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.