De Senectute

THE new translation by Dr. Andrew Peabody, of Cambridge, revived an old interest in the De Senectute, and being now unfortunately familiar with the subject I felt called upon to bear testimony as follows.

We drift toward old age imperceptibly. None of us can tell the exact moment when our sun crosses the equator. Suddenly we notice that the days have grown shorter. Some morning we rub our eyes, and look ! there it is behind us, — the high wall, unscalable, that separates us from youth. We are on the wrong side. We may cling to our old dress, amusements, occupations, friends, — it is of no use. We are outside the pale. The youngsters gaze down upon us with indifference, tinged with contempt ; keep both, my lads, for your own use. I hold with Steele that a healthy old fellow in easy circumstances (who despises hair-dye, let me add) has the happiest condition of existence. An essayist who wrote eighteen hundred years before Steele has made Cato say as much and more: “ If I were offered the chance to be young again,— Valde recusem, — I would emphatically refuse.”

Thus I spoke to my friend Thompson, a nobody like myself. We had been young together. Our parents were respectable, but poor. The star of our nativity was of the ninth magnitude, — a two and sixpenny star. Youth, I admit, has the charm to console for the lack of money. We were needy, but we did not mind it much. Voltaire, who was rich, said sneeringly to Piron, who was very poor, “ Vous n’êtes pas riche, mon pauvre Piron.” “ Non,” said Piron, “ mais je m’en . . . ; c’est comme si je l’étais.”

Wealth came to us when we were elderly and inert, as it did to Tityrus, in the first Eclogue. Thompson growled that the struggle of his life had been to make the end of his income meet the end of the year. The pleasure of victory was now taken away from him; he was reduced to opulence. What was he to do for occupation ? Tityrus lay under his beech-tree and made the woods resound with the name of Formosa Amaryllis. For men of his age in this climate the grass were a dangerous couch; and Formosa Amaryllis in the nineteenth century is not satisfied with loud and empty compliments. She prefers to see her name on parcels from the jeweler’s shop.

I went on with ray discourse. Senex, to be happy, must know his place ; he will not try to be as good as new, — a senex recoctus, who affects youth and the manners and pleasures of young men, lingering about the banquet like a disreputable servant in search of heel-taps. He will be too much of a gentleman to indulge in dissolute stories, foul with wine and grease like a dirty tablecloth. He will have too much sense to relate jokes and anecdotes of Egyptian antiquity which, like the letters in the Flying Dutchman’s mail bag, were meant for men dead years ago; and he will not be pompous and garrulous, abounding in highly colored, not to say imaginary, reminiscences of the wonderful things done by himself and his fellows in their young days, most of which his surviving friends probably wish were buried out of sight and forgotten. He should never give advice unless it is earnestly asked for, and very little of it even then. Such a man will improve with age, like good wine and Turkey rugs, softened, mellowed, toned down, unaggressive.

T. Your model old man reminds me of the typical Irish gentleman: the most perfect specimen of the gentleman, if you could only meet one. You have heard the saying.

I. You will admit that the condition of the ordinary veteran has been improving since tradition begins. It must have been a dreary moment in the career of the noble savage, our ancestor, when his wind and sight began to fail him, and he could no longer hunt for his share of the larder, nor hold his own in a scrimmage with his neighbors. He became a burden to his relatives ; there was no place in the world for him, and he was duly put out of it, — knocked in the head by the heir at law with the Kith club kept for that sacred purpose in the family cave, and gathered to his children, roasted or baked according to their taste or conveniences for cooking. Trollope’s fixed period was the universal law. When mankind advanced to houses and farming and became reasonably certain of getting their daily meals, the old man was kept alive. New uses were found for him. Savages are conservative and governed by precedent. He was a chronicle of the past. He sat at the gates and told how things were done in the times of the fathers, and his experience seemed wisdom. Savages are also very fond of listening to story-tellers ; and the inclination natural to age to talk about himself and his contemporaries, made him an object of delightful and respectful interest. We see this stage in Nestor, in the Iliad. If Nestor were to be reproduced in this generation he would seem a garrulous old bore. Cato’s position was much better than Nestor’s, but not nearly so good as that of the nineteenth-century old man. Modern science and modern pursuits make him almost as good as new, or at least keep him middle-aged. He has spectacles and false teeth, umbrellas and Indiarubber goloshes, fires and gaslight. He can drive in C - spring carriages and move about like the gods without the weariness of motion. He can be a trader or a professional man as long as he pleases. For the weaker brethren there are directorships in banks and insurance companies, trusteeships in clubs or hospitals or public libraries, and so on down to vestryman. There is no end to this kind of occupation but death or dementia, and almost any old fellow can have a tolerabilis senectus in this way. There is little excuse for the worst disease of age, ennni, — tedium senile. Nor do years bring to a man who fills places of this kind the loss of consideration that Caius Salinator and Spurius Albinus — homines consulares, ex-consuls — so bitterly complained of to Cato.

