SENESCENCE
CHAPTER I
THE YOUTH OF OLD AGE
The turn of the tide of life—Relative amount and importance of work accomplished before and after forty—The sexual life at the turn of the tide in man and woman—Osler’s views and critics (E. G. Dexter, D. A. N. Dorland, E. S. P. Haynes)—Illustrations from Tolstoi, Fechner, Comte, Swedenborg—The typical cases of Segantini, Lenau, von Kleist, de Maupassant, Gogol, Scheffel, Ruskin and Nietzsche—Michaëlis’s “dangerous age” in women—The difficulty in determining this age—The nature of the changes, conscious and unconscious, and the lessons that people in this stage of life should lay to heart—H. G. Wells and Ross.
The easiest division of every whole is into two halves. Thus day and night are bisected by noon and midnight, the year by both the solstice and the equinox; the racer turns in the middle of his course; curricula, apprenticeships, and long tasks have, from immemorial time, celebrated the completion of their first moiety, and halfway houses divide established courses of travel. So, too, we speak of middle age and think vaguely of it as half way between birth and death or between adolescence and senescence. If we think of life as a binomial curve rising from a base line at birth and sinking into it at death, midway is the highest point with the longest ordinate; and as the crest of a wave has its spindrift, so life at this point often foams, or at least shows emulsive tendencies. We come in sight of the descent while the ascent behind is still visible. The man of thirty-five hopes to live the allotted span of seventy and at forty he knows that in another two-score years his work will cease; and thus some comparison of the past and future is inevitable. Some begin taking stock of what has been and what remains to be done, reckoning only from the date of entering upon their careers and trying thus to judge its future by its past. Thus sooner or later there comes to all a realization that the tide that “drew us from out the boundless deep” begins to “turn again home.”
These meridional perturbations usually come earlier in women than in men, and this has been called their “dangerous age.” Both sexes realize that they face the bankruptcy of some of their youthful hopes, and certain temperaments make a desperate, now-or-never effort to realize their extravagant expectations and are thus led to excesses of many kinds; while others capitulate to fate, lose heart, and perhaps even lose the will-to-live. Osler was the evil genius, the croaking Poe raven of this period. If such pronouncements as his stimulate talent, which is longer lived, they depress genius, which blossoms earlier. On the height of life we ought to pause, circumspect, turn from the dead reckonings of the start, and ascend as into an outlook tower to see, before it is too late, if we need to reorient our course by the eternal stars. Here we begin the home stretch toward the finish. Change, or at least thoughts of change, arise even in those most successful, as biography so abundantly shows, while even partial failure impels many to seek new environments and perhaps callings and some are driven to mad new ventures. Most, however, despite a certain perturbation, go on perhaps a score of years, and instead of anticipating old age wait till it is upon them and they have to restrict their activities or retire; then only do they accept the burden of years. The modifications in the vita sexualis which middle life brings are only now beginning to be understood in their true significance. Its first flush has come and gone and some settle to the tranquil fruition of a happy married life, while others stray into secret and forbidden ways or yield to the excitements of overindulgence just when Nature begins to suggest more moderation, so that love often grows gross just when its sublimation should begin to be most active. One close and experienced observer points out that the forties is the decade of the triangle, of the paramour, and of divorces for men, and that the preceding decade is so for women; but of course we have no confirmatory statistics for such a conclusion save only for divorce. The following epitomes represent the chief aspects and treatments of this period, although illustrations of its phenomena might be indefinitely multiplied.
The sensational press has so perverted the statements made by Dr. William Osler in his farewell address on leaving the Johns Hopkins University in 1905, and his remarks are so pithy, thinly and ineffectively as he tried to mask his earnestness with humor, that it seems worth while to quote his words, as follows:[2]
I have two fixed ideas well known to my friends, harmless obsessions with which I sometimes bore them, but which have a direct bearing on this important problem. The first is the comparative uselessness of men above forty years of age. This may seem shocking, and yet, read aright, the world’s history bears out the statement. Take the sum of human achievement in action, in science, in art, in literature—subtract the work of the men above forty, and, while we should miss great treasures, even priceless treasures, we should practically be where we are to-day. It is difficult to name a great and far-reaching conquest of the mind which has not been given to the world by a man on whose back the sun was still shining. The effective, moving, vitalizing work of the world is done between the ages of twenty-five and forty years—these fifteen golden years of plenty, the anabolic or constructive period, in which there is always a balance in the mental bank and the credit is still good.
In the science and art of medicine there has not been an advance of the first rank which has not been initiated by young or comparatively young men. Vesalius, Harvey, Hunter, Bichat, Laennec, Virchow, Lister, Koch—the green years were yet on their heads when their epoch-making studies were made. To modify an old saying, a man is sane morally at thirty, rich mentally at forty, wise spiritually at fifty—or never. The young men should be encouraged and afforded every possible chance to show what is in them. If there is one thing more than another upon which the professors of the university are to be congratulated, it is this very sympathy and fellowship with their junior associates, upon whom really in many departments, in mine certainly, has fallen the brunt of the work. And herein lies the chief value of the teacher who has passed his climacteric and is no longer a productive factor; he can play the man midwife, as Socrates did to Theætetus, and determine whether the thoughts which the young men are bringing to the light are false idols or true and noble births.
My second fixed idea is the uselessness of men above sixty years of age, and the incalculable benefit it would be in commercial, political, and in professional life if, as a matter of course, men stopped work at this age. Donne tells us in his “Biathanatos” that by the laws of certain wise states sexagenarii were precipitated from a bridge, and in Rome men of that age were not admitted to the suffrage, and were called depontani because the way to the senate was per pontem and they from age were not permitted to come hither. In that charming novel, the “Fixed Period,” Anthony Trollope discusses the practical advantages in modern life of a return to this ancient usage, and the plot hinges on the admirable scheme of a college into which at sixty men retired for a year of contemplation before a peaceful departure by chloroform. That incalculable benefits might follow such a scheme is apparent to any one who, like myself, is nearing the limit, and who has made a careful study of the calamities which may befall men during the seventh and eighth decades!
Still more when he contemplates the many evils which they perpetuate unconsciously and with impunity! As it can be maintained that all the great advances have come from men under forty, so the history of the world shows that a very large proportion of the evils may be traced to the sexagenarians—nearly all the great mistakes politically and socially, all of the worst poems, most of the bad pictures, a majority of the bad novels, and not a few of the bad sermons and speeches. It is not to be denied that occasionally there is a sexagenarian whose mind, as Cicero remarks, stands out of reach of the body’s decay. Such a one has learned the secret of Hermippus, that ancient Roman, who, feeling that the silver cord was loosening, cut himself clear from all companions of his own age, and betook himself to the company of young men, mingling with their games and studies, and so lived to the age of 153, puerorum halitu refocillatus et educatus. And there is truth in the story, since it is only those who live with the young who maintain a fresh outlook on the new problems of the world.