“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.