful and thinks it is a perverse precept of social condition to think of chronological age at all. “We should say eighty years young;” “properly speaking there is no old age,” etc. All this is really the state of mind of a mental healer who does not wish old age, disease, or death, and so denies their existence and turns his back upon reality. It is the state of mind mythically ascribed to an ostrich, although the best observers deny that it ever buries its head in the sand from fear of danger. Such cajolery of the old is like baby-talk to children, which only infantilism or advanced second childhood relishes. It suggests infirmary wards and is itself a product of the type of psychic invalidism and valetudinarianism that is interesting to the psychologist because the appetite for it suggests the dreamy state of mind in which delusions become factual if they embody our desires. The old should be beyond attitudinizing or affecting a youth that is gone, for this is to live a lie, which is dangerous not only to their serenity, for old age should be the age of truth, but to health and even life.

G. S. Street[105] refutes the statement that of late, especially since the war, there is a great and growing gap between the young and the old, who speak a different language mutually unintelligible; that the old can no longer understand the young; etc. This has found frequent expression in recent literature. The rising generation is said to have its own interests, ideas, and even language, to have broken away from the old, and even to have developed a new poetry and art. A generation ago there was such a gap. The grown-ups were Olympians and there was little attempt of either young or old to understand each other. There was little friendship between dons and students but we have now a popular cult not only of childhood but of adolescence. It is said that psychoanalysis is becoming a cult of the young generation but Freud himself was not born yesterday. A very few soldiers have complained bitterly of the selfishness and stupidity of their elders who sent them into the trenches, safely staying at home themselves. There are, of course, aging politicians and diplomats who are little in touch with the future as represented by the sentiments and aspirations of the young.

But, on the whole, the war has brought old and young nearer together. The old have given up their foolish airs of superiority and the young have been matured by their experience. To be sure, these oldsters often criticise the young generation, that it is aggressive and free of speech or conduct; and there are young people who, under the illusion of new ideas, are aggressive. But such a gulf as has existed between the old and the young has always been mainly the fault of the old, and the qualities of the young give them less excuse for this attitude than they ever had before. Perhaps the world is a little too much in the hands of people who are a little too old, but this is being rapidly remedied.

C. W. Saleeby, M.D.,[106] says that young children never worry and youth does so almost entirely for the future, while the worries of old age are chiefly retrospective and may take the form of regrets. If young people feel these, it is only for a brief space, for they are resilient and soon react. In middle life the struggle for existence is keener and the “might-have-beens” cannot always be dismissed, although those in good health can usually soon surmount them. But this is more difficult in old age unless, indeed, it is “a lusty winter, frosty but kindly.” Wordsworth describes old age as it should be in this respect in “The Happy Warrior”:

Who not content that former worth stand fast

Looks forward persevering to the last,

From well to better daily self-surpassed.

Who, whether praise of him must walk the earth

Forever and to noble deeds give birth

Or he must fail, to sleep without his fame

And leave a dead, unprofitable name—

Finds comfort in himself and in his cause

And while the mortal mist is gathering, draws

His breath of confidence in heaven’s applause.

This is the Happy Warrior, this is he

That every man in arms should wish to be

* * * * *

A being breathing thoughtful breath

A traveler between life and death,

The reason firm, the temperate will,

Endurance, forethought, strength, and skill.

There is a vast difference between old age as commonly seen and as it should be. The average type of humanity is undergoing a change. Civilization means city-fication and this involves a state of mind very different from that of the rustic. Worry has become the disease of the age as it was not formerly when man’s vegetative nature was stronger. It is a maladie des beaux esprits. We are no longer content to eat, sleep, and sit in the sun. The old always and greatly need grandchildren and it was never so hard to provide occupation for them, for their temptation now is to become self-centered, which is perhaps most common in women. It takes a different form in men superannuated by some automatic rule. Pitiful is the state of those who withdraw from occupations that have required and developed great mental activity.

