had been unmanageable in youth and his genius for mischief was an
inspiration, yet he was hostile to everything pusillanimous, haughty,
aspiring, ready to fasten a quarrel on his shadow for running before,
at first inclined to reduce his boy brother to a fag, but finally
before his death became a great influence in his life. Prominent were
the fights between De Quincey and another older brother on the one
hand, and the factory crowd of boys on the other, a fight incessantly
renewed at the close of factory hours, with victory now on one and now
on the other side; fought with stones and sticks, where thrice he was
taken prisoner, where once one of the factory women kissed him, to the
great delight of his heart. He finally invented a kingdom like Hartley
Coleridge, called Gom Broon. He thought first that it had no location,
but finally because his brother's imaginary realm was north and he
wanted wide water between them, his was in the far south. It was only
two hundred and seventy miles in circuit, and he was stunned to be
told by his brother one day that his own domain swept south for eighty
degrees, so that the distance he had relied on vanished. Here,
however, he continued to rule for well or ill, raising taxes, keeping
an imaginary standing army, fishing herring and selling the product of
his fishery for manure, and experiencing how "uneasy lies the head
that wears a crown." He worried over his obligations to Gom Broon, and
the shadow froze into reality, and although his brother's kingdom
Tigrosylvania was larger, his was distinguished for eminent men and a
history not to be ashamed of. A friend had read Lord Monboddo's view
that men had sprung from apes, and suggested that the inhabitants of
Gom Broon had tails, so that the brother told him that his subjects
had not emerged from apedom and he must invent arts to eliminate the
tails. They must be made to sit down for six hours a day as a
beginning. Abdicate he would not, though all his subjects had three
tails apiece. They had suffered together. Vain was his brother's
suggestion that they have a Roman toga to conceal their ignominious
appendages. He was greatly interested in two scrofulous idiots, who
finally died, and feared that his subjects were akin to them.
John Stuart Mill's Autobiography presents one of the most remarkable
modifications of the later phases of adolescent experience. No boy
ever had more diligent and earnest training than his father gave him
or responded better. He can not remember when he began to learn Greek,
but was told that it was at the age of three. The list of classical
authors alone that he read in the original, to say nothing of history,
political, scientific, logical, and other works before he was twelve,
is perhaps unprecedented in all history. He associated with his father
and all his many friends on their own level, but modestly ascribes
everything to his environment, insists that in natural gifts he is
other below than above par, and declares that everything he did could
be done by every boy of average capacity and healthy physical
constitution. His father made the Greek virtue of temperance or
moderation cardinal, and thought human life "a poor thing at best
after the freshness of youth and unsatisfied curiosity had gone by."
He scorned "the intense" and had only contempt for strong emotion.
In his teens Mill was an able debater and writer for the quarterlies,
and devoted to the propagation of the theories of Bentham, Ricardo,
and associationism. From the age of fifteen he had an object in life,
viz., to reform the world. This gave him happiness, deep, permanent,
and assured for the future, and the idea of struggling to promote
utilitarianism seemed an inspiring program for life. But in the autumn
of 1826, when he was twenty years of age, he felt into "a dull state
of nerves," where he could no longer enjoy and what had produced
pleasure seemed insipid; "the state, I should think, in which converts
to Methodism usually are when smitten by their first 'conviction of
sin.' In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question
directly to myself; 'Suppose that all your objects in life were
realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you
are looking forward to could be completely effected at this very
instant; would this be a great joy and happiness to you?' And an
irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, 'No.' At this my
heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was
constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the
continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how
could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have
nothing left to live for. At first I hoped that the cloud would pass
away of itself, but it did not. A night's sleep, the sovereign remedy
for the smaller vexations of life, had no effect on it. I awoke to a
renewed consciousness of the woful fact. I carried it with me into all
companies, into all occupations. Hardly anything had power to cause me
even a few minutes' oblivion of it. For some months the cloud seemed
to grow thicker and thicker. The lines in Coleridge's 'Dejection'--I
was not then acquainted with them--exactly described my case:
"'A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet or relief
In word, or sigh, or tear.'
"In vain I sought relief from my favorite books, those memorials of
past nobleness and greatness from which I had always hitherto drawn
strength and animation. I read them now without feeling, or with the
accustomed feeling minus all its charm; and I became persuaded that my
love of mankind, and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself
out. I sought no comfort by speaking to others of what I felt. If I
had loved any one sufficiently to make confiding my griefs a
necessity, I should not have been in the condition I was. I felt, too,
that mine was not an interesting or in anyway respectable distress.
