This is the paper read to The Teacups.
It is in A Song of Moses that we find the words, made very familiar to
us by the Episcopal Burial Service, which place the natural limit on
life at threescore years and ten, with an extra ten years for some of
a stronger constitution than the average. Yet we are told that Moses
himself lived to be a hundred and twenty years old, and that his eye
was not dim nor his natural strength abated. This is hard to accept
literally, but we need not doubt that he was very old, and in remarkably
good condition for a man of his age. Among his followers was a stout
old captain, Caleb, the son of Jephunneh. This ancient warrior speaks
of himself in these brave terms: “Lo, I am this day fourscore and five
years old. As yet, I am as strong this day as I was in the day that
Moses sent me; as my strength was then, even so is my strength now,
for war, both to go out and to come in.” It is not likely that anybody
believed his brag about his being as good a man for active service at
eighty-five as he was at forty, when Moses sent him out to spy the land
of Canaan. But he was, no doubt, lusty and vigorous for his years, and
ready to smite the Canaanites hip and thigh, and drive them out, and
take possession of their land, as he did forthwith, when Moses gave him
leave.
Grand old men there were, three thousand years ago! But not all
octogenarians were like Caleb, the son of Jephunneh. Listen to poor old
Barzillai, and hear him piping: “I am this day fourscore years old; and
can I discern between good and evil? Can thy servant taste what I eat or
what I drink? Can I hear any more the voice of singing men and singing
women? Wherefore, then, should thy servant be yet a burden unto my
lord the king?” And poor King David was worse off than this, as you all
remember, at the early age of seventy.
Thirty centuries do not seem to have made any very great difference
in the extreme limits of life. Without pretending to rival the alleged
cases of life prolonged beyond the middle of its second century, such
as those of Henry Jenkins and Thomas Parr, we can make a good showing of
centenarians and nonagenarians. I myself remember Dr. Holyoke, of Salem,
son of a president of Harvard College, who answered a toast proposed in
his honor at a dinner given to him on his hundredth birthday.
“Father Cleveland,” our venerated city missionary, was born June 21,
1772, and died June 5, 1872, within a little more than a fortnight of
his hundredth birthday. Colonel Perkins, of Connecticut, died recently
after celebrating his centennial anniversary.
Among nonagenarians, three whose names are well known to Bostonians,
Lord Lyndhurst, Josiah Quincy, and Sidney Bartlett, were remarkable for
retaining their faculties in their extreme age. That patriarch of our
American literature, the illustrious historian of his country, is still
with us, his birth dating in 1800.
Ranke, the great German historian, died at the age of ninety-one, and
Chevreul, the eminent chemist, at that of a hundred and two.
Some English sporting characters have furnished striking examples of
robust longevity. In Gilpin's “Forest Scenery” there is the story of
one of these horseback heroes. Henry Hastings was the name of this old
gentleman, who lived in the time of Charles the First. It would be hard
to find a better portrait of a hunting squire than that which the Earl
of Shaftesbury has the credit of having drawn of this very peculiar
personage. His description ends by saying, “He lived to be an hundred,
and never lost his eyesight nor used spectacles. He got on horseback
without help, and rode to the death of the stag till he was past
fourscore.”
Everything depends on habit. Old people can do, of course, more or less
well, what they have been doing all their lives; but try to teach them
any new tricks, and the truth of the old adage will very soon show
itself. Mr. Henry Hastings had done nothing but hunt all his days, and
his record would seem to have been a good deal like that of Philippus
Zaehdarm in that untranslatable epitaph which may be found in “Sartor
Resartus.” Judged by its products, it was a very short life of a hundred
useless twelve months.
It is something to have climbed the white summit, the Mont Blanc of
fourscore. A small number only of mankind ever see their eightieth
anniversary. I might go to the statistical tables of the annuity and
life insurance offices for extended and exact information, but I prefer
to take the facts which have impressed themselves upon me in my own
career.
