Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

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.