The young, on the other hand, are less tolerant than formerly of the foibles and frailties of age. We live at such a high speed that it seems slow, if not stupid, and lack of sympathy adds to its burdens. The very idea of the family is declining and there is little left of the old sentiment for the patriarch, so that “the faster we move, the wider must become the gap between the young and those who, like the aged, have ceased to move.” Indeed, old age “is probably less tolerated and less tolerable to-day than ever in the past,” for the old were never so out of it. It might be expected, as death draws near, that religious anxieties would increase, but the contrary is true. Youth was never so unable to apply the principle Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner or to make allowances. So it is the young who worry most about religious matters. “Absence of occupation is not rest. The mind that’s vacant is a mind distrest.”

If the man who has lived solely for sport is ill prepared to meet old age, he who has lived solely for business is still less so. He has had no time to cultivate his more human tastes but has developed his potentialities in only one direction and when superannuation comes his soul is bankrupt. He generally now has money as well as time to spend and so devotes himself to increasing his material comforts in a way that beckons death, because high living is no substitute for high thinking. He should discover the least atrophied of his powers and devote himself to their eleventh-hour development. The man of the modern nervous type should lay up treasure that age cannot corrupt. Herbert Spencer said the purpose of education was to prepare for complete living.

One of the most beautiful and normal attributes of old age is interest in the young, without which age is lonely and life becomes, as the preacher said, “vanity of vanities.” “If old people are confined to the company of other old people, they hasten each other’s downward course.” There was “even a certain psychological truth symbolized in the old idea that the company of a young girl was the best means for the rejuvenescence of an old man.” “Never was the tendency to abandon old age to its own devices so strong as it is to-day.” Spencer thought the care of the aged by their dependents was the fit complement for the care that in earlier years had been devoted to them and regarded the imperfection of this return the great defect of our practical morals. Indeed, the author doubts “whether the aged were ever so much to be pitied as they are to-day.” The psychological needs of old age are greater than ever.

In his Health, Strength, and Happiness,[107] he gives an earnest, practical caution for all, but especially for the aged, to eat less; and particularly so in warm weather. “We dig our graves with our teeth.” Fat is hardly a part of the body at all. Flesh is really muscle, so that the fat man should be said to be losing flesh. “The whole secret of prolonging one’s life consists in doing nothing to shorten it.” The writer profoundly believes in government by the elderly in years and thinks that the really greatest works in many of the most difficult fields have been done by them. He stresses the fact that there is a certain kind of wisdom that nothing but age can bring. He sees the chief cause of senile degeneration in the hardening of the arteries, due to the necessity of disposing of superfluous fat. A man is really as old as his mind and he doubts whether we are producing more really living elderly men and women than did the ancient world. He is bitter in his condemnation of the common phrase, “Too old at forty.”

Bernard Shaw[108] thinks mankind is headed straight for the City of Destruction and can be saved not by eugenics or by a new and better education, as H. G. Wells opines, but by prolonging human life to circa three hundred years. If the length of life were reduced to one-half or one-quarter of what it now is we may assume that our culture and institutions would decline because children could not direct them. It is exactly the equivalent of this that has actually happened, only instead of life being shortened to half or a quarter of its span the problems of life have doubled or quadrupled in magnitude and difficulty so that present-day man is not grown up to them. Trained only to run a motor truck, he is now since the war called on to be an air pilot, and this requires a long and arduous training with a great deal of preliminary selection or weeding out. Thus man must now simply either live a great deal longer or the race will go under.

This can be done and Shaw tells us how. It is simply by wishing and willing it intensely enough and for generations. Lamarck, the first creative evolutionist, devoted his life to the “fundamental proposition that living organisms changed because they wanted to.” They wanted to see and so evolved eyes; to move about and so grew organs of locomotion; the forbears of the giraffe wanted to browse on taller and taller tree-tops and so grew long necks, etc. All this was done by the same phyletic impulsion as now impels us to talk, swim, skate, ride a wheel, etc. We strive at it long and persistently and by and by, presto! the power comes from within because we will it, and it is never lost. In this same way man can and will acquire the power of living several times longer than he does now. As he does so he will put away his present occupations and interests, sports, amusements, party politics, religious dogmas, ceremonies, and indeed most of the things that now interest the populace, and come out into a new adulthood with vastly enhanced powers and a far wider horizon. Those who do this first will become pilots of mankind, which at present seems doomed for want of more wisdom and better leaders. Darwin and especially the Neo-Darwinians who believe in “circumstantial evolution” launched the world on a career of egoism in morals and mechanism in life that has brought it to its present pass and made it forget that all true evolution is from within, vitalistic, and voluntaristic.

