As a psychologist I am convinced that the psychic states of old people have great significance. Senescence, like adolescence, has its own feelings, thoughts, and wills, as well as its own physiology, and their regimen is important, as well as that of the body. Individual differences here are probably greater than in youth. I wanted to realize as fully as was practicable how it seems to be old. Accordingly I looked over such literature, both poetry and prose, as I found within reach, written by aging people describing their own stage of life, and by selection, quotation, and résumé have sought, in this chapter, to let each of them speak for him- or herself.

Some find a veritable charm in watching every phase of the sunset of their own life and feel even in the prospect of death a certain mental exaltation. More are sadly patient and accept some gospel of reconciliation to fate. Some distinctly refuse to think on or even to recognize the ebb of the tide. A few find consolation in beautifying age with tropes and similes that divert or distract from the grim realization of its advance. But perhaps the most striking fact is that so many not only deliberately turn from the supports offered to declining years by the Church but have more or less abandoned faith in physicians, for age is a disease that their ministrations may mitigate but can never cure. Men of science find least solace in religion, to which women are much more prone to turn than men. In most, love is more or less sublimated into philanthropy and very often into a new and higher love of nature in all her aspects. All, with hardly an exception, pay far more attention to health and body-keeping than ever before and many evolve an almost fetishistic faith in the efficacy of some item of food or regimen to which they ascribe peculiar virtue. They want to prolong life and well-being to their utmost goal for, with all the handicaps of age, life is still too sweet to leave voluntarily.

Many old people fortify themselves against the depressions and remissions of old age by familiarizing their minds with quotations from the Scriptures, hymnology, poetry, and general literature. We have a good illustration of this in Margaret E. White’s volume.77 It consists mainly of selections, determined of course by the author’s point of view—that of a liberal religionist—which has given her, and is well calculated to give others with her point of view, mental satisfaction. She wants to have “prisms in her window” to fill the room with rainbows. As the shadows lengthen she believes the climacteric should supervene without any break at all with the prime of life, although there are really two curves that run a very different course, one of physical strength and another of experience. When one stands on the summit of his years, he is buoyed up by great plans for life; but when he retires, there is nothing ahead save death and this involves a great and often critical change. The successful life is one that solves the problems that meet it here without patheticism and without self-delusion.

The author’s anthology of quotations and her own reflections are not a cry in the dark but, on the whole, strike a note of courage and her book is of psychological value because it gives us a good idea of how many authors have thought and felt. Most want to be quiet and at home. They console themselves with intimations of a lofty and spiritual, if remote, idealism. Perhaps of all the young people we knew not one will accompany the late survivors. Old age is a benefaction because service to it ennobles all who render it. When wrinkles come in the mind, one sings, the old is ever old; another, it is ever young. One conceives it as the portal to a higher life, while for another it is solely reversionary.

Harriet E. Paine,78 a retired maiden teacher, had grown deaf and her sight was dim at sixty, when this book was written. Her attitude is one of the very best illustrations of the consolations that are open to those in whom old age is like a summer night, who can maintain their optimism when the senses cut us off from the external world and we have to “economize the falling river” and take in sail. The author has much to say of old people with defective senses and thinks deafness particularly irritating both to the individual and to those about, especially if, as in her case, there is also weakness and diffidence. These impel one to take refuge in the “Great Comrade.” Like so many others, she finds great satisfaction in the familiar cases of great things done by old people and thinks that “the higher powers of the mind go on ripening to the last,” instancing the remarkable fight made for life by Pope Leo XIII when he was ninety-four, the chief items in whose enlightened policy were inaugurated after he was seventy. Samuel Whittemore, at eighty, killed three British soldiers on April 19, 1775, and then was himself shot, bayoneted, and beaten seemingly to death but had vitality enough to live on to the age of ninety-eight. Sophocles wrote his Œdipus at ninety; Mrs. Gilbert acted till over seventy; Mrs. Livermore, Julia Ward Howe, and others furnish examples that hearten her, etc. When the hair grows white it is possible, especially for women, to do many things impossible before.

Being herself in straitened circumstances, she is interested in, for example, the provisions of the New Zealand Parliament in 1898 granting a pension of eighteen pounds per annum to all people over sixty-five of good moral character who had resided in the country twenty-five years and whose income did not exceed thirty-four pounds; and also in Edward Everett Hale’s plea for a limited old-age pension bill, whereby a man paying a poll tax for twenty-five years and not convicted of crime should be given a pension of two dollars a week, the state to set aside a part of the poll tax for this purpose. He claimed that the savings to poorhouses would offset the expenditure. But still this author realizes that the old can be happy in comparative poverty if they strive to make their corner of the world brighter. At no time of life are the advantages of culture and experience more precious. She thinks the relations between old and young, so hard to adjust, need special attention. The two can live together only by sacrifices on both sides and this can never be successful unless each is able to take the other’s point of view. She rather surprisingly concedes that with true insight the young have more sympathy with the old than the latter, by memory, can have with the young, perhaps because bodily vigor increases love. She would mitigate the stage of criticizing mothers, through which she thinks all girls tend to pass, for old age gives a wisdom that is far harder to acquire and more precious than knowledge.

