Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

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.