The class of 1829 at Harvard College, of which I am a member, graduated,
according to the triennial, fifty-nine in number. It is sixty years,
then, since that time; and as they were, on an average, about twenty
years old, those who survive must have reached fourscore years. Of the
fifty-nine graduates ten only are living, or were at the last accounts;
one in six, very nearly. In the first ten years after graduation, our
third decade, when we were between twenty and thirty years old, we lost
three members,--about one in twenty; between the ages of thirty and
forty, eight died,--one in seven of those the decade began with; from
forty to fifty, only two,--or one in twenty-four; from fifty to sixty,
eight,--or one in six; from sixty to seventy, fifteen,--or two out of
every five; from seventy to eighty, twelve,--or one in two. The greatly
increased mortality which began with our seventh decade went on steadily
increasing. At sixty we come “within range of the rifle-pits,” to borrow
an expression from my friend Weir Mitchell.
Our eminent classmate, the late Professor Benjamin Peirce, showed by
numerical comparison that the men of superior ability outlasted the
average of their fellow-graduates. He himself lived a little beyond his
threescore and ten years. James Freeman Clarke almost reached the age
of eighty. The eighth decade brought the fatal year for Benjamin Robbins
Curtis, the great lawyer, who was one of the judges of the Supreme Court
of the United States; for the very able chief justice of Massachusetts,
George Tyler Bigelow; and for that famous wit and electric centre of
social life, George T. Davis. At the last annual dinner every effort was
made to bring all the survivors of the class together. Six of the ten
living members were there, six old men in the place of the thirty or
forty classmates who surrounded the long, oval table in 1859, when I
asked, “Has there any old fellow got mixed with the boys?”--11 boys
whose tongues were as the vibrating leaves of the forest; whose talk was
like the voice of many waters; whose laugh was as the breaking of mighty
waves upon the seashore. Among the six at our late dinner was our first
scholar, the thorough-bred and accomplished engineer who held the city
of Lawrence in his brain before it spread itself out along the banks of
the Merrimac. There, too, was the poet whose National Hymn, “My Country,
't is of thee,” is known to more millions, and dearer to many of them,
than all the other songs written since the Psalms of David. Four of our
six were clergymen; the engineer and the present writer completed
the list. Were we melancholy? Did we talk of graveyards and epitaphs?
No,--we remembered our dead tenderly, serenely, feeling deeply what we
had lost in those who but a little while ago were with us. How could
we forget James Freeman Clarke, that man of noble thought and vigorous
action, who pervaded this community with his spirit, and was felt
through all its channels as are the light and the strength that radiate
through the wires which stretch above us? It was a pride and a happiness
to have such classmates as he was to remember. We were not the moping,
complaining graybeards that many might suppose we must have been. We had
been favored with the blessing of long life. We had seen the drama well
into its fifth act. The sun still warmed us, the air was still grateful
and life-giving. But there was another underlying source of our cheerful
equanimity, which we could not conceal from ourselves if we had wished
to do it. Nature's kindly anodyne is telling upon us more and more with
every year. Our old doctors used to give an opiate which they called
“the black drop.” It was stronger than laudanum, and, in fact, a
dangerously powerful narcotic. Something like this is that potent drug
in Nature's pharmacopoeia which she reserves for the time of need,--the
later stages of life. She commonly begins administering it at about
the time of the “grand climacteric,” the ninth septennial period, the
sixty-third year. More and more freely she gives it, as the years go
on, to her grey-haired children, until, if they last long enough, every
faculty is benumbed, and they drop off quietly into sleep under its
benign influence.
Do you say that old age is unfeeling? It has not vital energy enough to
supply the waste of the more exhausting emotions. Old Men's Tears, which
furnished the mournful title to Joshua Scottow's Lamentations, do not
suggest the deepest grief conceivable. A little breath of wind brings
down the raindrops which have gathered on the leaves of the tremulous
poplars. A very slight suggestion brings the tears from Marlborough's
eyes, but they are soon over, and he is smiling again as an allusion
carries him back to the days of Blenheim and Malplaquet. Envy not the
old man the tranquillity of his existence, nor yet blame him if it
sometimes looks like apathy. Time, the inexorable, does not threaten him
with the scythe so often as with the sand-bag. He does not cut, but
he stuns and stupefies. One's fellow-mortals can afford to be as
considerate and tender with him as Time and Nature.