The very old are very different from the old; for example, an old lady of eighty-nine called on one of ninety-eight and felt rejuvenated. Very few do, when they are old, what they have planned for their old age. The weapon against loneliness is work. “When the world is cold to you, go build fires to warm up.” We strive to renew the emotions but find it very hard to do so and feel burned to the socket. In answering the question how far we should let the dead past bury its dead, she deplores the fact that young persons, especially young women, often give to their elders, particularly mothers or fathers, a devotion that involves a complete sacrifice of their own lives and thinks that to accept this is the acme of selfishness in the old. Old age is especially hard, she thinks, for those who have enjoyed the senses most.

Amelia E. Barr79 says that on March 29, 1911, she awoke early to see her eightieth birthday come in. “I wish to master in these years the fine art of dying well, which is quite as great a lesson as the fine art of living well, about which everyone is so busy.” A good old age is a neighbor to a blessed eternity. An English physician said, “If you wish to have a vigorous old age, go into the darkness and silence ten hours out of every twenty-four, for in darkness we were formed.” “Never allow anyone to impose their pleasures upon you; if you have any rights, it is to choose the way you will spend your time.” “On the margin gray, twixt night and day,” the author finds special comfort in the lines

It is a sin, she says, to become so mentally active that we are unable to keep quiet and go to sleep. The Greeks knew little of insomnia and the English have been great sleepers and dreamers, holding perhaps with Wordsworth that “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,” etc.

This author is an astrologist and tells us that nine insane rulers were born when Mercury or the moon, or both, were affected by Mars, Saturn, or Uranus, and five people of genius were ruled by the same planets and became insane. She really mourns less for what age takes away than what it leaves behind.

The tone of her work differs radically from that of Miss Paine. The latter seeks and finds compensations so satisfactory to herself that she ventures into print with them, apparently for the first time, hoping that she may thereby help others to live out their old age better; while the former indulges her literary instincts to produce another book and is far more inspired by the muse of Death than that of Life. The kismet motive, which is expressed in her recourse to astral fatalism, manifests not a pis aller resource first found when she was old but one that had long been with her, and it is an interesting recrudescence of the same psychological motivations that in the East made fatalism and among Calvinists made the doctrine of divine decrees and foreordination so attractive.

At the age of eighty-three she worked six hours a day instead of nine as formerly, avoided routine, tried to give her mind new thoughts, and thought this mental diet kept her strong. She took two cups of coffee in the morning and more at night, persisted in lying abed ten hours although she slept but seven, eschewed all preserved fruits, etc. She had a constant sense of the Divine and her whole standpoint is very different from that, for example, of Burroughs.

Mortimer Collins80 looks back on a prolonged life with calm philosophic poise and concludes that length of life is wholly dependent upon ideas. The theory of Asgill that it is cowardly of man to die appeals to him. Sylvester calculated the lives of nine mathemeticians with an average age of 79, but Collins finds nine literary men whose average age was 85, and so concludes that “imagination beats calculation.” We are islands in an infinite sea; only the instant is ours. The soul makes the body. He holds that in England there is no mode of life healthy enough to secure longevity, either in the city or country, while London is a slow poison. He wants a Utopia, but without religion. He would have a journal kept in every locality noting length or brevity of life, with the causes thereof, as a kind of vade Mecum for the inhabitants. All should live in the open, with plenty of water and hills, enough sleep and good food. Marriage should be congenial and love a liberal education; in short, marriage should be completion. Parents early spoil their children and later fear them. Politics should be eschewed for it shows only the worst side of human nature. We should have books telling us how to enjoy summers, the secret of which even the English gentleman has not yet found. Literature, especially the classics, helps to longevity, and in old age people should do that which they most love, that is most natural and that gives greatest freedom to the play instinct—not that which pays best. Gardening takes us into partnership with God and he prescribes country walks with the sun and the sea. The country gentleman should live an almost Homeric life. The large number of octogenarians in Westmoreland, the lake region of Wordsworth, which has often been noticed, is very significant. The laziest man usually lives longest, but lazing is an art.

The style of this author is in places almost lapidary, his views are quaint and abrupt and the reader is impressed with the idea that he is supremely satisfied with old age as he has found it. His radicalism is good-natured and his love of paradox suggests an affectation of originality that does not, however, much impair his fundamental sincerity. He illustrates a type of precocious maturity that finds pleasure in ideas not very well matured.