There was nothing in it to attract sympathy. Advice, if I had known
where to seek it, would have been most precious. The words of Macbeth
to the physician often occurred to my thoughts. But there was no one
on whom I could build the faintest hope of such assistance. My father,
to whom it would have been natural to me to have recourse in any
practical difficulties, was the last person to whom, in such a case as
this, I looked for help. Everything convinced me that he had no
knowledge of any such mental state as I was suffering from, and that
even if he could be made to understand it, he was not the physician
who could heal it. My education, which was wholly his work, had been
conducted without any regard to the possibility of its ending in this
result, and I saw no use in giving him the pain of thinking that his
plans had failed, when the failure was probably irremediable, and, at
all event, beyond the power of his remedies. Of other friends, I had
at that time none to whom I had any hope of making my condition
intelligible. It was, however, abundantly intelligible to myself, and
the more I dwelt upon it the more hopeless it appeared."
He now saw what had hitherto seemed incredible, that the habit of
analysis tends to wear away the feelings. He felt "stranded at the
commencement of my voyage, with a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but
no sail; without any real desire for the ends which I had been so
carefully fitted out to work for: no delight in virtue, or the general
good, but also just as little in anything else. The fountains of
vanity and ambition seemed to have dried up within me as completely as
those of benevolence." His vanity had been gratified at too early an
age, and, like all premature pleasures, they had caused indifference,
until he despaired of creating any fresh association of pleasure with
any objects of human dire. Meanwhile, dejected and melancholy as he
was through the winter, he went on mechanically with his tasks;
thought he found in Coleridge the first description of what he was
feeling; feared the idiosyncrasies of his education had made him a
being unique and apart. "I asked myself if I could or if I was bound
to go on living, when life must be passed in this manner. I generally
answered to myself that I did not think I could possibly bear it
beyond a year." But within about half that time, in reading a pathetic
page of how a mere boy felt that he could save his family and take the
place of all they had lost, a vivid conception of the scene came over
him and he was moved to tears. From that moment, his burden grew
lighter. He saw that his heart was not dead and that he still had some
stuff left of which character and happiness are made; and although
there were several later lapses, some of which lasted many months, he
was never again as miserable as he had been.
These experience left him changed in two respects. He had a new theory
of life, having much in common with the anti-consciousness theory of
Carlyle. He still held happiness the end of life, but thought it must
be aimed at indirectly and taken incidentally. The other change was
that for the first time he gave its proper place to internal culture
of the individual, especially the training of the feelings which
became now cardinal. He relished and felt the power of poetry and art;
was profoundly moved by music; fell in love with Wordsworth and with
nature, and his later depressions were best relieved by the power of
rural beauty, which wrought its charm not because of itself but by the
states and feelings it aroused. His ode on the intimations of
immortality showed that he also had felt that the first freshness of
youthful joy was not lasting, and had sought and found compensation.
He had thus come to a very different standpoint from that of his
father, who had up to this time formed his mind and life, and
developed on this basis his unique individuality.
Jefferies, when eighteen, began his "Story of My Heart,"[31] which he
said was an absolutely true confession of the stages of emotion in a
soul from which all traces of tradition and learning were erased, and
which stood face to face with nature and the unknown.
His heart long seemed dusty and parched for want of feeling, and he
frequented a hill, where the pores of his soul opened to a new air.
"Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun,
the air and the distant sea.... I desired to have its strength, its
mystery and glory. I addressed the sun, desiring the sole equivalent
of his light and brilliance, his endurance, and unwearied race. I
turned to the blue heaven over, gazing into its depth, inhaling its
exquisite color and sweetness. The rich blue of the unobtainable
flower of the sky drew my soul toward it, and there it rested, for
pure color is the rest of the heart. By all these I prayed. I felt an
emotion of the soul beyond all definition; prayer is a puny thing to
it." He prayed by the thyme; by the earth; the flowers which he
touched; the dust which he let fall through his fingers; was filled
with "a rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus. With this inflatus I
prayed.... I hid my face in the grass; I was wholly prostrated; I lost
myself in the wrestle.... I see now that what I labored for was soul
life, more soul learning." After gazing upward he would turn his face
into the grass, shutting out everything with hands each side, till he
felt down into the earth and was absorbed in it, whispering deep down
to its center. Every natural impression, trees, insects, air, clouds,
he used for prayer, "that my soul might be more than the cosmos of
life." His "Lyra" prayer was to live a more exalted and intense soul
life; enjoy more bodily pleasure and live long and find power to
execute his designs. He often tried, but failed for years to write at
least a meager account of these experiences. He felt himself immortal
just as he felt beauty. He was in eternity already; the supernatural
is only the natural misnamed. As he lay face down on the grass,
seizing it with both hands, he longed for death, to be burned on a
pyre of pine wood on a high hill, to have his ashes scattered wide and
broadcast, to be thrown into the space he longed for while living, but
he feared that such a luxury of resolution into the elements would be
too costly. Thus his naked mind, close against naked mother Nature,
wrested from her the conviction of soul, immortality, deity, under
conditions as primitive as those of the cave man, and his most
repeated prayer was "Give me the deepest soul life."