Shaw’s drama opens in Eden, where Adam, oppressed by the conviction that he must live forever, first faces the fact of death in finding the putrefying body of a fawn. The gorgeously hooded serpent explains to Eve how she is to renew life by offspring from her body, and because of this she and Adam are assured that they need live only a thousand years. In the next scene Cain the Killer justifies his vocation.

In the second part, which opens in our day, two brothers, one a liberalized clerical and the other a biologist, agree that life is too short to be taken seriously and that neither of them is within a hundred and fifty years of the experience and wisdom they have been sincerely pretending to. To be a good clergyman or biologist requires several centuries. Man now dies before he knows what life or what science is. Indeed, life is now so short that it is hardly worth while to do anything well. Then a past and present prime minister, obviously caricatures of the two most famous men who have lately filled that position in England, enter and try—each according to his method and hobbies—to interest the brothers in one popular cause after another, but in vain; and are finally plainly told that they have not lived long enough to outgrow personal and local prejudices or to see things in their true perspective. The statesmen, failing to find campaign material serviceable for the next election in this new Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas, then ask for a prescription that will prolong their lives and, failing to obtain either, cease to be interested. It does not seem practical to found a Longevity Party and it might be dangerous to let everyone live as long as he wanted to. The statesmen are finally told that as they are incompetent to do God’s work He will produce some better beings who can.

In Part III, A.D. 2170, The thing Happens. An archbishop, now 283 years old, is convinced that “mankind can live any length of time it knows to be absolutely necessary to save civilization from extinction.” Such lengthening may now happen to anyone and when he is convinced that he is one of these elect everything changes. A well preserved lady who appeared in a former part as a parlormaid but who is now 224 years old enters and discourses sapiently on the traits of the short-livers and complains that there are so few grown-ups. “What is wrong with us is that we are a non-adult race.” Her own serious life began at 120.

In Part IV we are transferred to the year A.D. 3000. An Elderly Gentleman, attired in very pronounced fashions that have not changed from our day, comes from Bagdad, now the British capital—London being only a park and cities being for the most part abolished. He is an amateur student of history and comes to revisit the home of his remote ancestors but finds it now tenanted only by long-livers who regard him as a child and chaperone and instruct him as such. At first he loquaciously vents his own opinions on a great variety of subjects with the utmost confidence but finally, under the tutelage of a Primary and a Secondary, and at last from contact with an awful Tertiary (for thus those in the first, second, and third century of their lives are known and labeled) he loses confidence, becomes more and more depressed at finding so many things he cannot understand, and has a serious attack of the “discouragement” that is generally the doom of all short-livers who visit these parts. In the end the aged Briton is so confounded by the wisdom that he cannot comprehend that life loses all its attractions and he finally dies of exhaustion at the feet of the Oracle. Napoleon also swaggers and boasts upon the stage, but his ideals, too, are shown to be only characteristic of the short-livers and he is completely subjected.

Part V of this Pentateuch is dated A.D. 31,920. Children are now born from eggs, clamoring to get out when about as mature as our youth are at seventeen, so that there are no children in our sense. They are grown-ups, according to our standard, at three or four. Art and science, after incredible labors, are at last able to produce two homunculi, a male and a female. They represent the consummation of circumstantial or mechanical evolution. They appear, talk, will, feel, apparently not as the reflex mechanisms and automata they are but as completely human. They have, however, almost incredible powers of destruction which they turn first against their own fabricator. So dangerous are they that they have to be destroyed because not truly human since they lack the creative urge from within.