Colonel Nicholas Smith81 is a homely philosopher of old age who has brought together a vast body of items to hearten the old and to support the thesis that all can greatly prolong their lives if they will. He thinks that as years advance the average brain does more work, and the body less. With remarkable industry he has gathered records of scores and hundreds of old people living, or recently dead, who have maintained their vigor and remained “invincible children,” who never became wholly sophisticated but still dream, wonder, and believe. He almost seems to agree with Emerson that a man is not worth very much until he is sixty.

Most of his book consists of brief records of men who maintained their activity to a great age. Many of these are familiar enough but we sample a few. Mommsen, for example, frail and small, lost his library by fire when he was sixty, a calamity that all thought would end his career. But he did much of his best work later, toiling on his History of Rome nearly to his death in his eighty-sixth year. George Ives, when his friends congratulated him on attaining his hundredth year, was found at work in the field and said that even if he knew he were to die the next day he should “carry on” as if he were immortal. Mrs. H. W. Truex on her 96th birthday in 1904 finished a quilt of nine hundred and seventy-five pieces and during the previous year had completed six such. Sir Joseph Hooker, the botanist, worked almost up to his death at 87, holding that rich natures develop slowly. Carlyle published the last volume of his Frederick the Great at the age of 69; Darwin, his Descent of Man at 62; Longfellow wrote his Morituri Salutamus for the fiftieth anniversary of his graduation; W. C. Bryant published his translation of the Odyssey at the age of 76; O. W. Holmes wrote his “Guardian Angel” at 70 and “Antipathy” at 76, while the “Iron Gate” was for a breakfast given in honor of his seventieth birthday; George Bancroft at 82 published his History of the Foundations of the Constitution of the United States; Frances Trollope, failing in business at the age of nearly 50 and a stranger in this country, turned to a literary career, and between the ages of 52 and 83 wrote upwards of a hundred volumes, mostly novels of society; Humboldt, at the age of 74, began his Cosmos, the fourth and last volume of which was issued the year before his death, in 1858, at the age of ninety; Cervantes published the last part of his Don Quixote at 78; Goethe wrote till he was 80 and finished the second part of Faust only shortly before his death; Victor Hugo wrote his Annals of a Terrible Year at 70, and his Ninety-Three, which some regard as his best story, at the age of 72; Mary Sommerville kept up her scientific activities and at 92 said she could still read books on the higher algebra four to five hours in the forenoon; Weir Mitchell wrote his Hugh Wynne at 66 and Constance Trescot, a very remarkable psychological study of a woman, when he was 76. A deposed minister began the study of medicine at 72 and practiced for several years, dying in the harness. A. J. Huntington was acting professor of classics till he was 82. Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney published her twenty-seventh volume at the age of 80, etc.

There are two views of age. One is Hogarth’s picture—a shattered bottle, cracked bell, unstrung bow, signpost of a tavern called the “World’s End,” shipwreck, Phoebus’s horses dead in the clouds, the moon in her last quarter, the world on fire. It only remained to add to this the picture of a painter’s palette broken. This was his last work and he died at 67. Over against this we might place E. E. Hale, who late in life said his prospects cast no shadow and became very anxious to see the curtain rise. When he was 80 he published his Memoirs of a Hundred Years and at 82 was chaplain of the United States Senate. Gladstone locked every affair of state out of his bedroom and said that when we sleep we must pay attention to it, for a workless is a worthless life.

This author agrees with J. H. Canfield, who protested that the old should stay in the harness and not step out to give the young men a chance, for they never had a better chance than to work with their elders, as colts are best broken in with old horses. As we grow old we see that nothing, after all, matters as much as we had thought. Smith finds comfort in the fact that, according to the census of 1900, one in every two hundred becomes an octogenarian and that out of a population of 36,800,000 there were 176,571 reputed to be 80 years of age or over.

He finally gives us his own empirical observations about foods and concludes that three-fourths of all the poor health in the country is due to dietary errors or to “carrion and cathartics.” The old should eat no meat, take no drink with meals, avoid starch, recognize the error in the belief that they need stimulants, and should not try to be fat but realize that progressive emaciation is normal. Appetite should be our guide although we should eat only about half what we want. He, too, praises laziness as a concomitant of longevity and recognizes a vast difference in dietary needs. He would never use laxatives but depends upon two glasses of water half an hour before breakfast and two in the afternoon, and would never mix cooked vegetables nor fruit.

The popularity and wide sale of this book must have been extremely gratifying to the author as not only showing wide and deep interest in the subject but as also supplying, by copious data and illustrations, the kind of encouragement the old often sorely need. The author makes no pretenses of being scientific and accepts cases of reputed great age with no critical scruples.