There was not much boasting among us of our present or our past, as we
sat together in the little room at the great hotel. A certain amount
of self-deception is quite possible at threescore years and ten, but at
three score years and twenty Nature has shown most of those who live to
that age that she is earnest, and means to dismantle and have done with
them in a very little while. As for boasting of our past, the laudator
temporis acti makes but a poor figure in our time. Old people used to
talk of their youth as if there were giants in those days. We knew some
tall men when we were young, but we can see a man taller than any one
among them at the nearest dime museum. We had handsome women among us,
of high local reputation, but nowadays we have professional beauties
who challenge the world to criticise them as boldly as Phryne ever
challenged her Athenian admirers. We had fast horses,--did not “Old
Blue” trot a mile in three minutes? True, but there is a three-year-old
colt just put on the track who has done it in a little more than two
thirds of that time. It seems as if the material world had been made
over again since we were boys. It is but a short time since we were
counting up the miracles we had lived to witness. The list is familiar
enough: the railroad, the ocean steamer, photography, the spectroscope,
the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, anesthetics, electric
illumination,--with such lesser wonders as the friction match, the
sewing machine, and the bicycle. And now, we said, we must have come to
the end of these unparalleled developments of the forces of nature. We
must rest on our achievements. The nineteenth century is not likely to
add to them; we must wait for the twentieth century. Many of us, perhaps
most of us, felt in that way. We had seen our planet furnished by the
art of man with a complete nervous system: a spinal cord beneath the
ocean, secondary centres,--ganglions,--in all the chief places where
men are gathered together, and ramifications extending throughout
civilization. All at once, by the side of this talking and light-giving
apparatus, we see another wire stretched over our heads, carrying
force to a vast metallic muscular system,--a slender cord conveying the
strength of a hundred men, of a score of horses, of a team of elephants.
The lightning is tamed and harnessed, the thunderbolt has become a
common carrier. No more surprises in this century! A voice whispers,
What next?
It will not do for us to boast about our young days and what they had
to show. It is a great deal better to boast of what they could not show,
and, strange as it may seem, there is a certain satisfaction in it. In
these days of electric lighting, when you have only to touch a button
and your parlor or bedroom is instantly flooded with light, it is a
pleasure to revert to the era of the tinder-box, the flint and steel,
and the brimstone match. It gives me an almost proud satisfaction
to tell how we used, when those implements were not at hand or not
employed, to light our whale-oil lamp by blowing a live coal held
against the wick, often swelling our cheeks and reddening our
faces until we were on the verge of apoplexy. I love to tell of
our stage-coach experiences, of our sailing-packet voyages, of the
semi-barbarous destitution of all modern comforts and conveniences
through which we bravely lived and came out the estimable personages you
find us.
Think of it! All my boyish shooting was done with a flint-lock gun; the
percussion lock came to me as one of those new-fangled notions people
had just got hold of. We ancients can make a grand display of minus
quantities in our reminiscences, and the figures look almost as well as
if they had the plus sign before them.
I am afraid that old people found life rather a dull business in the
time of King David and his rich old subject and friend, Barzillai, who,
poor man, could not have read a wicked novel, nor enjoyed a symphony
concert, if they had had those luxuries in his day. There were no
pleasant firesides, for there were no chimneys. There were no daily
newspapers for the old man to read, and he could not read them if there
were, with his dimmed eyes, nor hear them read, very probably, with his
dulled ears. There was no tobacco, a soothing drug, which in its various
forms is a great solace to many old men and to some old women, Carlyle
and his mother used to smoke their pipes together, you remember.
Old age is infinitely more cheerful, for intelligent people at least,
than it was two or three thousand years ago. It is our duty, so far
as we can, to keep it so. There will always be enough about it that
is solemn, and more than enough, alas! that is saddening. But how much
there is in our times to lighten its burdens! If they that look out
at the windows be darkened, the optician is happy to supply them with
eye-glasses for use before the public, and spectacles for their hours
of privacy. If the grinders cease because they are few, they can be made
many again by a third dentition, which brings no toothache in its train.
