Old people

Contents

Harriet Eliza Paine ix

I. Greeting Old Age 1

II. Change and Breadth 15

II Change And Breadth

With the failing of the normal powers, there usually comes a change of circumstance. The musician becomes deaf and can no longer conduct his orchestra. His income is cut off, and he goes to live with his son in a distant state. His son loves him, but his son's wife and children are almost strangers to him. His surroundings are new, and his habits must be changed. The mother, who has lived all her life in the country, a power in the village where she knows every person she meets, is no longer able to manage her own housekeeping. She must make her home with her daughter who teaches in a city, and exchange her cottage in the midst of trees and shrubbery for a dingy little apartment in an undesirable street where she knows no one. A Colonel Newcome loses his money when he is too old and feeble to earn a living, and he is received into the brotherhood of the Grey Friars. A good master dies, and the servants, who are too stiff and rheumatic to be wanted in new places, must turn to the almshouse. An efficient, independent woman, who has directed the affairs of a neighborhood, becomes blind, and must submit henceforward to a companion who shall guide her every footstep.

Are these changes easy to bear ? It is not easy even for the young to alter the whole mode of life, especially when the change is not a voluntary one. And in the case of the old, to be taken up by the roots and transplanted to a soil that is perhaps uncongenial may well have terrors.

Have such clouds a silver lining ? I remember hearing a middle-aged lady say, years ago, that she looked upon the necessity that had forced her away from her beautiful country home to earn laboriously a somewhat irregular livelihood in the city, as one of the greatest blessings that had ever been bestowed upon her. " For," she said, " in the country I was as narrow as a crack."

" Life is growth and growth is change," Miss Larcom sang. We all realize that for the young and even for the middle-aged, — but for the old ! We hardly believe growth is possible for the old.

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Of course there comes a time when the powers absolutely fail j but for the courageous that day may be postponed. Something is possible long after the usual work of life has to be suspended, something, too, that is often of a higher quality than the work of one's prime. The dreaded changes that seem so cruel in old age usually ripen the character instead of causing it to decay, at least when they befall an earnest soul.

" To make habitually a new estimate, that is greatness," Emerson said. Now, in new circumstances we are forced to make new estimates. We must sift the chaff of our lives from the wheat. The process is painful, but the result is worth the pain.

" My daughter rules me with a rod of iron," said an old lady, with a cheerful laugh. The daughter, somewhat aggrieved, explained in private that, with failing powers, her mother could no longer do as she had once done. When she raised her tea-cup in a trembling hand, the tea splashed over the tablecloth; moreover, her dim eyesight put an end to perfection in her dress. How could she really see when she was untidy? "I know she is really neat," said the daughter anxiously, " for I remember her in the past; but the grandchildren can't know that, and I will not have them think of her as a careless old woman." So the daughter ruled with " a rod of iron," and the wise old lady, though she occasionally allowed herself the satisfaction of a sharp remark, yet on the whole consented with cheerfulness to the rule. She even allowed her daughter to introduce modern innovations into the time-honored etiquette of her life, and she really welcomed labor-saving inventions in the housekeeping. She had to do old things in a new way, but she adapted herself to the new situation so well that the very alertness of mind demanded of her in order to make such accommodation possible lent her manner the charming vivacity that delighted everybody who knew her ; there was a sparkle about her age such as we commonly associate only with youth.

Professor William Davis of Harvard, in his fascinating lectures on Physiography, used to talk about the effect of giving new work to an old river. For instance, after explaining that cascades belong naturally to young rivers, and that as the

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stream wears down the rock to a level, they disappear, leaving the water to meander lazily over the plain, he would add that the whole scene might be changed by the upheaval of the river-bed. Then the old river had to begin anew to cut the rock down to a level, and waterfalls once more appeared naturally in its course. So in the case of my old lady's vivacity. New work had been given to her in her old age, and it lent her in turn the sparkle of youth.

The expositors of mental healing tell us that it is contraction which deadens us. The sensitive and weak — and, we may add, the old — always have a tendency to contract, to withdraw into themselves and to cease from active effort. " My dear woman/' wrote a lively lady to a distant friend, " what is this you tell me about becoming deaf ? I thought only obstinate people were deaf ! " Well, who knows how much truth there was in that? The inflexibility of mind that makes one obstinate might certainly so act on the nerves as to contract the blood-vessels supplying the ears, and starve the cells until they no longer respond to the stimulus of sound.