Byron C. Utecht82 thinks the day is dawning when one hundred and fifty years will be the usual span of life. He gives many statistics to show that the average age is slowly increasing, particularly in Switzerland, where in the sixteenth century it was 21.2 years whereas in the nineteenth it was 39.7. He quotes Finkenberg of Bonn, who concludes that “the average length of life in Europe in the sixteenth century was 18 years and now it is 40,” the average in India being now about 23.6 years as against 19, two hundred years ago. These figures, it should be noted, however, are little more than conjectural.

Utecht, like Colonel Smith, has collected data about many people who have reached the age of 100, some of whom he photographs. He believes man not only lives longer but is more vital than formerly. He seems to accept without proof that a Montana Indian lived to be 134; an Oregon woman, 120; and a Mrs. Kilcrease of Texas, 136. He tells us of one Arkansas woman who reached 112 years, keeping a large garden almost to the end of her life, who at the above age walked six miles and back to see her great-great-granddaughter married. She claimed her age was due to clean, honest living, plenty of work, a desire to help, keeping busy, and caring for others. A. Goodwin of Alabama (106) walks five miles a day and works several hours in his garden. He eats what he likes, reads without glasses, and is the head of one of the largest families in the country, their reunions being attended by more than eight hundred persons. He had been a hunter and still uses his rifle and ascribes his longevity to interest in out-of-door sports as a young man. He has been so busy he can hardly realize he is old, wants fifty years more of life if possible and feels that he is going to have it. He has been temperate, sleeps much and regularly, and has a horror of worry. Mrs. Mary Harrison of Michigan celebrated her hundredth anniversary and did not seem as tired as any of her two hundred guests. She had been a humorist and would never look on the dark side of things. An Ohio lady of 91 who has been devoted to a motorcycle cannot bring herself to give up her joyrides, although she now has a young man to guide the wheel. She has always lived in the country and worked hard and ascribes her longevity chiefly to her rides.

Utecht has collected perhaps two-score more instances of people well over ninety and concludes that all of them were, in their prime, more or less athletic—at least none were weaklings. He thinks the longest-lived people are average men and women who have a good hygienic sense. None were intemperate, few were highly educated, and most were inured to hardships and even drudgery in youth, so that the study of all their lives practically tells the same story of simple life in the free air, with enough but not too much work and with exemption, for the most part, from worry.

It would be interesting to know if a more critical study of the actual age of many of these and other quoted centenarians would substantiate their claims. No such investigation, however, has ever been made into the many cases reported by this and the preceding author.

I append a few special records that seem peculiarly challenging. The first is that of James L. Smith,83 a veteran of the Civil War. Twenty years ago he weighed two hundred and twenty pounds, was warned against excitement, and his friends and physician were horrified when he proceeded to run his flesh off. It was a great effort for so heavy a man but in six months he had reduced his weight to one hundred and ninety and was running more than six miles a day, his daily work being the directing of two hundred district messengers. Yielding to the protests of his friends he ceased his exercise, because he was told that he could not punish his heart and lungs thus and not suffer and was liable to drop dead. Growing fleshy again, with increased shortness of breath, he began to run again daily, reducing his weight once more to a hundred and sixty and developing a physique and complexion like that of a far younger man. At seventy he ran never less than five and often ten miles a day, holding that senility is a disease of the mind and that youth and its vigor can be maintained if one only believes in himself. He has raced in many parts of the country and has a standing offer to run any ten survivors of the Civil War in relays of one to a mile, he himself running the whole ten. His offer used to be accepted; it is so no longer. The day he was seventy he “covered a half mile faster than a roller-skating champion,” and at seventy-three ran half a mile in 2 minutes and 44 seconds. On a dirt road he has run ten miles in 1 hour, 13 minutes, and 48 seconds, exactly the same time in which he ran the same distance in the Grand Army marathon at Los Angeles six years before, and says that he finished in fine condition.

Still more interesting, although perhaps not more authentic, is the autobiographic record of Sanford Bennett.84 At the age of fifty he was broken in health and had to give up his position because of a feeble heart and dyspeptic stomach. After trying various cures he, like Smith, developed one of his own, consisting chiefly of very manifold exercises taken, for the most part, in a recumbent position to lessen the arterial strain upon his weak heart, and with little and finally no apparatus. By persistent adherence to this regimen the circulatory and digestive functions were slowly recuperated and his muscles underwent remarkable development in bulk and power. Many photographs of himself, with only a breech-waist, show him to have acquired a symmetry and fulness of physical development of which any young athlete might well be proud. Under self-massage wrinkles of face and neck disappeared, the growth of the hair on his head was somewhat increased, and its grayness was more or less modified. His spirits and the courage with which he faced life and reëntered business showed a rejuvenation of mind and feelings no less remarkable than that of the body. By more or less systematic methods he strengthened his eyes; improved the condition of his liver and kidneys; freshened the skin; greatly bettered the varicosities (photographed) of the veins of his legs; and materially improved the action of his heart, all the while recognizing the influences of the unconscious mind upon his physical condition. He has entirely overcome his tendency to adiposity, strengthened his voice, increased the girth of his chest and his respiratory capacity, etc.

