“Labour and sorrow.” Are these the characteristics of old age? I should say the words give a singularly precise description of that stage of human experience. I do not mean that it is complete; for there are antidotes, comforts and pleasures appropriate to the case: but the liabilities of the condition are precisely “labour and sorrow.”
It is rarely understood by persons who have the full use of their animal powers that the worst evil of the absence of any of them is not the pain of privation (bad as that is), but the laboriousness thus occasioned in the act of living. I do not know that I have ever met with any person who had thought of this truth without being told; and certainly no person has ever first mentioned the fact to me. Yet there can be no doubt about it. A “well-favoured” person, as the ancient expression is—a person endowed with health and comeliness, and with the keen senses which belong to thorough health, has a very easy life of it, whatever tricks fortune may play him in regard to his surroundings. Impressions flow in upon him incessantly, setting mind and body to work in a natural way, exercising and entertaining his faculties, and rendering easy and plain what he has to do. One with purblind eyes or dull ears has much harder work to do in the mere act of living on from day to day; and the blind, or the deaf, have a lot so laborious as it would astonish their neighbours to become aware of. Instead of influences of sight and sound flowing in upon them, and working within them, they have either to do without that inestimable benefit and aid, or to seek it with pains and toil. They have to make express and laborious effort, from hour to hour of every day, where others simply receive as a free gift the means of thought, feeling, and action. I could say much about this, but my business here is with so much of the truth as is involved in the experience of old age. The “labour” is of this description. The “sorrow” arises from the trials of the affective nature, chiefly, with considerable additions from other sources.
I remember the way in which, when I was young, an elderly friend of mine reasoned with, and laughed at, himself, about this matter of the laboriousness of advancing age. A man of active mind and habits, he felt the stiffening of his joints, the twinges of rheumatism, and the conflict between mind and body about moving hither and thither, which were growing upon him. He told me he had found himself making long faces at having to mount his horse slowly, and leave off running, and give up waiting on sisters and daughter, like the young fellows. Lying awake with rheumatism, or mere sleeplessness, was worse: but he had remembered that he had been glad to live thus long rather than die earlier, and that it was absurd to quarrel with the conditions. He accepted the “labour,” or, as we commonly call it, the burden of years, as a lot which he would have chosen if a choice had been offered him how long he would live. His merry face and philosophical temper impressed me strongly, though the incident may look very small and commonplace to others.
The failure of the senses is a far graver matter than that of the limbs, involving more labour as well as more privation. To young persons suffering under the loss of a sense there is something frightful, as well as painful, in the process. The sense of exclusion from the sights or sounds (whichever it may be) of nature and society is terribly painful; but yet worse is the converse sense of imprisonment—of being secluded from the life of other people, and more and more helplessly. We all shudder at the story of the octagon prison chamber, one side of which disappeared in the course of each night, till it must become a mere closet—a triangular case to stand in—and then, a crushing machine. The same horror of the imagination seizes on a person who, becoming blind or deaf, is daily aware of losing something of the common influences of life, and is aware that he must go on alone into deeper seclusion, finding the mere act of living more difficult every day. The aged do not suffer so acutely as those on whom the calamity falls untimely; but they can tell what the labour is, while caring less for the privation. It does not matter so much to them, they say, how the remnant of their life is passed: they have not active duties, nor heavy responsibilities resting upon them; their accounts with society are made up, and it is their own affair what they are thenceforth fit for; so, if they are sensible and amiable, they keep themselves quiet, and amuse themselves as well as they can. But still there is the laboriousness! Nothing can relieve that. When they were young, the contact between external objects and their special organ (whichever it be) was so natural as to be unobserved; so was the function of the nervous fibre, and so was the cerebral reception of the impression; and its effect on mind or body followed of course. Now, when the consolidation of the frame has gone too far, there is obstruction somewhere in the process, or everywhere; the impression is faint, or it is spoiled, or it is wholly absent, and a natural stimulant and guide to action or thought is withdrawn. Its loss must be supplied somehow, if thought and action are to go on; and to supply it is a heavy and unremitting task.
How this is to be made the best of, depends mainly on the moral strength and temper of the aged person. A superannuated man or woman who sinks under the trouble, or frets under the pain, must be merely humoured and borne with. No other aid is possible, because the sufferer cannot get away from the evil which no one can remedy. A stronger and wiser person has much less to suffer, and for a shorter time. As age advances, the activity subsides, the actual fact of daily existence becomes more acceptable; and monotony itself becomes easiest, while proving anything but dull. One of the characteristics of old age is its susceptibility to old impressions revived, which forms a remarkable contrast to the apathy about new experiences. It is common for aged people to say that the pleasure of the opening of spring is more vivid to them than ever. Granting that they may have forgotten somewhat of the intensity of the pleasure in youth, it is evidently true that they do keenly relish the enjoyments they have known longest. Göthe, whose mental resources might be supposed sufficient for