The teacher’s life should have three periods—study until twenty-five, investigation until forty, professional until sixty, at which age I would have him retired on a double allowance. Whether Anthony Trollope’s suggestion of a college and chloroform should be carried out or not, I have become a little dubious, as my own time is getting so short.
E. G. Dexter[3] disputes Osler’s conclusions by referring to such well-known cases as Gladstone, Bismarck, von Moltke, Rockefeller, Morgan, etc., and finds that according to the last census there are 4,871,861 persons over sixty in the United States. He recognizes the fact, however, that many corporations refuse to add new men to their working force who are beyond forty years of age. Dexter had previously tabulated the age of the nearly 9,000 persons mentioned in the 1900 edition of Who’s Who and found that comparatively few who were under forty attained the distinction of being included in this list. Of 6,983 men the median age was 54, only one in six being below 40; that is, some 16 per cent were within Osler’s period of most effective work. But he concludes that in Who’s Who younger men did not receive the recognition given to their older confrères. This ratio he finds to be as follows:
| 20–29 | 30–39 | 40–49 | 50–59 | 60–69 |
| 3.9% | 39.5% | 36.4% | 17.6% | 2.4% |
Thus the decade from 30 to 39 shows only very slightly greater productivity than the next one, and less than one-half made good, so far as public recognition is concerned, before the age of 40. This is irrespective of vocation.
In all the studies of genius[4] it would seem that musicians do their best work earliest and prodigies are most common in this field. In those callings that require a long preparation, science promises earliest recognition because this line of work is entered with better intellectual equipment. Here, too, belong professors, librarians, and teachers. Next come actors and authors, in whom ability is partly born and partly made. Compared with science, inventive genius gains a foothold on the ladder of fame late in life. The business man and financier, the lawyer, doctor, and minister, must often enter their profession from the bottom, and almost no great inventor is below forty. For woman, however, recognition comes earlier, and attractiveness of person has a greater premium here than with her brother. Having outlived her youth, however, progress is harder.
W. A. Newman Dorland[5] studied the histories of four hundred great men of modern times and concluded that they refute Osler’s theory, the large majority of them being still active at sixty, although he distinguishes between workers and thinkers. He tells us that only that which is fittest survives and almost seems to imply that man became man when he was able to live and work productively after 40.[6] He considers old age one of the choicest products of evolution. His painstaking article is divided into three sections: (1) enumerating the great things done by men after 70; (2) by those between 60 and 70; (3) by those between 50 and 60. He thinks that if Osler’s dictum has any validity, it is found among manual laborers. It doubtless had its influence in the practice of so many industries that employ no new men above the age of 40.
E. S. P. Haynes[7] resents the idea that people should retire from public affairs at forty, although he recognizes that near this age in both men and women there is often an impatience with a future that promises to be just like the past and there is a peculiar liability to amorous, financial, or other adventures. If people do anything, they are labeled and so get into grooves, and their friends, if they break out in new lines, as for example, Ruskin did, are shocked. But the groove is liable to grow narrow, and when this is realized, abrupt changes may occur. Nature protests against decay and hence it is that we often see the spectacle of impatient old people who are in a hurry, due perhaps to a subconscious effort to feel young again. This is akin to the “dangerous age” in women. Life is not a bed of roses for those who have succeeded, for it is sometimes as difficult to retain as it is to achieve success. Very often our ideas, when we are young, are ahead of our age but the world may catch up with us in middle or later life. Very often, too, by ostentatiously turning their backs upon some new movement the old thereby compel the young to take it up in order to deploy themselves.
In this connection one may reflect, with Louise Creighton, that as older people caused the late war, while the younger fought it, when the latter came home the places that had to be found for them involved a great deal of displacement, so that the tension between old and young has been greatly increased since the close of the war. We also recall the view of George R. Sims,[8] that the effect of the war upon the old was depressing because they felt they must die when the world was in darkness and without realizing the prayer of Simeon. The young anticipated the harvests of peace, but for the old the prospect of dying before this harvest was garnered was often pathetic.
Charles W. St. John[9] résumés the experimental studies of Ranschenburg and Balint which show that all activities of judgment, association, etc., are retarded, errors increased, and ideas impoverished in old age. De Fursac tabs the traits of normal senile dementia as (1) impaired attention and association; (2) inaccurate perception of the external world, with illusions and disorientation; (3) disordered memory, retrograde amnesia, and perhaps pseudo-reminiscence; (4) impoverishment of ideas; (5) loss of judgment; (6) loss of affectivity, along with morbid irritability; and (7) automatism. There may be ideas of persecution or delusions of greatness. Youthful items of experience hitherto only in the fringe of consciousness now press to the center, and youthful contents are revived. There is a tendency to depart from inductive procedure toward a priori methods, where feelings and beliefs are criteria, and especially, as Fechner showed, to introversion. There is less control and regression first shows itself in the intellect, which is last to develop.
St. John proceeds to characterize four eminent men who underwent more or less radical transformations in the early stages or youth of old age, as follows. Tolstoy[10] was a typical convert. He witnessed the horror of his grandmother’s death, which profoundly affected all his later views. When he was about twelve, a schoolmate told him that there was no God and that all thought about Him was an invention; and he accepted this news and went on in a few years to Nihilism. In later life he asked himself if he should become “more famous than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, and Molière, what then?” and he could not answer. The ground crumbled under him. There was no reason to live. Every day was bringing him nearer to the precipice and yet he could not stop. He felt he could live no longer and the idea of suicide as a last resort was always with him and he had to practice self-deception to escape it. Yet he had a pagan love of life. He found his status summed up in an Eastern fable of a traveler who is attacked by a wild beast and attempts to escape by letting himself down into a dried-up well, at the bottom of which he finds a dragon, and so is forced to cling to a wild plant that grows on the wall. Suddenly he sees two mice (one black and one white—day and night) nibbling the plant from which he hangs and in despair he looks about, still with a faint hope of escape. On the leaves of this wild plant he sees a few drops of honey and even with fear at his heart he stretches out his tongue and licks them. Thus the dragon of death inevitably awaits him, while even the honey he tries to taste no longer rejoices him for it is not sweet. “I cannot turn my eyes from the mice or the dragon. Both are no fable.”