By temperance and good Habits of life, proper clothing, well-warmed,
well-drained, and well-ventilated dwellings, and sufficient, not too
much exercise, the old man of our time may keep his muscular strength in
very good condition. I doubt if Mr. Gladstone, who is fast nearing his
eightieth birthday, would boast, in the style of Caleb, that he was as
good a man with his axe as he was when he was forty, but I would back
him,--if the match were possible, for a hundred shekels, against
that over-confident old Israelite, to cut down and chop up a cedar of
Lebanon. I know a most excellent clergyman, not far from my own time of
life, whom I would pit against any old Hebrew rabbi or Greek philosopher
of his years and weight, if they could return to the flesh, to run a
quarter of a mile on a good, level track.
We must not make too much of such exceptional cases of prolonged
activity. I often reproached my dear friend and classmate, Tames Freeman
Clarke, that his ceaseless labors made it impossible for his coevals to
enjoy the luxury of that repose which their years demanded. A wise old
man, the late Dr. James Walker, president of Harvard University,
said that the great privilege of old age was the getting rid of
responsibilities. These hard-working veterans will not let one get rid
of them until he drops in his harness, and so gets rid of them and
his life together. How often has many a tired old man envied the
superannuated family cat, stretched upon the rug before the fire,
letting the genial warmth tranquilly diffuse itself through all her
internal arrangements! No more watching for mice in dark, damp cellars,
no more awaiting the savage gray rat at the mouth of his den, no more
scurrying up trees and lamp-posts to avoid the neighbor's cur who wishes
to make her acquaintance! It is very grand to “die in harness,” but it
is very pleasant to have the tight straps unbuckled and the heavy collar
lifted from the neck and shoulders.
It is natural enough to cling to life. We are used to atmospheric
existence, and can hardly conceive of ourselves except as breathing
creatures. We have never tried any other mode of being, or, if we have,
we have forgotten all about it, whatever Wordsworth's grand ode may tell
us we remember. Heaven itself must be an experiment to every human soul
which shall find itself there. It may take time for an earthborn saint
to become acclimated to the celestial ether,--that is, if time can be
said to exist for a disembodied spirit. We are all sentenced to capital
punishment for the crime of living, and though the condemned cell of
our earthly existence is but a narrow and bare dwelling-place, we have
adjusted ourselves to it, and made it tolerably comfortable for the
little while we are to be confined in it. The prisoner of Chillon
“regained [his] freedom with a sigh,”
and a tender-hearted mortal might be pardoned for looking back, like the
poor lady who was driven from her dwelling-place by fire and brimstone,
at the home he was leaving for the “undiscovered country.”
On the other hand, a good many persons, not suicidal in their
tendencies, get more of life than they want. One of our wealthy citizens
said, on hearing that a friend had dropped off from apoplexy, that it
made his mouth water to hear of such a case. It was an odd expression,
but I have no doubt that the fine old gentleman to whom it was
attributed made use of it. He had had enough of his gout and other
infirmities. Swift's account of the Struldbrugs is not very amusing
reading for old people, but some may find it a consolation to reflect
on the probable miseries they escape in not being doomed to an undying
earthly existence.
There are strange diversities in the way in which different old persons
look upon their prospects. A millionaire whom I well remember confessed
that he should like to live long enough to learn how much a certain
fellow-citizen, a multimillionaire, was worth. One of the three
nonagenarians before referred to expressed himself as having a great
curiosity about the new sphere of existence to which he was looking
forward.
The feeling must of necessity come to many aged persons that they have
outlived their usefulness; that they are no longer wanted, but rather in
the way, drags on the wheels rather than helping them forward. But let
them remember the often-quoted line of Milton,
“They also serve who only stand and wait.”