T. You omit the newspaper, a resource and pastime within reach of the poorest. The newspaper is the magic mirror of our time. We see the whole world in it twice a day, and news “ doth the spirit move like rum and true religion. ” The dullest inhabitant of the earth of Indolence loves to nod over his paper ; and with what he gets from it, and a few castaway opinions he picks up derelict, can make quite a respectable figure.

I. I shall also take note of the pleasure we get in the care of our health. The modern invalid, instead of being despised and destroyed as in the aforetime, derives a certain dignity and importance from his infirmities. He rather boasts of my cold or my gout as if it were a possession to be proud of, and keeps his sign up of “ Whines and Ails ” like a dram shop. If he can afford professional services, an army of smiling and gossiping physicians are ready to visit him; if his means are limited, there are patent medicines of all kinds, from the mild tonic to some fierce drug, — a doppia purgazione, as the Italians say. Hunyádi before breakfast, hot water before dinner, — he can improve each shining hour. He will also meet many friends in the same physical and mental condition with whom he can have a pleasant interchange of ailments, and discuss what to eat and what to avoid; carefully connoting dishes with their attendant diseases.

T. I have in my library Every Woman her own Housekeeper, published by John Perkins, of London, in 1809. I will send it to you for your friends. In the table of contents of this curious receipt book, the penalty of indulgence is placed alliteratively beside each kind of food, as thus : Apples and Asthma — Custards and Colic — Gravy and Gout — Jelly and Jaundice—Pickles and Piles — Appetite and Apoplexy — Drams and Death.

I. We are not as active and strong as we once were, and many of the pleasures of young men have gone from us; but, as Cato says, we have ceased to care about these things, — sed ne desideratio quidem. Taking one thing with another, I aver that a man is as well off in our stage of life as in the earlier. Healthy, wealthy, and wise old men have said so.

T. I doubt that they really believed it. There is something ridiculous about old men even in each other’s eyes. “ Nil habet senectus durius in se quam quod homines ridicules facit.” I have changed the line, for it is truer of age than of poverty. All your modern improvements are merely alleviations, — anodynes that dull the pain of the stings of time. The awful fact is ever present: we are condemned to disease, decay, death, and undergo a portion of our sentence every day. Have you read Edgar Poe’s story of the prisoner who noticed each morning when he waked that there was one window the less in his dungeon? So with me : I notice the loss of some faculty or taste every day.

I. Then it is surely wise to make the most of what is left. As long as there is a window in your prison, let the sun shine in. The man who tries to see life without its illusions hardly sees life at all. Any one can analyze life into the contemptible and the miserable ; but it is all we have got. Even the vulgar excitement of brass bands and pink fire is better sense than your dreary pessimism. You are rich: sweet are the uses of prosperity. If you were a pauper, I would throw up your case. Poverty and old age together are indeed too heavy a load for man to bear. You are in good health and in good repute.

make a comfortable residuum.

T. Dregs is the better word, — dregs of a life unfulfilled. I lament the happiness I could not grasp. Now it is too late. What a lying proverb: Better late than never! Late may sometimes be better than never, but very seldom. There is a saying that every man smells once of the rose that blooms in the garden of Eden. My chance to sniff at it has come when I have nearly lost the sense of smell. Another lying French proverb tells us “Tout vient àa point à qui sait attendre.” Only the ghost of Tout comes if one has to wait long. Hope deferred, like dinner delayed, destroys the appetite. What might have been gold when Polk was President is paper at a ruinous discount under Arthur. When Jacob won Rachel after fourteen years’ service she was not the same Rachel, nor was he the same Jacob. I asked for fresh bread; I got it stale and hard as a stone.