It is impossible to con this book and its untouched photographs without the conviction, which has been strengthened by my own correspondence with the author, that he has undergone a remarkable physical transformation. We have already enough such instances to suggest that senescence normally releases in healthy natures new motivations for the conservation of health and that if these are given their due expression and if all aging men and women came to realize that as the decline of life sets in they must be, more and more, not only their own hygienists but their own physicians, far more might be accomplished in many if not most cases than the world at present suspects.

This suggests the lesson that Charles Francis85 has drawn from his life, namely, that exercise is the chief cause of his vigor at seventy. His life in connection with his vocation as a printer has been extremely active and arduous and he ascribes his present condition to athletics and his exceptional fondness for dancing. He insists that next to this comes the avoidance of worry and thinks that every normal old man develops a more or less full creed of hygienic Do’s and Don’ts. Charles Cliff thinks the way to eighty is to work hard in youth and then gradually take it easy.

Many modern writers, like Cicero’s Cato, ascribe great efficacy to the accumulated examples of old men who have achieved exceptional success late in life, not only in business, arts, and letters but in the greatest art of all, that of conserving health and youth. We can easily conceive of a new temple of fame to immortalize those who have mastered the art of deferring senility and death.

Captain G. E. D. Diamond86 claimed to be 103 and in his book tells us how he lived—no sweets, meats, stimulants, tobacco, tea, or coffee; had never married; found a panacea in olive oil taken internally and with which he once or twice daily rubbed his body; found great virtue in a cup of hot water at breakfast, grapefruit at luncheon, bread buttered with olive oil; used milk, and fish. He discants at length upon the kinds, purity, and mode of application of his panacea and is a polemic vegetarian.

The late Cardinal Gibbons87 thinks no one ever died of hard work and says that he almost never had an idle moment. He forced himself to lie in bed at least eight hours and did not worry if he did not fall asleep. The foundations of health are laid in youth and he laid the greatest stress upon plenty of regular exercise suitable to one’s age, moderation in eating and drinking, plenty of sleep, an occupation, and avoidance of worry.

John Burroughs88 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 Ogden89 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 Matthews91 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 Emerson92 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 Holmes93 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. Hoar94 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.

Each generation, as it passes, gets from its successor much more criticism than sympathy; the heir is not on good terms with the king. “Crabbed age and youth cannot live together.” No English monarch ever built a tomb for his predecessor. We should thank God that Abraham, Isaac, and David are well dead.

It is young men who deal most courageously with the doctrine of immortality; old men have made no contribution to it. They are silent or do not wish to be suspected of cant or hypocrisy, or perhaps fear striking their heads against a stone wall. If there is no immortality it is the great souls who will be most disappointed and the world will be “only the receptacle of a compost heap of the carcasses of an extinct humanity.” A cruel Highland chief shut his rebellious nephew in a dungeon, fed him on salt meat, then let down a cup which on opening contained no water, and left him to die of thirst. The Divine treats us this way if there is no future. Old men develop individuality. They reason less and less about the future and trust reason less. But “beside the silent sea I wait the muffled oar,” assured that “no harm from Him can come to me on ocean or on shore.”

W. D. Howells95 said at eighty that he was less afraid of dying than when he was young. Virtues may become faults, for example, thrift may make a miser, his love of gold being more tangible than of greenbacks. It is, indeed, a shame to die rich. We are often young in spots, for example, on a spring morning. Slight acclivities seem to grow up into hills. After too long sitting, for example, in the theater, we realize that we have over-rested. The golden age, he thinks, is between fifty and sixty. Those who have made themselves wanted are still so. Our utmost effort is less. We are not dull, as the young think us because we seem so to them. A reader has exhausted most of the best literature and yet of rereading old books and reading new ones we never tire and have our favorite passages. We should interest ourselves in public questions. It hurts to be always told how young we look. We forget names we were most familiar with and recall them by their uses or perhaps by their foreign equivalents. He thinks old women, however, do not forget words. Tolstoi said that memory is hell and a future state that recalls all would be a bore. Titian outlived 99 and painted to the end. His masterpiece, the bronze doors of the sacristy at St. Mark’s, was done when he was 85. When tired he withdrew to a dark, warm place. John Bigelow in the nineties gave a charming lecture on Dumas. Versus the solitude of old age, the young do often seem dull. We do not help other old men enough. Woman’s sympathy goes far to bridge this interval. Some grieve that they cannot help with their own self-support. Howells says he is a great dreamer and forgets where he puts things, for example, his spectacles.