This is peculiarly true of them. They are helping others without always
being aware of it. They are the shields, the breakwaters, of those who
come after them. Every decade is a defence of the one next behind it. At
thirty the youth has sobered into manhood, but the strong men of forty
rise in almost unbroken rank between him and the approaches of old age
as they show in the men of fifty. At forty he looks with a sense of
security at the strong men of fifty, and sees behind them the row of
sturdy sexagenarians. When fifty is reached, somehow sixty does not look
so old as it once used to, and seventy is still afar off. After sixty
the stern sentence of the burial service seems to have a meaning
that one did not notice in former years. There begins to be something
personal about it. But if one lives to seventy he soon gets used to
the text with the threescore years and ten in it, and begins to count
himself among those who by reason of strength are destined to reach
fourscore, of whom he can see a number still in reasonably good
condition. The octogenarian loves to read about people of ninety and
over. He peers among the asterisks of the triennial catalogue of the
University for the names of graduates who have been seventy years out of
college and remain still unstarred. He is curious about the biographies
of centenarians. Such escapades as those of that terrible old sinner and
ancestor of great men, the Reverend Stephen Bachelder, interest him as
they never did before. But he cannot deceive himself much longer. See
him walking on a level surface, and he steps off almost as well as ever;
but watch him coming down a flight of stairs, and the family record
could not tell his years more faithfully. He cut you dead, you say? Did
it occur to you that he could not see you clearly enough to know you
from any other son or daughter of Adam? He said he was very glad to hear
it, did he, when you told him that your beloved grandmother had just
deceased? Did you happen to remember that though he does not allow that
he is deaf, he will not deny that he does not hear quite so well as he
used to? No matter about his failings; the longer he holds on to life,
the longer he makes life seem to all the living who follow him, and thus
he is their constant benefactor.
Every stage of existence has its special trials and its special
consolations. Habits are the crutches of old age; by the aid of these we
manage to hobble along after the mental joints are stiff and the muscles
rheumatic, to speak metaphorically,--that is to say, when every act of
self-determination costs an effort and a pang. We become more and more
automatic as we grow older, and if we lived long enough we should come
to be pieces of creaking machinery like Maelzel's chess player,--or what
that seemed to be.
Emerson was sixty-three years old, the year I have referred to as that
of the grand climacteric, when he read to his son the poem he called
“Terminus,” beginning:
“It is time to be old,
To take in sail.
The God of bounds,
Who sets to seas a shore,
Came to me in his fatal rounds
And said, 'No more!'”
It was early in life to feel that the productive stage was over, but he
had received warning from within, and did not wish to wait for outside
advices. There is all the difference in the world in the mental as in
the bodily constitution of different individuals. Some must “take in
sail” sooner, some later. We can get a useful lesson from the American
and the English elms on our Common. The American elms are quite bare,
and have been so for weeks. They know very well that they are going
to have storms to wrestle with; they have not forgotten the gales of
September and the tempests of the late autumn and early winter. It is
a hard fight they are going to have, and they strip their coats off and
roll up their shirt-sleeves, and show themselves bare-armed and ready
for the contest. The English elms are of a more robust build, and stand
defiant, with all their summer clothing about their sturdy frames.
They may yet have to learn a lesson of their American cousins, for
notwithstanding their compact and solid structure they go to pieces in
the great winds just as ours do. We must drop much of our foliage before
winter is upon us. We must take in sail and throw over cargo, if that is
necessary, to keep us afloat. We have to decide between our duties and
our instinctive demand of rest. I can believe that some have welcomed
the decay of their active powers because it furnished them with
peremptory reasons for sparing themselves during the few years that were
left them.
Age brings other obvious changes besides the loss of active power. The
sensibilities are less keen, the intelligence is less lively, as
we might expect under the influence of that narcotic which Nature
administers. But there is another effect of her “black drop” which is
not so commonly recognized. Old age is like an opium-dream. Nothing
seems real except what is unreal. I am sure that the pictures painted by
the imagination,--the faded frescos on the walls of memory,--come out
in clearer and brighter colors than belonged to them many years earlier.
Nature has her special favors for her children of every age, and this is
one which she reserves for our second childhood.
No man can reach an advanced age without thinking of that great change
to which, in the course of nature, he must be so near. It has been
remarked that the sterner beliefs of rigid theologians are apt to soften
in their later years. All reflecting persons, even those whose minds
have been half palsied by the deadly dogmas which have done all they
could to disorganize their thinking powers,--all reflecting persons, I
say, must recognize, in looking back over a long life, how largely their
creeds, their course of life, their wisdom and unwisdom, their whole
characters, were shaped by the conditions which surrounded them. Little
children they came from the hands of the Father of all; little children
in their helplessness, their ignorance, they are going back to Him.