I There was a Rachel, then ! Why were you not as pertinacious as Jacob?

T. I had read Ovid’s “ Nubere si qua voles, differ,” long before I saw Punch’s celebrated advice. I thought Look before you leap a good maxim, and I looked too long. Matrimony is like the ministry, — not to be entered into without a call. I never felt my calling sure, and I was quite sure I could not afford a wife. Poverty makes us acquainted with strange bedfellows. I had a dread of discomfort, overcrowding, little tempers, the noise of children ; the worry culminating when to the pinched papa comes the first shrill cry for pocket money. The horse leech is not the only parent whose daughters cry, “ Give, give.” Now come the twaddlers, who tell me I ought to have somebody to inherit my money. I do not see that it is of much consequence to the world at large whether a Smith or a Jones leaves offspring or not; nor to a dead man who is to spend his money. We would all take it with us if we could. It is too late. I am not silly enough to marry a young woman, and the loves of my youth are faded, when they are not gone. Some have become matrons in protuberant health, and some still languish on the native thorn, “ unclaimed blessings,” as Max 0‘Rell calls them, prim, perpendicular, angular, angels no longer, — non angli, sed anguli. I met some of them lately at a small and early tea. They said it seemed like old times. To me it seemed like a resurrection party, and I, a social metempsychosis, recollected having existed in some previous and pleasanter state of probation.

To return to Cato : —

Much of his contention is idle stuff. He sneers at the inconsistency of mankind. All men, he says, wish for old age, and complain when it comes to them: omnes optant accusant adepti. What all men wish for is long life, not old age. A youth lives with the feelings of the immortals ; one would be happy forever if one could stop at five and twenty. And again, nemo est tam senex, nobody is so infernally old that he does not pray to live longer. The dread of death is instinctive in man and in all animals, and to us mere consciousness is a pleasure we do not care to give up. And what an uncommon old man is this Cato ! He has none of the pains of age, nec afflixit senectus; and none of its weakness, sed aliquid pristini roboris. He married his second wife at eighty. He was a very vain man ; like the Priscus Adams, he thought “ all was vanity or vexation of spirit.” He had his delight in talking about himself, and his fellow citizens were obliged to listen, as he was rich, powerful, and the most famous man of his day in Rome. He boasts of his rank and influence as a crown,—apex senectutis est auctoritas ; he compares himself to the pilot (gubernator), who apparently does no work, but who steers the ship. How does all this apply to you or to me, who are single, old, and feeble, and have never risen even to the rank of corporal in the grand army of the unknown ? Yet this exceptional veteran, old only in the number of his years, warns us that we must not give up to old age, but fight it. Keep mind and memory busy to avoid senility. “ Pugnandum contra senectutem, semper agens aliquid.” There is something dreary and almost humiliating in this daily struggle with destiny.

I. But he mentions other ways of mitigating age that are within our easy reach, and are not dreary. He lent money at high rates, and he loved to lay it up. Accumulation — literally, the growth of the pile — is a constant pleasure. Age does not weary of its infinite variety. Money, at our time of life, gives in this way the most enjoyment. He studied Greek in his declining years, and had such joy in the language that he dreamed in Greek. He liked books. We have half a dozen languages and literatures, and thousands of books to choose from. Cato enjoyed a joke, and although those that have come down to us as his are not good he probably heard better than he made. Then gardening and farming were incredibilia delecta. “ No man is so old that he may not hope to live another year to see his flowers bloom and his fruits ripen.” Here again he was right. Nature does not grow old, and never suggests age to us. The trees and the grass and the birds seem the same year after year. As we advance in life we enjoy nature more and more. Paradise was and will be a garden. Cato gave dinners frequently, propter sermonis delectationem, for the pleasure of conversation as well as of eating and drinking. Old people never weary of their dinner. Even deaf ears seem to hear the sweet jingle of silver and glass.