Now a change that forces us out of ruts, that breaks up old habits and calls on us to form new ones, almost always helps us to expand, unless, indeed, we resist it with all our might, in which case we may contract to the point of induration ; and so, no doubt, changes of circumstance, as we grow old, tend not only to give us breadth of character but to keep us young.

Change being so clearly a blessing, must we choose it? To most of us, even to those of us who have loved variety in early life, quiet is most attractive in old age. It seems as if we had a right to a resting-place between the active life and the new life awaiting us. Browning says : —

" And I shall thereupon Take rest ere I be gone Again on my adventure strange and new."

It seems as if the old had a right to live their last days among their familiar friends, to sit in a comfortable easy-chair by their own fireside, to cease from struggle, and to receive the glad ministry of affectionate and reverent youth. It seems furthermore as if they could do more good to old friends than to new ones. To some old people this interval

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of rest is granted : though it is almost always brief, because life is exacting and usually taxes our full powers, whether these are great or small. The rich can sometimes command such a resting-place, the poor very seldom. Ought we to wish for it, or should we vigorously seek for the change that so often gives us breadth ?

Each must answer this question for himself. The temperament, the character, the circumstances of each one must decide it. I am not at all inclined to recommend any one to go out of his way in search of discipline for its own sake. If a peaceful old age by a beloved fireside is vouchsafed to one who is tired of the stir of life, it would certainly be ungrateful not to rejoice in it. We need have no fear that all the discipline we really need will not be offered us without our going out of the way to seek it. But when we see clearly that a change in our peaceful life is necessary, let us accept it willingly, remembering that it holds for us the possibility of a life that is broader and better.

Ill

When Wordsworth wrote, —

" But yet I know, Where'er I go, That there hath passed away a glory from the earth,"

he was not an old man. No one has ever interpreted the great ode as having been inspired by the decay of the senses. The reason, to Wordsworth, that

" nothing can bring back the hour Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower/'

is that the progress of life has dimmed the recollection of " that imperial palace whence we came." It is a mental and moral change, not a physical one, of which he speaks.

Yet there is a physical change that comes to most of us and gives poignancy to our understanding of Wordsworth's lines. We talk proudly in our youth of our independence of the senses, not so much as dreaming how much of our higher life is due to them. We are quite right, of course, in saying that they are not essential to us, and Helen Keller was born to prove that love and genius united can bridge the chasm between the clod and the angel absolutely without their help. But for most of us the failure of a single sense in even a slight degree casts a shadow over the universe. We are surprised and puzzled ; we think the cloud will pass. But it settles more and more heavily, like a pall.

" The rainbow comes and goes, And lovely is the rose,"

yet now the eye has grown dim, it is too weak to look up at the rainbow, and it does not catch the flush of the opening rosebud among the leaves ; it is only the full-blown rose that arrests it. I have a friend who has become deaf. She says that the solid earth seemed to be slipping from under her as the sense of hearing gradually grew less and less acute. She had to readjust herself to the whole world, — to things as well as to persons. The fatigue from this readjustment acted upon her nerves and threatened her whole physical system. She could not believe that the loss of one faculty was to entail the loss of others until she actually found it so. She had felt the transcendent delight of music; still, she is not what is called musical, and she thought that by and by she should be able to bear the loss of a part of the heavenly harmony in a full orchestra or chorus, though she found with gratitude that musical sounds will reach an ear too dull to catch the gossip of the hour. She fancied that she could replace music more and more by the beauty of the out-door world. The two had always seemed to appeal to the same inner sense. And then one day she suddenly became aware that a part of the charm of nature had also gone. She sat on the grass beside a friend, at the parting of woodland ways in June, tippling on wild strawberries, and she saw the sunset lights through a vista of beeches, and she felt the soft breeze on her cheek, as it brought her the fragrance of pine boughs and sweet-fern, and she was happy. And then her friend raised a hand and said, " Hush ! there is the wood-thrush ! " and she could not hear it. She was no longer " lord of the senses five." Four senses were ministering to her at the moment, and she knew and loved the song of the thrush which she was nevermore to hear. One note in the chord of nature had been lost. The harmony would not be so rich again.

What is springtime in a painted world? " The glory and the freshness of a dream " is gone, and we say, with a different meaning from that of Wordsworth, —

" Turn wheresoe'er I may, By night or day, The things that I have seen I now can see no more."