H. D. Sedgwick96 thinks Harvard seniors more disposed to answer questions than to ask them. Youth may be worth living, but is old age so? Young men know nothing of youth; they cannot realize it objectively, for they despise it and want to hurry on. The “kid” would be a Freshman. He feels at first just outside the door of something delectable. The boy does not enjoy himself so much as the old man looking on “for such is the kingdom of Heaven.” The young are individualists absorbed in self. They form cliques excluding hoi polloi. They over-praise their own college, but their ego is always the center. It is really the spectator in the theater that gets the most out of it. Youth is exclusive in its foolish divisions. The old do not dwell on differences but common qualities. The old man finds no solace in isolation but in community. He loves humanity; seeks a refuge for self; passes lightly over differences of speech, clothes, and customs. Perhaps this is due to the slow approach of night, which makes all draw together for the warmth of friendship. The old man snuggles to the breast of humanity and is less prone to lose himself in random interests. If he cannot get about in space, he turns to the essential truth of the universe. The gods do not know the words “great” or “small.” The old see wonders in the iris. Youth seeks the top of the mountains because it cannot see the wonders in what is common and what is right about. The old are more religious and less subject to emotional crises. They do not see God in the fire or smoke but can see Him in the commonplace, and find beauty in cloud, flower, and tree; while youth is too busy with its own emotions and their tyranny. The records of earth tell of bestial cruelty. The globe is cooling and youth resists it like Prometheus. To youth the energy of the world is inexplicable. All is the product of brute force. Out of the dust came the eye and the brain and the mind, and all the turmoil is like labor-pangs to produce love, beauty, and happiness. Everything is full of aspiration. Out of the universe will come God, who is slowly evolving from the material without. If the matter of life has produced the passions of humanity, it is charged with potential divinity.

Walt Mason97 says that until his system falls apart he will stay on deck, with his coat-tails in the air, refusing to be relieved, even though he may require overhauling every few days. When he was young he was careless in dress, but as he grew older he became very fastidious and was inclined to turn a new leaf in dress every day and give the best imitation possible of a young man. But we who were born during the Van Buren period cannot look like little Lord Fauntleroys. He studied old men and found that one did not believe in adding machines while most hated innovations in general. An old man who criticises anything present is always very unpopular and when he praises it, the attitude of everyone changes toward him. The young hate ancient history and want to lay it away in moth-balls. Eternal vigilance is the price of eternal youth.

Edison at the age of seventy-two said he worked eighteen hours a day and that it was hard for him to take a week-end off. When Colonel Death comes around the corner and says “Time’s up,” Mason says he wants him to find him in a hand-to-hand conflict with his trusty lyre. Every town has a coterie of “old boys” who are against everything; they write letters to the press, etc. Now, idleness is the worst thing for an old man and for his disposition. If he retires at 50 kindly, he will grow impossible by 70. The old are always blaming and brooding over the final showdown. It is always possible that the next cold or bit of rheumatism may break down the carburetor, but why worry?

E. P. Powell,98 a Florida clergyman, cannot conceive old age for young Sidis and others like him. Charity should not help people to get rid of work but conceive a haven of rest. A workman damns epitaphs readable a few years hence. Humanity must not be loaded with a mass of pensions. Old age must not be a luxury. Good sleep should renew the world. Rev. Tinker improved sweet corn, Rev. Goodrich, potatoes. Worry is one road to the cemetery and idleness is another. The working problem is more important than that of diet. The author writes his sermons lying on the floor and spinning a top. A Florida June morning, he says, is far better than a month in Paradise. He does not care for heaven because he is more interested in the divine earth. The family should include four generations. We should all strive for perpetual youth. “Few children but better,” should be our motto. Premature old age is reprehensible. The world is full of half dead men. We shall never abolish death. Present society is death-hastening and life-wasting. Fisher would prolong by (1) eugenics, (2) personal hygiene, (3) public, (4) what might be called domestic hygiene.

U. V. Wilson99 says that the seasons or nature were never so pleasant. He has the leisure that he toiled for all his life. Every year seems shorter (being now only one-seventy-third of all) so that he feels he is approaching the infinite point of view. Religionists tell us that it is hard for the Lord to save an old man but now that the days and years shrink we approach eternity. Seventy-three is the age of his physical being but he is really centuries older. His circle of friends is narrow but closer. He had a fad for hunting and fishing and photography and his sense of youth remains forever. He dreads decrepitude and helplessness and hates to see his body tumble down, like a man in a dungeon seeing the world only through a very small window. Second childhood suggests that if the eye fails, there are glorious things beyond it can see; that if the ear fails, there are inner harmonies. He feels like a youth shut up in an old body. Infirmities are forerunners of immortal health. So he does not fear death because it only removes barriers between him and the fullness of life.