This amazingly bold projection of Shaw’s imagination into the void is elaborately wrought out and needs very careful reading to be rightly appraised. Almost every reader will agree that he goes much too far in disparaging about all that modern man has done or cared for so far in the world as childish doll-play. This is its pessimism. Its optimism, which lies in the hope of vastly increased longevity and wisdom, will be thought to compensate, or to fail to do so, according to the temperament of the reader. The new dispensation, which is to come when man has grown up, for in the last part it is seen that he may live even 700 or 800 years, will be ushered in by those individuals who are most perfectly convinced of the desperate state into which man has now fallen but nevertheless profoundly believe both that he is worth saving and that he can be saved. George Eliot’s way of prolonging life by giving to moments the significance of days will not do because great events often have no power to speed up but must evolve very slowly. The best type of old age as we know it is still too puerile to expect very much from.

Shaw’s conceptions of the old are neither attractive nor constructive but priggish because presuming on their years to demand respect for a wisdom that is nowhere in evidence. There is almost no suggestion that they have done anything to improve the material or psychic conditions of human life. No great inventions are suggested unless telephonic communication by tuning forks. These Ancients seem to derive their greatest pleasure from disparagement of their own youth and, what is far worse, of youth in general. The long-livers are cynical, addicted to sneering, rebuke, criticise, and do not inspire, construct, achieve, or even teach; in fact they only make the gestures and show the affectations of sagehood. They are divided in their counsels whether to exterminate the short-livers or to leave them to natural selection. Thus they are a class apart and we have almost no hint as to the stages by which they evolved. Now we are told that they are “elected” to longevity or achieve it as “sports,” while in the Preface it is insisted that it comes by a long series of persistent efforts.

On the whole, happy as was his choice of scene, fascinating as are these almost actionless conversations, the whole thing is a jeu d’esprit, with no message of practical import to our age or to the aged unless it be to slightly encourage the hope in the latter that by willing to do so more and more intensely they may add somewhat to their length of years. Shaw’s Ancients are simply a board of censors to carry out his own whims and who have grown arrogant as their powers increased. Altogether they are so unlovely that the reader would hesitate whether he would prefer to be a bloodless Ancient or to take his chance of being exterminated by them as a short-liver. The two Ancients in the fifth book of the Pentateuch, 700 and 800 years old respectively, are chilly, loveless, almost clotheless, sleepless, hairless creatures, happy in enjoying a wisdom of the nature of which we are given very few hints. They teach that all works of art from rag dolls to statues, and even to homunculi, are needless, and the intimation is that they are well on the way to becoming independent of the body, which they have subjected and which has lost all its attractions. We are not even told how the gigantic eggs from which the race is born at adolescence are produced. The final verdict of Lilith, the androgynous mother of our first parents in Eden, is that in giving Eve curiosity, which was still impelling the race to conquer matter and then resolve itself back into bodiless vortexes and energies, she had made no mistake for the Ancients are ever gaining in wisdom to comprehend the universe and, despite the slow decay of their bodies, are likely to attain the goal of achieving real but immaterial truth, beauty, and goodness all in one, so that she need not exterminate man and produce in his place a new and higher race of beings. Thus Shaw’s Ancients are the direct antithetes of Nietzsche’s supermen.

The poets of all times and climes have had something to say of old age, and vastly more of death. The latter has always been one of the chief themes of Christian hymnology and both its gruesome horrors and its consolations have found expression in countless tropes—sleep, harvest, crossing the river, and many others that are fairly burned into the consciousness of all who have come into contact with the church. Hymns have given the Western world ideas of death that the scientific descriptions of it show to be utterly false to fact, for the dying almost never face death consciously, so that its terrors are generally quite unknown to those who meet it; while the cajolements that the Great Enemy has really been conquered in his stronghold and the supreme fear of the world banished, which, as I have elsewhere shown,[109] came to its most ecstatic affirmation at Pentecost, are no less fallacious. Thus along with its anodyne Christianity has invested death with a new horror of hell unknown to the pagan world. Moreover, it has always been taught as something exogenous or as a graft upon a more primitive stock and it is the latter that the psychologist chiefly seeks to know. Thus, excluding the more artificial reactions that have come to it from this source, I have reduced my first numerous selections to a very few that express the natural spontaneous repercussion of the three chief attitudes of mind regarding it.