It is merciful that in most cases the senses fail slowly, so that we adapt ourselves gradually to their lack. I know old people who do not seem to be aware that they have lost the power to see and hear as in youth. Of course they know that their grandchildren can thread a needle or hear a whisper better than they can ; but they do not realize that the world the youngsters look at is shot through and through with colors they themselves no longer see, or that when the old and the young are listening to music together, the old hear only the fundamental tones, while the young are ravished by the rich chords formed by unnumbered overtones. They do perhaps perceive that neither nature nor music will now sweep them away with such sudden delight as of old ; but they think this is due to the slower pulse of age, when in fact they do not now see the visions or hear the sounds that once so moved them.

The failure of the senses is not, however, so gradual as to be imperceptible in all cases. Crises come to many lives on the threshold of old age. Novelists choose, and rightly, to describe the drama of youth which ends in hope for this life ; but it is probable that both the inner and the outer experience of most people is fuller of dramatic struggle and suffering at about fifty than at any other time. Then their parents die, and they are anxious about their children, and less hopeful of achieving material ends as they find their powers beginning to fail. Work increases on their hands, not only for themselves, but for those older and those younger. They are in the thickest of the fight of life. There comes a strain, and they have not the strength to meet it. Yet they must meet it. And in the struggle a sense fails them. When this change comes suddenly, it is felt most keenly.

Such losers know what they have lost. All such losses are more unbearable in the beginning, before there has been time for adjustment to them. Now those whose senses have been sources of the greatest delight suffer most in losing them ; and yet, paradoxically, if they have used them aright, the delight remains. For example, two men lounging on a hillside look at the same landscape with strong, young eyes. One sees it carelessly, and notices little. He looks perhaps at a passing wagon or a heap of rubbish as often as at the distant sea or the springing flowers at his feet. The other catches every varying tint of the ocean, every beautiful shadow from the moving clouds, every glint of sunshine through the over-arching trees, every exquisite tendril of the grapevine on the wall. When their eyes fail them, which loses most? Physically, the one who saw most. But, on the other hand, a mind so enriched as his has a treasure that cannot be touched by decay. If both these men should suffer blindness, and be led to the same spot again, which would see it most truly ? Even a new scene must be more beautiful to the one who had once discerned beauty truly. If a friend says, u There is an apple-tree in blossom, and a bluebird has alighted on it," he sees the tree and the bird as if his eyes were open. But if he had never cared for apple-blossoms, except to wonder how many barrels of apples he should have to sell, he might not be able to recall the petals' lovely rose.

Sight is more than a question of true lens and thrilling nerve. An old man of dim vision, if he has looked for beauty all his life, will find more loveliness in a landscape than a young man, with perfect eyes, looking at the scene with equal earnestness, even though in time the young man might learn to see all his companion cherishes. Complete beauty is not often revealed in a flash. It sometimes seems to be, I know. When the train approaching Lausanne emerges from the last long Alpine tunnel, and Lake Geneva bursts at once on the vision, with the line of snow-covered Savoy Alps beyond it, the summits touched with the crimson of sunset, the shining clouds and mountains reflected in softer colors in the lake, the whole world transfigured by the pulsating atmosphere which holds the Alpine glow, changing moment by moment from silver to rose and from rose to violet, the most stolid men, under the sudden shock of the glory, sometimes melt into tears. They see more than they know they see. I suppose no recollection, no imagination, could give a blind man all that is granted to one who sees in that single instant. He could remember what he knew he saw, but not the splendor he received unconsciously. This supreme glory does pass when the sense fails. No philosophy can save the old from loss. The fact of deprivation must be faced. Recollection is not vision.

But such a vision as that of the Swiss lake is rare in any life. It is still true that all the beauty of most scenes is perceived slowly by the reverent, watching mind; and though there is a great difference in the power to see it in different young people, and many young people see more than many old ones, yet the same person, whose heart has remained pure, sees more actually at forty than he saw at twenty ; and even with the dim eyes of seventy, he sees what he did not at twenty. Yet no one knows so well as the one who has watched for beauty all his life that he has lost something real when the sense fails. His recollection is a blending of anguish and blessedness. In the beginning, it seems as if the anguish would overpower the blessedness. Whether it conquers in the end will depend on the soul within.

