Old age is neither helped nor understood by the cheap and chipper paradoxes about it of those who tell the old that they are not so save in years and that these do not count, or who affect to marvel at the passion to look and seem young. One writer[104] even tells us that the old are beautiful and thinks it is a perverse precept of social condition to think of chronological age at all. “We should say eighty years young;” “properly speaking there is no old age,” etc. All this is really the state of mind of a mental healer who does not wish old age, disease, or death, and so denies their existence and turns his back upon reality. It is the state of mind mythically ascribed to an ostrich, although the best observers deny that it ever buries its head in the sand from fear of danger. Such cajolery of the old is like baby-talk to children, which only infantilism or advanced second childhood relishes. It suggests infirmary wards and is itself a product of the type of psychic invalidism and valetudinarianism that is interesting to the psychologist because the appetite for it suggests the dreamy state of mind in which delusions become factual if they embody our desires. The old should be beyond attitudinizing or affecting a youth that is gone, for this is to live a lie, which is dangerous not only to their serenity, for old age should be the age of truth, but to health and even life.
G. S. Street[105] refutes the statement that of late, especially since the war, there is a great and growing gap between the young and the old, who speak a different language mutually unintelligible; that the old can no longer understand the young; etc. This has found frequent expression in recent literature. The rising generation is said to have its own interests, ideas, and even language, to have broken away from the old, and even to have developed a new poetry and art. A generation ago there was such a gap. The grown-ups were Olympians and there was little attempt of either young or old to understand each other. There was little friendship between dons and students but we have now a popular cult not only of childhood but of adolescence. It is said that psychoanalysis is becoming a cult of the young generation but Freud himself was not born yesterday. A very few soldiers have complained bitterly of the selfishness and stupidity of their elders who sent them into the trenches, safely staying at home themselves. There are, of course, aging politicians and diplomats who are little in touch with the future as represented by the sentiments and aspirations of the young.
But, on the whole, the war has brought old and young nearer together. The old have given up their foolish airs of superiority and the young have been matured by their experience. To be sure, these oldsters often criticise the young generation, that it is aggressive and free of speech or conduct; and there are young people who, under the illusion of new ideas, are aggressive. But such a gulf as has existed between the old and the young has always been mainly the fault of the old, and the qualities of the young give them less excuse for this attitude than they ever had before. Perhaps the world is a little too much in the hands of people who are a little too old, but this is being rapidly remedied.
C. W. Saleeby, M.D.,[106] says that young children never worry and youth does so almost entirely for the future, while the worries of old age are chiefly retrospective and may take the form of regrets. If young people feel these, it is only for a brief space, for they are resilient and soon react. In middle life the struggle for existence is keener and the “might-have-beens” cannot always be dismissed, although those in good health can usually soon surmount them. But this is more difficult in old age unless, indeed, it is “a lusty winter, frosty but kindly.” Wordsworth describes old age as it should be in this respect in “The Happy Warrior”:
Who not content that former worth stand fast
Looks forward persevering to the last,
From well to better daily self-surpassed.
Who, whether praise of him must walk the earth
Forever and to noble deeds give birth
Or he must fail, to sleep without his fame