The first is the death thought that always and everywhere tends to find its first expression in ingenuous youth and this has never been more fully and normally portrayed than in Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,”[110] which is familiar even to school children and which was written by the author in his ripe adolescence. This might have been composed in ancient pagan Hellas or even by a Buddhist as well as by a Christian, so generic and germane is it to human nature as it evolves. Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar,”[111] while it shows vestiges of the same youthful aperçus that lingered into the author’s maturer years, is far more specific, more funereal, and really the farewell address of a dying soul to survivors. The euthanasia motive is far less pronounced in it.

The second attitude is illustrated by Matthew Arnold and by the lugubrious phase of Walt Whitman, both written after decrepitude had begun. Poems written in this spirit arouse the question whether old age is intrinsically pessimistic or perhaps even pathological. Should senescents express or repress the inexorable and progressive limitations and weaknesses senescence brings in its train, or strive to ignore if they cannot be oblivious to them? Are not such abandonments to pathos, in their deeper psychological motivation, a cry for pity, to which strong souls feel it unworthy to appeal? Are they perhaps atavistic vestiges or echoes of a time when the old were more cruelly treated? Why spend time and energy in mourning for what old age takes away rather than in finding “joy in what remains behind” and which no other stage of life can give? Hysterical symptoms are often only an appeal for sympathy by those who crave, perhaps subconsciously, more attention and service, which only selfishness would think lacking. Psychopaths and paranoiacs have often made literary capital of their aberrations, as have adolescents out of the ferments peculiar to their age. All this has its place but should, in my opinion, always be known as what it is, namely, abnormal and aberrant and thus belonging entirely to science and not to literary art.

The third or reminiscent type expresses the inveterate instinct of the old to look back upon life, to illumine and interpret its memories by such philosophy as experience brings, in some measure, to all who can reflect. It is a happy circumstance that senile amnesia always begins with the loss of recent recollections, while those of early life are only later and very rarely effaced. This resource is always open to the aged, who can relive the most interesting stages of their early and adult lives, unify them, and draw the moral of them as a whole. The world owes much and, as it grows old, will owe ever more to the autobiographic impulse of those who achieve normal senectitude.

The following is Matthew Arnold’s “Growing Old”:

What is it to grow old?

Is it to lose the glory of the form,

The lustre of the eye?

Is it for beauty to forego her wreath?

—Yes, but not this alone.

Is it to feel our strength—

Not our bloom only, but our strength—decay?

Is it to feel each limb

Grow stiffer, every function less exact,

Each nerve more loosely strung?

Yes, this, and more; but not

Ah, ’tis not what in youth we dream’d ’twould be!

’Tis not to have our life

Mellow’d and soften’d as with sunset-glow,

A golden day’s decline.

’Tis not to see the world

As from a height, with rapt prophetic eyes,

And heart profoundly stirr’d;

And weep, and feel the fulness of the past.

The years that are no more.

It is to spend long days

And not once feel that we were ever young;

It is to add, immured

In the hot prison of the present, month

To month with weary pain.

It is to suffer this,

And feel but half, and feebly, what we feel

Deep in our hidden heart

Festers the dull remembrance of a change,

But no emotion—none.

It is—last stage of all—

When we are frozen up within, and quite

The phantom of ourselves,

To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost,

Which blamed the living man.

From Walt Whitman I quote the following four extracts:[112]

Thanks in Old Age

Thanks in old age—thanks ere I go,

For health, the midday sun, the impalpable air—for life, mere life,

For precious ever-lingering memories, (of you my mother dear—you, father—you, brothers, sisters, friends,)

For all my days—not those of peace alone—the days of war the same,

For gentle words, caresses, gifts from foreign lands,

For shelter, wine and meat—for sweet appreciation.

A Carol Closing Sixty-nine

Of me myself—the jocund heart yet beating in my breast,

The body wreck’d, old, poor and paralyzed—the strange inertia falling pall-like round me,

The burning fires down in my sluggish blood not yet extinct,

The undiminish’d faith—the groups of loving friends.