I have seen children in the meadows and woods in May, when the larks and bluebirds and sparrows and thrushes were singing rapturously, who never once stopped picking flowers to listen to a single strain. I do not mean that the " blended notes of spring " did not enhance the charm of the moment. I am sure all this wild music sank into their hearts, and that they were better for having heard it, though unconsciously. And yet a deaf Thoreau, rambling through the same paths, would recognize a certain charm in the woods withheld from them. The scene might be as silent as a painted scene, but when a thrush flitted across the pathway, the deaf man would feel the rustle of the branches as he had once known it, and he would follow in his heart the song the bird sang, follow it actually. For the children, the happiness of the day would be unalloyed. To the man there would be a higher happiness, though its undercurrent would be pain. Perhaps a part of the sense is withdrawn, lest we should be overpowered by the " intolerable radiancy" which perfect senses would add to the rich vision of maturity. When the sibylline leaves were first offered to the people, they were many in number. Then, as more and more of them were lost, the value of the remaining ones increased. And so it is with the senses of the old. A single note of a thrush brings back to them the whole forest, with its trees and ferns and mosses, the rich colors of the sunset shining through the arches of the pines like the windows of a vast cathedral ; it brings back the feeling of the light breeze on the cheek, the murmuring of the leaves, the fragrance of innumerable living things, growing at our feet. A child may hear the full richness of the song that escapes the old man ; but the child must hear the song a thousand times before it means to him what it means to the old man. How could we bear at once both kinds of beauty in their fullness?

The old are learning to do without this body. When the chrysalis can no longer hold the expanding soul, and breaks because of the strain within, then, indeed, we may be ready for a finer body, wiljh new senses, and we may be able to bear the blending of inner and outer beauty. We may be prepared for the beauty that no human eye has seen.

Have you ever thought how the loss of a sense gives us a great hope ? If you had never had the sense of hearing, you could not know that the spring woods are full of melody. Having had it and having lost it, you know that all the birds are singing, though the silence about you is like that of death. Why, then, may you not believe that some unknown sense might open at your feet worlds of beauty of which you have never had a single hint? You look into the microscope and see a clear, empty field. You turn a screw the hundredth part of an inch, and the drop of water is peopled by myriads of forms of curious and exquisite life. Is not the change of death more than the turning of a screw? The most faithless must believe that even the outer world is a different thing to the butterfly from what it was to the worm.

Perhaps nobody can ever have felt the anguish of deafness as Beethoven did. " He would never have written the high notes in the Hymn of Joyin the Ninth Symphony if he could have heard them/' says a musical friend. " He would have known they were beyond any chorus." But what does that mean ? He perceived harmonies above the reach of the human voice and it was a Hymn of Joy.

The glory of the senses passes indeed with youth ; but there is a glory of age which shines when the senses have failed. I am not now speaking of the glory of a pure soul, which is always independent of the material, but simply of the kind of glory revealed to us at first through the senses, and afterwards woven into the fibre of our very life. The glory that comes from love and truth in the heart never passes away at all, but shines brighter and brighter to the end : though it is true that when the mind also fails, we cannot follow the soul. There may be a hidden life, full of meaning, that no one outside it can see. There may still be an inner glory. Here we must wait in reverent silence. We do not comprehend ; but we must believe that the glory of the terrestrial is one and the glory of the celestial is another.

IV Work

Much of the best work of the world is done by men and women past sixty. It is true that great warriors are seldom very old ; but great statesmen are seldom very young. Most people who are endowed by nature with a strong body and a strong mind, and who have lived rationally, find the years between sixty and seventy among the most fruitful of all. No one seriously doubts this in the case of mental and moral achievement, for, though the memory begins to be less powerful in these years, the judgment becomes stronger, experience is necessarily wider, all good habits formed earlier become more and more a part of the individual, and one is equipped with material that is quite out of the reach of young people. Hokusai says : " Since I was six years old I have been in the habit of drawing the shapes of objects. Toward my fiftieth year I published an infinity of designs ; but I am not satisfied with anything I produced before my six-

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tieth year. It is at my seventieth year that I am more or less able to understand the forms of birds, fishes, etc. ... At the age of one hundred and ten, everything from my brush, whatever it is, may be full of life." I suppose, however, that every reader of these last words will smile at the vain optimism of Hokusai, and make the mental comment that if he had lived to be one hundred and ten, his palsied fingers would no longer have been able to guide the brush, however vigorous his conception might still have been. For though we have all known centenarians who have kept the strength of their mind and heart to the last, we have not known very old people who have had the physical powers necessary for good manual work.

