Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

In Part III, A.D. 2170, The thing Happens. An archbishop, now 283 years old, is convinced that “mankind can live any length of time it knows to be absolutely necessary to save civilization from extinction.” Such lengthening may now happen to anyone and when he is convinced that he is one of these elect everything changes. A well preserved lady who appeared in a former part as a parlormaid but who is now 224 years old enters and discourses sapiently on the traits of the short-livers and complains that there are so few grown-ups. “What is wrong with us is that we are a non-adult race.” Her own serious life began at 120.

In Part IV we are transferred to the year A.D. 3000. An Elderly Gentleman, attired in very pronounced fashions that have not changed from our day, comes from Bagdad, now the British capital—London being only a park and cities being for the most part abolished. He is an amateur student of history and comes to revisit the home of his remote ancestors but finds it now tenanted only by long-livers who regard him as a child and chaperone and instruct him as such. At first he loquaciously vents his own opinions on a great variety of subjects with the utmost confidence but finally, under the tutelage of a Primary and a Secondary, and at last from contact with an awful Tertiary (for thus those in the first, second, and third century of their lives are known and labeled) he loses confidence, becomes more and more depressed at finding so many things he cannot understand, and has a serious attack of the “discouragement” that is generally the doom of all short-livers who visit these parts. In the end the aged Briton is so confounded by the wisdom that he cannot comprehend that life loses all its attractions and he finally dies of exhaustion at the feet of the Oracle. Napoleon also swaggers and boasts upon the stage, but his ideals, too, are shown to be only characteristic of the short-livers and he is completely subjected.

Part V of this Pentateuch is dated A.D. 31,920. Children are now born from eggs, clamoring to get out when about as mature as our youth are at seventeen, so that there are no children in our sense. They are grown-ups, according to our standard, at three or four. Art and science, after incredible labors, are at last able to produce two homunculi, a male and a female. They represent the consummation of circumstantial or mechanical evolution. They appear, talk, will, feel, apparently not as the reflex mechanisms and automata they are but as completely human. They have, however, almost incredible powers of destruction which they turn first against their own fabricator. So dangerous are they that they have to be destroyed because not truly human since they lack the creative urge from within.

This amazingly bold projection of Shaw’s imagination into the void is elaborately wrought out and needs very careful reading to be rightly appraised. Almost every reader will agree that he goes much too far in disparaging about all that modern man has done or cared for so far in the world as childish doll-play. This is its pessimism. Its optimism, which lies in the hope of vastly increased longevity and wisdom, will be thought to compensate, or to fail to do so, according to the temperament of the reader. The new dispensation, which is to come when man has grown up, for in the last part it is seen that he may live even 700 or 800 years, will be ushered in by those individuals who are most perfectly convinced of the desperate state into which man has now fallen but nevertheless profoundly believe both that he is worth saving and that he can be saved. George Eliot’s way of prolonging life by giving to moments the significance of days will not do because great events often have no power to speed up but must evolve very slowly. The best type of old age as we know it is still too puerile to expect very much from.

Shaw’s conceptions of the old are neither attractive nor constructive but priggish because presuming on their years to demand respect for a wisdom that is nowhere in evidence. There is almost no suggestion that they have done anything to improve the material or psychic conditions of human life. No great inventions are suggested unless telephonic communication by tuning forks. These Ancients seem to derive their greatest pleasure from disparagement of their own youth and, what is far worse, of youth in general. The long-livers are cynical, addicted to sneering, rebuke, criticise, and do not inspire, construct, achieve, or even teach; in fact they only make the gestures and show the affectations of sagehood. They are divided in their counsels whether to exterminate the short-livers or to leave them to natural selection. Thus they are a class apart and we have almost no hint as to the stages by which they evolved. Now we are told that they are “elected” to longevity or achieve it as “sports,” while in the Preface it is insisted that it comes by a long series of persistent efforts.