In other moods he felt the world outré-human, and his mind could by no
twist be fitted to the cosmos. Ugly, designless creatures caused him
to cease to look for deity in nature, where all happens by chance. He
at length concluded there is something higher than soul and above
deity, and better than God, for which he searched and labored. He
found favorite thinking places, to which he made pilgrimages, where he
"felt out into the depths of the ether." His frame could not bear the
labor his heart demanded. Work of body was his meat and drink. "Never
have I had enough of it. I wearied long before I was satisfied, and
weariness did not bring a cessation of desire, the thirst was still
there. I rode; I used the ax; I split tree-trunks with wedges; my arms
tired, but my spirit remained fresh and chafed against the physical
weariness." Had he been indefinitely stronger, he would have longed
for more strength. He was often out of doors all day and often half
the night; wanted more sunshine; wished the day was sixty hours long;
took pleasure in braving the cold so that it should be not life's
destroyer but its renewer. Yet he abhorred asceticism. He wrestled
with the problem of the origin of his soul and destiny, but could find
no solution; revolted at the assertion that all is designed for the
best; "a man of intellect and humanity could cause everything to
happen in an infinitely superior manner." He discovered that no one
ever died of old age, but only of disease; that we do not even know
what old age would be like; found that his soul is infinite, but lies
in abeyance; that we are murdered by our ancestors and must roll back
the tide of death; that a hundredth part of man's labor would suffice
for his support; that idleness is no evil; that in the future
nine-tenths of the time will be leisure, and to that end he will work
with all his heart. "I was not more than eighteen when an inner and
esoteric meaning began to come to me from all the visible universe,
and indefinable aspirations filled me."
Interesting as is this document, it is impossible to avoid the
suspicion that the seventeen years which intervened between the
beginning of these experiences and their final record, coupled with
the perhaps unconscious tendency toward literary effect, detract more
or less from their value as documents of adolescent nature.
Mr. H. Fielding Hall, author of "The Soul of a People," has since
written a book[32] in which, beginning with many definitions of
Christianity, weighing the opinion of those who think all our advance
is made because of, against those who think it in spite of
Christianity, he proceeds to give the story of a boy, probably
himself, who till twelve was almost entirely reared by women and with
children younger than himself.
He was sickly, and believed not in the Old but in the New Testament;
in the Sermon on the Mount, which he supposed all accepted and lived
by; that war and wealth were bad and learning apt to be a snare; that
the ideal life was that of a poor curate, working hard and unhappy. At
twelve, he went to a boarding-school, passed from a woman's world into
a man's, out of the New Testament into the Old, out of dreams into
reality. War was a glorious opportunity, and all followed the British
victories, which were announced publicly. Big boys were going to
Sandhurst or Woolwich; there were parties; and the school code never
turned the other cheek. Wars were God's storms, stirring stagnant
natures to new life; wealth was worshiped; certain lies were an honor;
knowledge was an extremely desirable thing--all this was at first new
and delightful, but extremely wicked. Sunday was the only other Old
Testament rule, but was then forgotten. Slowly a repugnance of
religion in all its forms arose. He felt his teachers hypocrites; he
raised no alarm, "for he was hardly conscious that his anchor had
dragged or that he had lost hold" of it forever. At eighteen, he read
Darwin and found that if he were right, Genesis was wrong; man had
risen, not fallen; if a part was wrong, the whole was. If God made the
world, the devil seemed to rule it; prayer can not influence him; the
seven days of creation were periods, Heaven knows how long. Why did
all profess and no one believe religion? Why is God so stern and yet
so partial, and how about the Trinity? Then explanations were given.
Heaven grew repulsive, as a place for the poor, the maimed, the
stupid, the childish, and those unfit for earth generally.
Faiths came from the East. "The North has originated only Thor, Odin,
Balder, Valkyres." The gloom and cold drive man into himself; do not
open him. In the East one can live in quiet solitude, with no effort,
close to nature. The representatives of all faiths wear ostentatiously
their badges, pray in public, and no one sneers at all religions.
Oriental faiths have no organization; there is no head of Hinduism,
Buddhism, or hardly of Mohammedanism. There are no missions, but
religion grows rankly from a rich soil, so the boy wrote three
demands: a reasonable theory of the universe, a workable and working
code of conduct, and a promise of something desirable hereafter. So he
read books and tried to make a system.
