Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

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.