On the whole, happy as was his choice of scene, fascinating as are these almost actionless conversations, the whole thing is a jeu d’esprit, with no message of practical import to our age or to the aged unless it be to slightly encourage the hope in the latter that by willing to do so more and more intensely they may add somewhat to their length of years. Shaw’s Ancients are simply a board of censors to carry out his own whims and who have grown arrogant as their powers increased. Altogether they are so unlovely that the reader would hesitate whether he would prefer to be a bloodless Ancient or to take his chance of being exterminated by them as a short-liver. The two Ancients in the fifth book of the Pentateuch, 700 and 800 years old respectively, are chilly, loveless, almost clotheless, sleepless, hairless creatures, happy in enjoying a wisdom of the nature of which we are given very few hints. They teach that all works of art from rag dolls to statues, and even to homunculi, are needless, and the intimation is that they are well on the way to becoming independent of the body, which they have subjected and which has lost all its attractions. We are not even told how the gigantic eggs from which the race is born at adolescence are produced. The final verdict of Lilith, the androgynous mother of our first parents in Eden, is that in giving Eve curiosity, which was still impelling the race to conquer matter and then resolve itself back into bodiless vortexes and energies, she had made no mistake for the Ancients are ever gaining in wisdom to comprehend the universe and, despite the slow decay of their bodies, are likely to attain the goal of achieving real but immaterial truth, beauty, and goodness all in one, so that she need not exterminate man and produce in his place a new and higher race of beings. Thus Shaw’s Ancients are the direct antithetes of Nietzsche’s supermen.

The poets of all times and climes have had something to say of old age, and vastly more of death. The latter has always been one of the chief themes of Christian hymnology and both its gruesome horrors and its consolations have found expression in countless tropes—sleep, harvest, crossing the river, and many others that are fairly burned into the consciousness of all who have come into contact with the church. Hymns have given the Western world ideas of death that the scientific descriptions of it show to be utterly false to fact, for the dying almost never face death consciously, so that its terrors are generally quite unknown to those who meet it; while the cajolements that the Great Enemy has really been conquered in his stronghold and the supreme fear of the world banished, which, as I have elsewhere shown,[109] came to its most ecstatic affirmation at Pentecost, are no less fallacious. Thus along with its anodyne Christianity has invested death with a new horror of hell unknown to the pagan world. Moreover, it has always been taught as something exogenous or as a graft upon a more primitive stock and it is the latter that the psychologist chiefly seeks to know. Thus, excluding the more artificial reactions that have come to it from this source, I have reduced my first numerous selections to a very few that express the natural spontaneous repercussion of the three chief attitudes of mind regarding it.

The first is the death thought that always and everywhere tends to find its first expression in ingenuous youth and this has never been more fully and normally portrayed than in Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,”[110] which is familiar even to school children and which was written by the author in his ripe adolescence. This might have been composed in ancient pagan Hellas or even by a Buddhist as well as by a Christian, so generic and germane is it to human nature as it evolves. Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar,”[111] while it shows vestiges of the same youthful aperçus that lingered into the author’s maturer years, is far more specific, more funereal, and really the farewell address of a dying soul to survivors. The euthanasia motive is far less pronounced in it.

The second attitude is illustrated by Matthew Arnold and by the lugubrious phase of Walt Whitman, both written after decrepitude had begun. Poems written in this spirit arouse the question whether old age is intrinsically pessimistic or perhaps even pathological. Should senescents express or repress the inexorable and progressive limitations and weaknesses senescence brings in its train, or strive to ignore if they cannot be oblivious to them? Are not such abandonments to pathos, in their deeper psychological motivation, a cry for pity, to which strong souls feel it unworthy to appeal? Are they perhaps atavistic vestiges or echoes of a time when the old were more cruelly treated? Why spend time and energy in mourning for what old age takes away rather than in finding “joy in what remains behind” and which no other stage of life can give? Hysterical symptoms are often only an appeal for sympathy by those who crave, perhaps subconsciously, more attention and service, which only selfishness would think lacking. Psychopaths and paranoiacs have often made literary capital of their aberrations, as have adolescents out of the ferments peculiar to their age. All this has its place but should, in my opinion, always be known as what it is, namely, abnormal and aberrant and thus belonging entirely to science and not to literary art.

The third or reminiscent type expresses the inveterate instinct of the old to look back upon life, to illumine and interpret its memories by such philosophy as experience brings, in some measure, to all who can reflect. It is a happy circumstance that senile amnesia always begins with the loss of recent recollections, while those of early life are only later and very rarely effaced. This resource is always open to the aged, who can relive the most interesting stages of their early and adult lives, unify them, and draw the moral of them as a whole. The world owes much and, as it grows old, will owe ever more to the autobiographic impulse of those who achieve normal senectitude.