D. G. Brinton100 says “that old age is synonymous with wisdom is a comical deception which the graybeards have palmed off on the world because by law and custom they hold most of the property and want most of the power as well.” “As we grow old, we cease to obey our finer instincts” (Thoreau). “The experience of youth serves but to lead old age astray, and this is nowhere so plain as when an old man pretends a zest for the pleasures of the young. No fool like an old fool.” “Every age has pleasures sufficient which are appropriate to it, and these alone should be sought after.” If youth respects the laws of nature, old age is very tolerable. It brings many compensations for losses, and although not likely to be so happy as the best of middle life, it should be and often is superior in this respect to youth. “Probably it would generally be so were we more willing to learn the lessons appropriate to it.”

One writer says no man can be happy till he is past sixty, and another, “He who teaches the old is like one who writes on blotted paper.” A long life is the desire of all, and old age, which all abhor, is the hope of all. “It alone justifies a man to himself and before others.” “The sage is he whose life is a consistent whole and who carries out in his age the plans which he made in youth.” “The Jews of Frankfurt average ten years more of life than the non-Jewish citizens because they avoid unsanitary avocations and observe wiser rules of diet.” At seventy-five exposure to cold is thirty-two times more dangerous than it is at thirty years of age. “The sorrows of age are usually the returns of the investments of youth, these proving of that sort which levy assessments instead of paying dividends. A short life and a merry one is the maxim of many a youngster. The hidden falsehood at the core of this philosophy is the belief that happiness belongs to youth alone.” “The admiration of the early periods of life is one of a common class of illusions.” “He who would work securely for his own welfare will not be led astray by the belief that any one period of life contains solely or in any large measure the enjoyments of life as a whole. He will, therefore, not eat to-day the bread of to-morrow. He will guard the fires of youth that he may not in age have to sit by the cold ashes of exhausted pleasures.” The price of so doing is premature senility, loss of zest in life due to the early exhaustion of irrational enjoyments. “The only malady which all covet is the only one which is absolutely fatal, old age.” No passion is so weak but that a little pressed, it will master the fear of death. “He who is haunted by the dread of dying makes himself miserable for fear he cannot make himself miserable longer.”

Few modern writers have written more sagely on old age than N. S. Shaler, late professor of geology at Harvard.101 He attaches great importance to the interval between the end of the reproductive period and death, which in lower creatures is very brief if it exists at all. In domesticated animals there is hardly any normal old age and they do not seem to know a climacteric. There is a great variation among different races in this period of senescence, which is so peculiar to man. This interval is very brief among savages. But with the beginning of speech all the relations of the individual to his group change. If old animals live on, they do so to themselves and not for the benefit of their kind. But in man the old individual becomes a storehouse of acquired or traditional knowledge, and wisdom has, for the first time, a distinct value in organic association. It was in this way that the reproductive period was shortened, or perhaps we had better say that life was prolonged beyond it. In civilized society the old are still members of the species, not aliens or enemies. When a people begins to have a literature or a religion and a large body of mores as social inheritance develops, the value of old age increases.

The old have to maintain a more dignified demeanor. They are readapted and can go on with life as before, especially as they now have eyes and teeth preserved. The best attitude toward the old is one that assures a broader view of life and better sense of values and marks the modern passage from the earlier division of men into ranks and occupations, in which women, youth, and old men were once separated from the active and militant class. Thus the position of the aged is now bettered by keeping in close relation with their fellows.

The growth of wealth has helped democratic individualization and thus helped old age. “The presence of three or four generations in the social edifice gives to it far more value than is afforded by one or two.” They “unite the life of the community and bridge the gap between successive generations.” “As the body of the tradition which makes the spirit of a people becomes the greater, it is the more difficult to effect the transmission of it from stage to stage in the succession.” Despite the volume of printed matter, including history, there is a spirit of society that cannot be preserved in books. Who can doubt that if veterans of our Civil War had been more numerous and influential, we should have plunged into the late war with Spain. There would have been more men who really remembered what war meant and its lessons, for the new generation lacked the true sense of what conflict was and went about it light-heartedly. So the need of strict military discipline generally has to be relearned with each war. The same is true of hygienic policies in the army. There are, thus, many political, social, and even business follies that would have been avoided had the wisdom and experience that only old age can bring been more dominant. Thus we could make our historic records not only more effective and more complete in regard to its matter but also more perfect as regards the lessons it conveys. History is often written by men who are separated from the times they chronicle and the best way to bridge the gulf is to keep in touch as long as possible with the generation that was making history.

But the endeavor to retain the aged is not merely an effort to preserve the lives of the old but part of the problem of avoiding premature death for everyone. Thus since man came there seems to be a sudden loss of longevity if we measure it solely in terms of the period of growth. If this really has occurred, it may be that the term is less fixed than we should expect it to be if the institution were of more recent date.