Queries to my Seventieth Year

Approaching, nearing, curious,

Thou dim, uncertain spectre—bringest thou life or death?

Strength, weakness, blindness, more paralysis and heavier?

Or placid skies and sun? Wilt stir the waters yet?

Or haply cut me short for good? Or leave me here as now,

Dull, parrot-like and old, with crack’d voice harping, screeching?

As I Sit Writing Here

As I sit writing here, sick and grown old,

Not my least burden is that dulness of the years, querilities,

Ungracious glooms, aches, lethargy, constipation, whimpering ennui,

May filter in my daily songs.

Longfellow strikes a less pessimistic note:[113]

Morituri Salutamus

Ah, nothing is too late

Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.

Cato learned Greek at 80; Sophocles

Wrote his grand Œdipus, and Simonides

Bore off the prize of verse

From his compeers

When each had numbered more than four-score years.

And Theophrastus at four-score and ten

Had but begun his characters of men.

Chaucer at Wadstock, with the nightingales,

At sixty wrote The Canterbury Tales.

Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the last,

Completed Faust when eighty years were past.

These are, indeed, exceptions, but they show

How far the gulf stream of our youth may flow

Into the Arctic regions of our lives

Where little else but life itself survives.

* * * * *

Whatever poet, orator, or sage

May say of it, old age is still old age.

It is the waning, not the crescent, moon,

The dusk of evening, not the blaze of noon.

It is not strength but weakness, not desire

But its surcease, not the fierce heat of fire,

The burning and consuming element,

But that of ashes and of embers spent.

In which some living sparks we still discern,

Enough to warm but not enough to burn.

What, then, shall we sit idly down and say

The night hath come; it is no longer day?

The night hath not come; we are not quite

Cut off from labor by the failing light.

Something remains for us to do or dare,

Even the oldest tree some fruit may bear.

Not Œdipus Colonus, or Greek Ode,

Or tales of pilgrims that one morning rode

Out of the gateway of the Tabard Inn.

But other something would we but begin,

For age is opportunity no less

Than youth itself, though in another dress,

And as the evening twilight fades away

The sky is filled with stars invisible by day.

I also append the following quotations:

At sixty-two life is begun,

At seventy-three begins once more;

Fly swifter as thou near’st the sun

And brighter shine at eighty-four.

At ninety-five

Shouldst thou arrive

Still wait on God and work and thrive.

It has been sung by ancient sages

That love of life increases with years

So much that in our later stages,

When bones grow sharp and sickness rages

The greatest love of life appears.

Hard choice for man to die or else to be

That tottering, wretched, wrinkled thing you see,

Age then we all prefer; for age we pray;

And travel on to life’s last lingering day,

Then sinking slowly down from worse to worse,

Find Heaven’s extorted boon our greatest curse.

Many a man passes his youth in preparing misery for his age, and his age in repairing the misconduct of his youth.

It is easy to die but difficult to die at the right time.

The danger of shipwreck is less in mid-ocean than near to shore.

Time wears out masks; the old show what they are.

The misfortunes of life are that we are born young and become old.

Grow old along with me!

The best is yet to be,

The last of life, for which the first was made!

What I aspired to be,

And was not, comforts me.

Browning: Rabbi Ben Ezra.

What is age but youth’s full bloom

And retiring, more transcendent youth?

Old men must die or the world would grow mouldy, would

only breed the past again.—Tennyson: Becket.

Youth is a blunder; manhood a struggle; old age a regret.—Disraeli: Coningsby.

See how the world its veterans rewards!

A youth of frolics, an old age of cards.

Pope: Moral Essays.

Alonso of Aragon was wont to say in commendation of age, that age appears to be best in four things—old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.—Bacon: Apothegms.

Dr. Clara Barrus, who for many years has labored in the closest personal contact with John Burroughs, has kindly sent me, along with much other information, the notes he made during the last months of his life for an article that he never lived to complete on Old Age. The quotations and aperçus that he collected and that most impressed him were such as the following:

As men grow old they grow more foolish and more wise.

Young saint, old devil; young devil, old saint.