Nevertheless, even in the matter of manual labor, I believe old people accomplish far more than we think, and that they could do still more if they had a little added encouragement. By this I do not mean that they. have the strength of maturity, or that they should be urged to work or criticised for idleness. Technical skill, such as Hokusai prognosticated for himself, is so rare after sixty — though there are still many instances where it is maintained for a decade or two longer — that it may be disregarded altogether in a discussion like this, intended to apply to the rank and file. But what I mean is that the judgment and experience which the old put into their work often more than compensates, even in manual labor, for the weakness of the hand and eye. For example, I have known many old ladies who had been accomplished seamstresses and who continued to set most beautiful stitches at eighty, though their hands were weak and their eyesight half gone, — stitches that their grand-daughters, brought up in an age of sewing machines, tried in vain to imitate. In such a case, we have the result of the long habit of beautiful work, and the judgment plays so small a part that the work is sometimes done when the mind is almost gone. It is excellent work, nevertheless, and contributes to the welfare of the world. I can hardly speak emphatically enough of the good that is done by some of my octogenarian friends who learned to sew in the days when all sewing had to be done by hand. They sit all day long in an armchair perhaps, too lame to walk out, too weak to stand, and one after another piece of w T ork is

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swiftly and silently completed for the busy people who have not time or strength or skill to sew for themselves. There is a smile on their placid faces as they work : for they know they are doing what is of use and doing it well, and usually they have pleasant thoughts of the friend for whom they are busy. Perhaps this is the last generation that will ever see such work done. Even the young women who learn to sew now are not forced to it so constantly that it becomes a second nature, and their hand will lose its cunning much sooner in consequence.

I have known a dear old lady almost ninety years of age who kept up her lifelong habit of cooking for her family, and to the last her cookery was the work of an artist. If I say that her mincepies and her sugar gingerbread and her doughnuts were all incomparable, everybody in our village will know her name, for her food was not merely good, but actually the best. Now, though we may speak of cooking as a manual occupation, yet it is certainly something more than that. This dear old friend had very little bodily strength at the last. An incurable disease attacked her some years before her death, and during all these years, she was never once able to lie down. She slept sitting in her armchair, and she cooked sitting in her armchair. That she continued to cook well so that she could satisfy the wants of her beloved old husband and herself without the burden of a servant was the result of her long life of intelligent activity. Her judgment was good, not only because she had been endowed with a strong intellect to begin with, but because it was supplemented by character, and she had practiced faithfully what she knew to be best her whole life long.

One splendid old lady who lived to be ninety-one, spent her last dozen years traveling in Europe and the South, and wherever she went she taught new branches of industry. She was over eighty when she learned to crochet ; but her work was so beautiful that the shawls she made were fit for heirlooms. She helped a poor Swiss woman to become independent for life by teaching her the art of crocheting these shawls. Wherever she went in the South and saw women wearing themselves out over fires to bake hot biscuit three times a day, she straightway set herself at work to

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show them how to make the most excellent yeast bread.

A year ago, when I was driving through a neighboring village with some friends, we wished to climb a hill. The easiest way to reach it was through the vegetable garden of an old gentleman known to one of the party, and she asked the desired permission. As we passed the kitchen door, a handsome old lady came out and greeted us. It was Monday morning, and she was doing her own washing : yet I speak advisedly when I call her a lady. No one could deny that title to the tall, aristocratic-looking woman, with her gracious manners. Her beautiful gray hair was simply and becomingly arranged, her calico dress was neat and well-fitting. Her sleeves were rolled up above her elbows, and her strong, sinewy arms showed that she had worked all her life ; but if she had put on a long-sleeved silk dress, I think she could have taken her place fittingly in any society in the land. She was a woman of intellect, and her conversation was full of acumen. I was astonished when my friend said she was nearly eighty years old. It is not every old lady of eighty who has the strength to do washing. Furthermore, it is not every housekeeper who can be unembarrassed in receiving a party of strangers at ten o'clock on Monday morning, knowing that both her house and herself are in perfect order. Now this old lady was not strong. She died within the year. What she was able to achieve to the very last was the result of her cheerful, unremitting work all through her youth and middle age.