Anthony Trollope102 tells us of a small republic, Britannula, situated somewhere in the South Pacific and which had freed itself from England, that had been induced by its leader, Mr. Neverbend, who was deeply impressed with the sufferings and dangers of old age, to pass a law that at a fixed period, which after much discussion was fixed at 67½ years of age, everyone in the colony should be taken with great honor to a college beautifully situated five miles from the capital city and there spend a final year, at the end of which he was to suffer euthanasia at the hand of the chief by being placed under an opiate and bled to death. Details are given of the many discussions that led up to this legislation, with the justifications for it and descriptions of the college. When the law was passed, there was no one in the community of great age. Deposition or relegation to the college was to be a matter of much pomp and dignity, with bells, banquets, and processions, and life within the walls was to be made attractive by every means.

The first to reach the required age, Crasweller, ten years the senior of the founder, was a man of immense vitality and wealth, the most efficient proprietor of a very large estate, and when the day of his deposition drew near he dismayed the founder by insisting that he was a year younger, although all knew his age, which was to be tatooed upon the skin of everyone. Meanwhile, an interesting love episode is described between his daughter and the son of the founder. There was much bitterness and recrimination and it is realized that it will never do to compel the withdrawal by force of the first victim, who was to set a high example to all others; and so finally the year falsely claimed is allowed to pass and then Crasweller is taken in state to the college itself, which another citizen was growing weary of tending because it was untenanted. There were many criticisms of its new and unfinished state and of the proximity of the cremation furnaces, which were said even to smell of the bodies of the animals that had been consumed in them.

Meanwhile, as the others were drawing near to their term, support of the plan passed over into covert and then overt opposition, and just as the first victim with his escort entered, an English man-of-war appeared—in response, it afterwards became known, to a petition of the citizens to stop such a proceeding, which thus cost the colony its independence. Thus Crasweller was freed and Neverbend, the founder, retired to England, where his musings at last convinced him that the world was not yet quite ready for his great reform. It might work if and when men were philosophers but it would doubtless have to be postponed at least during the lives of his grandchildren, and perhaps indefinitely. Thus the women, who had always opposed it, and the populace, who welcomed it when they were young but condemned it as they grew old, had their will and its realization is yet to come. The reasons that led to the scheme were that the misery, uselessness, troublesomeness, and often obstructiveness of old age still remain and are ever increasing in force, so that something like this must surely sometime be.

Stephen Paget103 gives us an excellent description of what he thinks a typical state of mind of old age, but which I deem an excellent illustration of senile degeneracy. The old man, he says, wonders at his own existence, is bewildered at the feel of the pen in his hand, at the taste of his food; that he is alive when so many millions are dead or unborn; at a funeral is fascinated by someone’s whisper or the contour of a face or some other irrelevancy; is smitten with momentary surprise that he is or that it is it; finds an apocalypse on looking in the glass; is oppressed by a sense of mystery that is very far from philosophic contemplation; and realizes that when others observe him thus, they reflect that there is no speculation—“No speculation in those eyes that thou dost glare with”; finds himself growing out “of the world, of life, of time”; feels it not unreasonable to consider the one, the all, the infinite, if his mind drifts that way. His mind wanders while he wonders whether heaven lies about him in his second infancy. Perhaps it all brings the kind of smile we call wistful. He may go crazy over a human eyebrow or a breath of air; common things seem novel; the dull things fascinate. One enjoys a vagabond ease on the street; is irked at fine manners; is fond of news. The old problems of politics and religion lose their charm and in place of pure art we turn to that of the street. He says we old are thus a sentimental lot and for the sake of economy live on our emotions, which cost nothing. This point of view he deems more or less philosophic, etc.

This state of mind the psychologist would call dissociative, if not dissolutive. It is the dementia præcox of old age and can mean nothing but disintegration and befuddlement. True, childhood is often lost in wonder at items of experience that later are synthesized into wholes and become commonplaces. But this goes with a keen rapport with the environment, which the senses are developing, while this author’s musings reveal a falsetto last look before we are melted or diffused into the cosmos. Such reveries are letting go, not taking hold of life. They are the decadence of the philosophic spirit and belie the normal tendency of old age, which is to knit up experiences into synthetic wholes, to draw the moral of life, and to give integrity to the soul.

Thus Mr. Paget seems to be the victim of a kind of senile Narcissism, revering its chief traits in his symptoms, yielding himself with a kind of masochistic pleasure to any chance impressions that present themselves. He has ceased to strive and to will, and there is no justification of his point of view, that his state is akin to that of certain transcendentalists who have fallen into deep puzzlements over what Bronson Alcott called “the whichness of the what.”

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 writer104 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. Street105 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”: