# Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 9/Modern old age

MODERN OLD AGE.
Several recent circumstances have fixed attention on the great prominence of Old Age as a feature of our time:—Old Age, not coddled in cotton-wool, and kept warm by the fireside, but active, intelligent, efficient, and agreeable;—not only venerable through wealth of years, but admirable in its own character. Physiologists and statisticians tell us that the longevity of our own nation improves,—a marked increase in the length of life having been established within this century; and certainly, what we see in the society of men of mark in our own time quite disposes us to believe this.
The wonder is why there is any such change in the case of public men,—statesmen, churchmen, philosophers, authors, and professional men. It is easy to understand why the labouring classes, and people of small means, live longer than formerly. Sanitary improvements, and increased knowledge of the human frame and how to manage it, may account for such a diminution as there is of disease, whether in active operation or in the form of infirmity which breaks down the system prematurely. But what makes the difference to people who have been brought up in comfort, and have lived in good dwellings, and fed on good and well-cooked food, and been exempt from damp, and bad smells, and scarcity of air and water? If our upper classes have in all ages been blessed with an abundance of the means of living, why should one generation of them live longer than another?
Perhaps, if the entire generation in two different centuries were compared, the greater number of each would be found to be still very much alike. It may be that the difference is seen mainly in the longevity of a small number of conspicuous persons. In the humbler classes the improvement is spread more evenly over the whole population. The cases of workhouse wonders,—mummies of either sex who are celebrated for having been on the rates for seventy or eighty years,—are probably about as many as were known to our fathers; or the difference may be that such cases are now occasionally found in better homes than the workhouse: but they are always very few; and the world is sure to hear of such as there are. Such cases, generally speaking, show how life may be carried on with the least vital action. The brain works just enough to keep the machine going, and by no means to wear it out. Once secured against hunger, toil, and care, they have no further wear and tear; and so there is nothing to prevent their living on till the machinery stops of itself. Their comrades who have more brain, more heart, more responsibilities, and a keener sense of them, are subject to more bodily risks and more mental anxiety. As knowledge, management of affairs, and wages improve, the higher orders of poor people suffer less, run fewer risks, and live somewhat longer; but the longevity is so diffused that we might hardly observe it except by the proof being brought before our eyes.
In the case of the easy middle ranks the longer life of our days is easily accounted for. The virtual abolition of small-pox alone is a great matter. A greater is that intemperance in the form of eating and drinking has descended to a lower class. It is in the small shopkeeping and artisan class now that we see the heavy feeding and the passionate pursuit of dainties for the table which was once no disgrace in mansions and palaces; and, when a man has to be excused for something done or said because he was drunk, the instant conclusion is that he is not a gentleman. Without looking further, therefore, society agrees that the gentry may well be longer lived than their grandparents,—by at least the difference of having no small-pox and very little gout to deal with. Fevers, too, seem to be gravitating so as to suggest the hope that they, like drunkenness, will go out at the lower end of society. All this seems clear and satisfactory to many persons; but the question remains—why it is that we see so many more old men than formerly in the most arduous positions of public life?
It is a remarkable spectacle, no doubt. Taking the Statesmen first;—how many of those whom the world has lost were active in their functions to the last! Metternich was thrust aside because his work was a failure, and not because he was himself incapable of action. Nesselrode was Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Chancellor of the Empire to successive Czars till he died last year at ninety-two, clear-headed and full of interest for Russia as he had ever been. Last month, a man at least as life-like at about the same age departed from among us, leaving a stronger impression on our minds of everything about him than of his extreme age. Lord Lyndhurst had some infirmities at ninety-one; but nobody to the last associated any idea of decrepitude with him,—much less of senile weakness. Lord Lansdowne was eight years younger at his death; and we saw in him more of the familiar attributes of failing executive powers: but he, too, had a clear and calm mind, and a bright interest in the life around him, at an age when the traditional octogenarian should have been lingering in second childhood. That Lord Campbell should have been hard at work, head and hand, till death fell upon him in his chair, is hardly surprising to those who had long studied his constitution and his course. To those who knew his fibre, physical, mental, and moral, the question was whether he ever would die, and why: and if he had lived over a hundred, doing all the work of his particular judgeship or any other, the final surprise would have been,—not that he had lasted so long, but that he should ever come to a stop. Mr. Ellice had much less to do, to think about and to feel, in regard to public affairs, than any of these men; but still he was a public man,—once active, and not perhaps the less busy after he had taken to repressing other ​people’s activity. Whether with little or much wear and tear, he had a long old age, unspoiled by decay of body or mind. He had no more to do with second childhood than those we have mentioned, or than those of his contemporaries who are still active in the service of their country.
The first that will occur to all minds is, of course, the Prime Minister. I am myself so tired of reading the incessant remarks—not altogether considerate to Lord Palmerston’s own feelings,—on the marvellousness of his being still as clever and serviceable as ever at seventy-nine, that I shall not enlarge upon the case. It speaks for itself; it may confirm some inferences yielded by the whole class of cases; and it is a fact of strong and peculiar interest far beyond the bounds of our own empire; but it ought not to be considered miraculous by us who saw Nesselrode as he was last year, and Lyndhurst as he was last month;—the one thirteen, and the other twelve years older than Lord Palmerston is now. Two of his political contemporaries remain,—one active, the other passive, as far as public life is concerned. Lord Brougham is the active one, of course; and at the recent Social Science Congress he observed that Lord Glenelg and himself were the only survivors of their generation of members of the Speculative Society. Lord Glenelg is eighty; and that he should have lived so long is the more remarkable from his being a twin, the survivor of his twin brother Robert by many years. We do not forget him; but we hear nothing of him. As for Lord Brougham, he speaks for himself so abundantly that I may leave him to that description. There is one more remarkable statesman, who appears, at seventy-five, as able as he ever was to guide and shape the fortunes of rulers and their dominions and people. Men must be old themselves to remember the interest of the first clear disclosures of the ability of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe,—Canning’s cousin,—in the field of diplomacy. When he reached his threescore years and ten, he came home from the East,—but not to be wrapped in cotton-wool and set down by the fireside, but to render in parliament services on Eastern questions which no other man is competent to render. May he be there to do this till Eastern questions become better able to take care of themselves!
This name—Stratford Canning—brings up some melancholy associations with the theme of longevity among statesmen. What two men were his relatives,—George Canning and his son, the late Lord Canning! And they were laid in the grave prematurely while many, infinitely less precious to the country, are living on, prosperously and gaily! The father was worried out, and the son worn out of life. They are more like the statesmen of the last century than those whom we see old, and growing old, in office. They remind us of some of the conditions of longevity in their special class, and help us to understand some of the laws of it.
Nothing is clearer than that a habitual activity of brain,—and especially of the intellectual organs of it,—is a leading condition of the most substantial kind of health. All the evidence in connection with longevity, gathered from every class, confirms this. As a rule (which will have fewer exceptions as time passes on), other circumstances being anything approaching to equal, the ablest men in any intellectual career will live the longest. Habitual, strenuous, equable exercise of the faculties requisite for the work is the primary condition of a working longevity. Either included in this condition, or regarded separately, as each may prefer, is the condition of temperance. It is included in the other because there can be no strenuous, and no equable exercise of the intellect when any sort of intemperance is indulged in. Temperance is simply doing or taking only what agrees with one: and to take or do anything which disagrees with one, is simply disordering the brain, and rendering a thoroughly healthy action of it impossible. All this is plain enough: but next follows that pathetic certainty to which we must refer so many of our disappointments, and premature losses of noble public service and glorious public servants. Strong moral emotions are incompatible with durable vigour,—probably in every walk of life, and certainly in that of statesmanship. Men of keen general sensibility, men of anxious ambition, or sensitive honour, or, above all, of delicate conscience, can be statesmen only under the hardest conditions,—those of a living martyrdom and an early death,—unless the latter is precluded by the worse doom of political extinction. Life is sorely wearing to the man of tender conscience in the very stillest of the world’s paths, where the responsibilities are fewest and plainest. Life strains the brain and fibre of the Man of Feeling wherever it finds him. What must be the wear and tear of statesmanship to the man who carries the poet’s nature into such a function! He is under the incessant, conscious burden of millions of human lives which depend on his counsels and decisions, and of the national honour and existence which will stand or fall by his sufficiency or failure. Most of us know something of the probation of an anxious or dissatisfied conscience. If our suffering is keen, what must his be who cannot but make mistakes occasionally, and who can perceive, on looking back, a great sum of mischiefs and miseries which might, perhaps, have been spared by greater wisdom, intellectual or moral, on his part!
The wonder is,—not that statesmen of a high order die early, but rather that they can live under such a strain of emotion. The world may say (as it seems to the world) that such a man dies of hard work. The real truth is, in such cases, that the work would not have been fatal if there had been an unwounded spirit to support it. It is the inward pain which gives its deadly quality to mere fatigue. The Cannings, father and son, were men of this delicate moral organisation: and both sank under their burden,—of irritation, of responsibility, and of fatigue. “Pitt’s heart was broken,” all men say now. It would not have killed him to pass through the probation of 1805 if he had not violated the second condition,—of temperance in all things: but it was moral emotion which rendered life impossible to him when only half of his natural term had run out. An affecting example of the exhausting effects of a painful sensibility has been before the ​eyes of all of us in the case of O’Connell. If ever there was a frame built for longevity, it was his. Of all the politicians of his time, he seemed the most likely to live to a hundred. But he misled Ireland,—he entangled himself in perilous falsehood,—he was conscious that honour was virtually gone, and that infamy and the curses of a deceived people were in the future, and he was unnerved. Afraid either to live or die, he died of fatal exhaustion from overstrained, painful, and unremitting emotion.
It would seem, then, that if statesmen are to add to their other utilities that of serving their country to a great age, they must not be men of a very acute sensibility, of strong passions, or of a delicate conscience. The conscience must be at least robust; and if it is somewhat more,—rather hard, or blunt, or lax, so much the stronger is the chance of the protraction of their work. They must be men of calm passions and regular habits, generally speaking. If, indeed, an aged statesman is seen whose private life has not commanded respect, or whose egotism has amounted to a passion, involving jealousy and hatred, his old age is hardly a privilege, to himself or anybody else. His intellect may appear untouched; but in fact his judgment has become untrustworthy. It is probably inconsistent in its decisions; and it is certainly warped by his resentments, his exultations, and his mortifications. Though no one may say it, most people feel that he would have been better in his grave long ago, for other reasons than the comprehensive doubt whether old age is a blessing at all.
There was a time within living memory when it was considered desirable that men who were real workers should be permitted and encouraged to retire from their toils at sixty. Of course, no such rule could be universally applicable. One man is younger at sixty than another at fifty; and there are labours which are easier at sixty than at forty. But there was a strong feeling that, generally speaking, parliamentary work, pulpit work, the judicial bench, and the toils of medical practice, were too much for men over sixty. When the painter must have recourse to glasses, when the preacher becomes garrulous, or delivers old sermons, when the county member nods through a debate, when the physician has to refresh his memory about his patients’ ailments from day to day, and when the author puts forth less power from season to season, all faithful and genial friends wish that these sexagenarians were respectably and tranquilly reposing in their own homes, enjoying their leisure while the capacity for enjoyment remains. But the term really seems to have been changed within a generation. We see men of seventy whom we could ill have spared from public life for ten years past; and I do not know that it matters very much what is the age fixed upon, while there is a sort of public opinion established in favour of some term being assigned at which laborious men may be authorised to leave off working, for their own sakes and that of the society they have thus far served so well.
We have seen how some statesmen who might have lived their threescore years and ten died, worn out, far too soon; and to Pitt, Lord Dalhousie, and the Cannings, we might add many names of men in minor offices who worked themselves to death, either in carrying some particular measure, or under the constant pressure of care and toil. There have been others who were snatched from us by accidents. Huskisson followed his friend Canning too soon; but he also was nearly worn out; and he could not have worked much longer if he had been far away from the railroad on that fatal opening day. Our hearts are yet sore from the loss of Peel, at a period when we reckoned on a more dignified public life for him, and a greater wealth of counsel from him for ourselves than even his official career had afforded. In other departments of the public service accident has deprived us of benefits from men who had become old without any perceptible diminution of power. Lord Clyde’s death may be attributed to the fall from his horse in India, of which he made so light; and Sir Cresswell Cresswell’s death cannot be supposed altogether unconnected with the injury which he received in the Park. The one was just past seventy, and the other just short of it; and yet both may be said to have died prematurely.
Arts and Arms seem to be favourable to longevity under the same conditions as statesmanship. Wellington, in whom the two were united, is a remarkable illustration of how toil, responsibility, and the liabilities of fame, may be borne when the moral nature and training are a help instead of a drawback. His strength of will, his power of self-reliance, his simplicity of mind, his unconsciousness of doubt or scruple, and his very narrowness of political view, in combination with his military comprehensiveness of knowledge, enabled him to do and live through what would have killed half-a-dozen men of a more sensitive fibre, and a more egotistical sort of humility. In him, as in Lord Clyde (who might have lived to the age of Wellington), Lord Combermere, who is still alive and vigorous at ninety, the French Marshal d’Ornano, who has just died at the age of ninety-two, Lord Seaton, who has departed this year at the age of eighty-seven, and Sir Howard Douglas, who was a great professional authority and public benefactor till he died two years ago at eighty-five, we see that the toils of military life, and the gravest responsibilities, do not shorten the existence of men constitutionally adapted to that career.
The Church has for some time been becoming a scene of trouble and anxiety, very wearing to its guardians and administrators; yet there are still very old bishops in its modern annals. When a certain bishop died twenty or thirty years ago, at some unheard of age, leaving his diocese in a woeful condition from the long suspension of his personal offices, the Church had hardly begun to awake from its lethargy of the last century; but even then society felt that we must not have such aged bishops, if they were past their work. The late Archbishop of Canterbury was past eighty; the present Bishop of Exeter is eighty-six; and Archbishop Whately has just departed at seventy-six; but all these have so far provided against their duty being neglected that we may admit, without any reserve objection, that the clerical career ​seems to be favourable to longevity where the individual nature is hardy enough for its responsibilities.
The Philosophers ought to have length of days for their portion, seeing how their pursuits ought to elevate them above the disturbances of life. And such is, in fact, the operation of their mode of life, by which their faculties are furnished with constant entertainment, on subjects which would seem to lie outside the range of uneasy passions, while creating or exciting the noblest moral emotion. And an unusual amount of healthy longevity is in fact found among philosophers,—whether mathematicians, naturalists, or speculative students. Such things have been heard of as strifes in those serene fields of thought: such sights have been seen as faces furrowed with fretfulness, or working with passion: but the old age of many philosophers is at this moment an honour to their vocation. Peter Barlow was, when he lately died at eighty-two, the same Peter Barlow that he had been to two generations of friends and disciples. Sir David Brewster is still active and occupied at the same age. The late Mr. Tooke did not puzzle his brain about the Currency too much to be still up to the subject at eighty-six. Sir R. Murchison is past seventy, and so is Sir J. Herschel.
Literature ought to have the same operation as science; but it seems to have more room for agitations and anxieties, except in the case of authors who live in and with their work, exempt from self-regards. Jacob Grimm was a very perfect example of the philosophic serenity which a literary career can yield; and he lived to seventy-eight. There is something remarkable in the longevity of literary women in modern times, even if we do not look beyond our own country. Mrs. Piozzi and Mrs. Delany perhaps scarcely enter within the conditions: and the still-lamented Jane Austen was under an early doom from consumption: but Miss Edgeworth was above eighty when she died; Joanna and Agnes Baillie were older still; and Mrs. Trollope died the other day at eighty-four.
The artists who have departed lately have been old. Biot was eighty-seven, and Vernet seventy-four. Our Mulready was seventy-seven; and Professor Cockerell, the architect, was seventy-three.
If long life is a good and desirable thing, we may rejoice that it is manifestly on the increase. However it may be with longevity, we know that the occupation and exercise of the faculties which favours longevity is a very great blessing and a very high privilege indeed. Therefore, though my readers and I may have no personal wishes about living to be very old, we may rejoice that the conditions of prolonged life are becoming more common and more comprehensive from generation to generation.
From the Mountain.