They cannot help feeling that they are to be transferred from the
rude embrace of the boisterous elements to arms that will receive them
tenderly. Poor planetary foundlings, they have known hard treatment at
the hands of the brute forces of nature, from the control of which they
are soon to be set free. There are some old pessimists, it is true,
who believe that they and a few others are on a raft, and that the ship
which they have quitted, holding the rest of mankind, is going down with
all on board. It is no wonder that there should be such when we remember
what have been the teachings of the priesthood through long series of
ignorant centuries. Every age has to shape the Divine image it worships
over again,--the present age and our own country are busily engaged in
the task at this time. We unmake Presidents and make new ones. This is
an apprenticeship for a higher task. Our doctrinal teachers are unmaking
the Deity of the Westminster Catechism and trying to model a new one,
with more of modern humanity and less of ancient barbarism in his
composition. If Jonathan Edwards had lived long enough, I have no doubt
his creed would have softened into a kindly, humanized belief.
Some twenty or thirty years ago, I said to Longfellow that certain
statistical tables I had seen went to show that poets were not a
long-lived race. He doubted whether there was anything to prove they
were particularly short-lived. Soon after this, he handed me a list
he had drawn up. I cannot lay my hand upon it at this moment, but I
remember that Metastasio was the oldest of them all. He died at the
age of eighty-four. I have had some tables made out, which I have every
reason to believe are correct so far as they go. From these, it appears
that twenty English poets lived to the average age of fifty-six years
and a little over. The eight American poets on the list averaged
seventy-three and a half, nearly, and they are not all dead yet. The
list including Greek, Latin, Italian, and German poets, with American
and English, gave an average of a little over sixty-two years. Our young
poets need not be alarmed. They can remember that Bryant lived to be
eighty-three years old, that Longfellow reached seventy-five and Halleck
seventy-seven, while Whittier is living at the age of nearly eighty-two.
Tennyson is still writing at eighty, and Browning reached the age of
seventy-seven.
Shall a man who in his younger days has written poetry, or what passed
for it, continue to attempt it in his later years? Certainly, if it
amuses or interests him, no one would object to his writing in verse as
much as he likes. Whether he should continue to write for the public is
another question. Poetry is a good deal a matter of heart-beats, and the
circulation is more languid in the later period of life. The joints are
less supple; the arteries are more or less “ossified.” Something like
these changes has taken place in the mind. It has lost the flexibility,
the plastic docility, which it had in youth and early manhood, when
the gristle had but just become hardened into bone. It is the nature
of poetry to writhe itself along through the tangled growths of the
vocabulary, as a snake winds through the grass, in sinuous, complex,
and unexpected curves, which crack every joint that is not supple as
india-rubber.
I had a poem that I wanted to print just here. But after what I have
this moment said, I hesitated, thinking that I might provoke the obvious
remark that I exemplified the unfitness of which I had been speaking. I
remembered the advice I had given to a poetical aspirant not long since,
which I think deserves a paragraph to itself.
My friend, I said, I hope you will not write in verse. When you write
in prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you
must.
Should I send this poem to the publishers, or not?
“Some said, 'John, print it;' others said, 'Not so.'”
I did not ask “some” or “others.” Perhaps I should have thought it best
to keep my poem to myself and the few friends for whom it was written.
All at once, my daimon--that other Me over whom I button my waistcoat
when I button it over my own person--put it into my head to look up the
story of Madame Saqui. She was a famous danseuse, who danced Napoleon in
and out, and several other dynasties besides. Her last appearance was at
the age of seventy-six, which is rather late in life for the tight rope,
one of her specialties. Jules Janin mummified her when she died in 1866,
at the age of eighty. He spiced her up in his eulogy as if she had been
the queen of a modern Pharaoh. His foamy and flowery rhetoric put me
into such a state of good-nature that I said, I will print my poem, and
let the critical Gil Blas handle it as he did the archbishop's sermon,
or would have done, if he had been a writer for the “Salamanca Weekly.”
It must be premised that a very beautiful loving cup was presented to me
on my recent birthday, by eleven ladies of my acquaintance. This was
the most costly and notable of all the many tributes I received, and for
which in different forms I expressed my gratitude.