T. I find dinner parties cheerful enough in a way, but not in the old way. Time changes old friends and ices warm hearts. Our jolly club mottoes in college, “ Fide et amicitia,” “ Dum vivimus vivamus,” have an empty sound to me now. I find keeping myself alive all I can manage ; fides means little or nothing, and the amicitia is mostly dead or forgotten. I fear that the survivals are mostly olla amicitia, pot friendship, the high consideration of the invited: so many of our brilliant acquaintances are like the stars in the hymn,

Cato had another remedy for age. Cicero omits to mention it, but Horace has indiscreetly preserved it for us. “ Sæpe mero caluisse virtus : ” He frequently heated his great qualities with wine. I do not blame him. A good dose of this sparkling liquid rubs off the rust from the old man ; the shadows of his approaching fate vanish ; he is strong, happy, hopeful, young, again. For an hour or two it is the elixir of life. Ponce de Leon toiled painfully through the swamps of Florida in search of the Fountain of Youth. He might have found it in Jamaica, or Antigua, or Santa Cruz, or even in New England, had he lived a few years later.

I. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table says that drinking is the only resource when a man has survived his émotions à l’égard du beau sexe, if he has retired from business, and has no scientific, literary, or charitable hobby to ride.

T. Cato’s principles were cynically loose. You remember the sentential dia Catonis in Horace, and how he increased his income by hiring out his female slaves. He married the second time to keep up appearances. Do you notice he does not allude to the gratification old people derive from their grandchildren ? Evidently he had not the domestic virtues. The truth is, Cato was a coarse, sensual, hard, and disreputable old man, a typical Roman. You and he, in the excellent reasons you have offered why old people should be happy, forget the real difficulty, — the nearness of the end. The world is indeed “full of pleasant people and of curious things,” but it will not last. Years ago, in a Mexican village, I heard a young girl sing,

There is our trouble: “ Every second dies a man.” The air is full of death. Charon sees souls falling into Hades thick and fast, noiseless and white, like snowflakes. One cannot help feeling an infinite pity and sadness when one thinks of the thousands of kind, harmless, often happy beings who are so incessantly thrust out of existence. And I lament over myself especially. I shall soon have to give up the bonito mundo. Finis for me must be written in a year or two. “ Wie hässlich bitter ist das Sterben!” Do you think that a man who knows he is to be hanged the next morning would enjoy his dinner, even if Ude or Francatelli came back to cook it ? There are healthy, happy, careless fellows, friends of the gods, like the Phæacians, who are satisfied with the hour when they are comfortable, and put aside thoughts of a future ; but to men of my temper Cato’s talk is empty and childish. When a man has reached the home stretch, in the course of life, he cannot help seeing the end of the race and the Judge’s stand. That is another rub. What will the Judges say of a man like me, who dies and leaves no sign of his existence behind him, and is put under ground as an empty bottle is thrown into the dust bin ? No ! You and Cato and the Phæacians, with your cheery, self-encouraging talk, get your “ calm contentedness of seventy years ” as the beasts do, — for want of thought.

The gloomy Thompson leaves me alone with his “ fleeting world and piteous.” It is evening, and nearly dark. As the fitful firelight dances upon the parlor wall, the shadows take on the shape of the fair faces I liked to look at years ago. They seem to ask me with their sad Geisteraugen why I still sit waiting here. I am coming, my darlings, I am coming, but not quite yet. Why should I ? I have a good cook, and a housekeeper who is willing to do anything for me. The wood blazes brightly on a clean-swept hearth, my chairs are easy, my books and bibelots lie about me within reach. I have also the pleasure of watching the doings and the sayings of the actors who are making the world of to-day. It is true that I have little personal relation to what is going on beyond the amusement of the hour, but I am interested and amused, like a spectator at the play who has a good front seat. A selfish existence, perhaps, — but on the whole I am glad to be a Phæacian. No, not quite yet. Comfort, if it does not replace youth, love, hope, makes life endurable, I may say pleasant. It is the only solid standpoint in this world of phantoms. There are days in the Indian summer as fair as any in the spring.

F. Sheldon.