Montaigne said of Cicero _On Old Age_, “It gives one an appetite for old
age.” Its persuasive eloquence is the inspiration of an elevated
philosophy. Flourens has cleverly said, “The moral aspect of old age is
its best side. We cannot grow old without losing our _physique_, nor
also without our _morale_ gaining by it. This is a noble compensation.”
M. Reveillé-Parise says: “In a green old age, when from fifty-five to
seventy-five years, and sometimes more, the life of the mind has a
scope, a consistence, and remarkable solidity, man having then truly
attained to the height of his faculties.”
Patience is the privilege of age. A great advantage to the man who has
lived is, that he knows how to wait. Again, experience is an old man’s
memory.
Buffon was seventy years of age (this was young for Buffon, he lived to
eighty-one) when he wrote _The Epochs of Nature_, in which he calls old
age a prejudice. Without our arithmetic we should not, according to
Buffon, know that we were old. “Animals,” he says, “do not know it; it
is only by our arithmetic that we judge otherwise.”
Buffon having settled on his estate at Montbard, in Burgundy, there
pursued his studies with such regularity that the history of one day
seems to have been that of all the others through a period of fifty
years. After he was dressed, he dictated letters, and regulated his
domestic affairs; and at six o’clock he retired to his studies in a
pavilion in his garden, about a furlong from the house. This
pavilion was only furnished with a large wooden secretary and an
arm-chair; and within it was another cabinet, ornamented with
drawings of birds and beasts. Prince Henry of Prussia called it the
cradle of natural history; and Rousseau, before he entered it, used
to fall on his knees, and kiss the threshold. Here Buffon composed
the greater number of his works. At nine o’clock he usually took an
hour’s rest; and his breakfast, a piece of bread and two glasses of
wine, was brought to him. When he had written two hours after
breakfast, he returned to the house. At dinner he enjoyed the
gaieties and trifles of the table. After dinner he slept an hour in
his room; took a solitary walk; and during the rest of the evening
he either conversed with his family or guests, or examined his
papers at his desk. At nine o’clock he went to bed, to prepare
himself for the same routine of judgment and pleasure. He had a most
fervid imagination; and his anxious solicitude for a literary
immortality, “that last infirmity of noble minds,” continually
betrayed him to be a vain man.
“Every day that I rise in good health,” said Buffon to a conceited young
man, “have I not the enjoyment of this day as fully as you? If I conform
my actions, my appetites, my desires, to the strict impulses of wise
nature, am I not as wise and happy as you are? And the view of the past,
which causes so much regret to old fools, does it not afford me, on the
contrary, the pleasures of memory, agreeable pictures of precious
images, which are equal to your objects of pleasure? For these images
are sweet; they are pure; they leave upon the mind only pleasing
remembrances; the uneasiness, the disappointments, the sorrowful troop
which accompanies your youthful pleasures, disappear from the picture
which presents them to me. Regrets must disappear also; they are the
last sparks of that foolish vanity that never grows old.
“Some one asked Fontenelle, when ninety-five years old, which were the
twenty years of his life he most regretted. He replied that he had
little to regret; but the age at which he had been most happy was that
from forty-five to seventy-five. He made this avowal in sincerity, and
he proved what he said by natural and consoling truths. At forty-five,
fortune is established; reputation made; consideration obtained; the
condition of life established; dreams vanished or fulfilled; projects
miscarried or matured; most of the passions calmed, or at least cooled;
the career in the work that every man owes to society nearly completed;
enemies, or rather the enemies, are fewer, because the counterpoise of
merit is known by the public voice,” &c.
Galen, speaking of Hippocrates, and wishing to represent in one word the
man who, in his eyes, constitutes the most perfect type of slowly
matured wisdom and profound experience, simply calls him _the old man_.
The first rule of the Art of Preserving Life is to know how to be old.
“Few men know how to be old,” said La Rochefoucauld. Voltaire has—
Qui n’a pas l’esprit de son âge,
De son âge a tous les malheurs.
The first rule is more philosophic than medical, but is perhaps none the
less valuable.
The second rule is to know yourself well; which is also a philosophical
precept applied to medicine.
The third rule is properly to conform to regular habits. Old men, who
spend one day like another, with the same moderation, the same
appetites, live always. “My miracle is existence,” said Voltaire; and if
that foolish vanity which never grows old had not induced him, when
eighty-four years of age, to make a ridiculous journey to Paris, his
miracle would have continued a century, as was the case with Fontenelle.
“Few would believe,” said M. Reveillé-Parise, “how far a little health,
well managed, may be made to go.” And Cicero said: “To use what we have,
and to act in every thing according to our strength,—such is the rule of
the sage.”
Most men die of disease, very few die of mere age. Man has made for
himself a sort of artificial life, in which the moral is often worse
than the physical; and the physical itself often worse than it would be
with habits more serene and calm, more regularly and judiciously
exercised.
Haller, the physiologist, says: “Man should be placed among the animals
that live the longest: how very unjust, then, are our complaints of the
brevity of life!” He then inquires what can be the extreme limit of the
life of man; and he gives it as his opinion that man might live not less
than two centuries. M. Flourens,[36] however, decides on a century of
ordinary life; and at least half a century of extraordinary life is the
prospect science holds out to man. Still, as these inferences are drawn
from the exceptions of Jenkins and Parr, the opinions must be received
accordingly.
Haller, who has collected a great number of examples of Longevity, says
that he has found more than
1000 who have lived from 100 to 110 years
60 ” ” 110 to 120 ”
29 ” ” 120 to 130 ”
15 ” ” 130 to 140 ”
6 ” ” 140 to 160 ”
and one who reached the astonishing age of 169 years.
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Footnote 36:
_Human Longevity and the Amount of Life upon the Globe._ By P.
Flourens, Perpetual Secretary to the Academy of Sciences, Paris, 1855.
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