A man at sixteen will prove a child at sixty.

When men grow virtuous in their old age they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil’s leavings.

Nobody loves life like an old man.

An old young man will make a young old man.

Old age is a tyrant who forbids men, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.

Reckless youth makes rueful age.

Young men think old men fools and old men know young men to be so.

The evening of life brings with it its lamps.

A youthful age is desirable but aged youth is troublesome and grievous.

To me the worst thing about old age is that one has outlived all his old friends. The past becomes a cemetery.

It is characteristic of old age to reverse its opinions and its likes and dislikes. But it does not reverse them; it revises them. If its years have been well spent it has reached a higher position from which to overlook Life; it commands a wider view.

Old Age may reason well but old age does not remember well. The power of attention fails, which we so often mistake for deafness in the old. It is the mind that is blunted and not the ear. Hence we octogenarians so often ask for your question over again. We do not grasp it the first time. We do not want you to speak louder. We only need to focus upon you a little more completely.

I probably make more strenuous demands upon him who aspires to be a poet than ever before. I see more clearly than ever before that sweetened prose put up in verse form does not make poetry any more than sweetened water put in the comb in the hive makes honey. The quality of the man makes all the difference in the world. A great nature can describe birds and flowers and clouds and sunsets and spring and autumn greatly.

We in our generation have become so familiar with a universe so much larger than that known to the Ancients that we naturally wonder how the wise men of Greece and Rome and of Judea could have had or seem to have had so little curiosity about the earth upon which they lived and of which they were so ignorant.

Cicero found that age increased the pleasure of conversation. It is certainly true that in age we do find our tongues if we have any. They are unloosened, and when the young or middle-aged sit silent the octogenarian is a fountain of conversation. In age one set of pleasures is gone and another takes its place.

The old man reasons well, the judgment is clear, the mind active, the conscience alert, the interest in life unabated. It is the memory that plays the old man tricks.

Names and places with which one has been perfectly familiar all his life suddenly, for a few moments, mean nothing. It is as if the belt slipped and the wheel did not go around. Then the next moment away it goes again. Or shall we call it a kind of mental anesthetic or paralysis? Thus, the other day I was reading something about Georgetown, S. A. I repeated the name over to myself a few times. Have I not known such a place some time, in my life. Where is it? “Georgetown.” “Georgetown.” The name seems like a dream. Then I thought of Washington, the Capitol, and the city above it, but had to ask a friend if its name was Georgetown. Then suddenly as if some chemical had been rubbed on a bit of invisible writing, out it came! Of course it was Georgetown. How could I have been in doubt about it; I had lived in Washington for ten years.

CHAPTER IV
STATISTICS OF OLD AGE AND ITS CARE

I—Numbers of old people increasing in all known lands where data are available—Actuarial and other mortality tables—Expectation of life and death-rate at different ages—Longevity and fecundity—Death-rate in different occupations—Irving Fisher’s ideas on longevity—The population problem—Longevity in ancient Egypt and in the Middle Ages—Diversity of statistical methods and results.

II—Growing need of care for the indigent old—Causes of improvidence—Ignorance and misconception of what old age is and means—Why the old do not know themselves—Old age pensions in Germany, Austria, Great Britain and her colonies, France, Belgium, United States—Industrial pensions and insurance, beginning with railroads—Trades unions—Fraternal organizations—Retiring pensions in the army and navy—Local and national insurance—Teachers’ pensions—The Carnegie Foundation—Criticism of pension systems—Growing magnitude, urgency, and diversity of views and methods—The Life Extension Institute—“Borrowed Time” and “Sunset” clubs—Should the old organize?

Before discussing the nature and functions of old age, which chiefly concern us in this volume, we must in a brief, summary way answer two preliminary questions: (1) how many old people are there in the registration areas of the world to-day as compared to earlier times and to the total population; and (2) what is done for them publicly and privately. Each of these topics has a copious literature and experts of its own. On the first or statistical problem there is still great diversity of methods and results, which I simply present and make no attempt to harmonize, for this would be premature. As to the second point, of care, I have also attempted only a bird’s-eye view and avoided details.