On a hill, in a thunder-storm in the East, he realized how Thor was
born. Man fears thunder; it seems the voice of a greater man. Deny
eyes, legs, and body of the Deity, and nothing is left. God as an
abstract spirit is unthinkable, but Buddhism offers us no God, only
law. Necessity, blind force, law, or a free personal will--that is the
alternative. Freedom limits omnipotence; the two can never mix. "The
German Emperor's God, clanking round the heavenly mansions wearing a
German _Pickelhaube_ and swearing German oaths," is not satisfactory.
Man's God is what he admires most in himself; he can be propitiated,
hence atonement; you can not break a law, but you can study it.
Inquiry, not submission, is the attitude. Perhaps both destiny and
freedom are true, but truth is for the sake of light.
Thor had no moral code; the Greeks were unmoral. Jehovah at first
asked only fear, reverence, and worship. This gives no guide to life.
Most codes are directed against a foe and against pain. Truth, mercy,
courtesy--these were slowly added to reverence; then sanitary rules,
hence castes. Two codes, those of Christ and Buddha, tower above all
others. They are the same in praising not wealth, greatness, or power,
but purity, renunciation of the world, as if one fitted one's self for
one by being unfitted for the other world.
Is heaven a bribe? Its ideals are those of children, of girl angels,
white wings, floating dresses, no sheep, but lambs. "Surely there is
nothing in all the world so babyish." One can hardly imagine a man
with a deep voice, with the storm of life beating his soul, amid those
baby faces. If happiness in any act or attitude is perfect, it will
last forever. Where is due the weariness or satiety? But if happiness
be perfect, this is impossible; so life would be monotony akin to
annihilation. But life is change, and change is misery. There is
effort here; but there will be none in the great peace that passes
understanding; no defeat, therefore no victory; no friends, because no
enemies; no joyous meetings, because no farewells. It is the shadows
and the dark mysteries that sound the depths of our hearts. No man
that ever lived, if told that he could be young again or go to any
heaven, would choose the latter. Men die for many things, but all fear
the beyond. Thus no religion gives us an intelligible First Cause, a
code or a heaven that we want. The most religious man is the peasant
listening to the angelus, putting out a little _ghi_ for his God; the
woman crying in the pagoda. Thus we can only turn to the hearts of men
for the truth of religion.
Biographies and autobiographies furnish many photographic glimpses of
the struggles and experiences of early adolescent years.
Anthony Trollope's autobiography[33] is pitiful. He was poor and
disliked by most of his masters and treated with ignominy by his
fellow pupils. He describes himself as always in disgrace. At fifteen
he walked three miles each way twice a day to and from school. As a
sizar he seemed a wretched farmer's boy, reeking from the dunghill,
sitting next the sons of big peers. All were against him, and he was
allowed to join no games, and learned, he tells us, absolutely nothing
but a little Greek and Latin. Once only, goaded to desperation, he
rallied and whipped a bully. The boy was never able to overcome the
isolation of his school position, and while he coveted popularity with
an eagerness which was almost mean, and longed exceedingly to excel in
cricket or with the racquet, was allowed to know nothing of them. He
remembers at nineteen never to have had a lesson in writing,
arithmetic, French, or German. He knew his masters by their ferules
and they him. He believes that he has "been flogged oftener than any
human being alive. It was just possible to obtain five scourgings in
one day at Winchester, and I have often boasted that I have obtained
them all." Prizes were distributed prodigally, but he never got one.
For twelve years of tuition, he says, "I do not remember that I ever
knew a lesson."
At this age he describes himself as "an idle, desolate, hanger on ...
without an idea of a career or a profession or a trade," but he was
tolerably happy because he could fancy himself in love with pretty
girls and had been removed from the real misery of school, but had not
a single aspiration regarding his future. Three of his household were
dying of consumption, and his mother was day nurse, night nurse, and
divided her time between pill-boxes and the ink-bottle, for when she
was seventy-six she had written one hundred and forty volumes, the
first of which was not written till she was fifty.
Gradually the boy became alive to the blighted ambition of his
father's life and the strain his mother was enduring, nursing the
dying household and writing novels to provide a decent roof for them
to die under. Anthony got a position at the post-office without an
examination. He knew no French nor science; was a bad speller and
worse writer and could not have sustained an examination on any
subject. Still he could not bear idleness, and was always going about
with some castle in the air finely built in his mind, carrying on for
weeks and years the same continuous story; binding himself down to
certain laws, proprieties, and unities; always his own hero, excluding
everything violently improbable. To this practise, which he calls
dangerous and which began six or seven years before he went to the
post-office, he ascribes his power to maintain an interest in a
fictitious story and to live in a entirely outside imaginative life.
During these seven years he acquired a character of irregularity and
grew reckless.
Mark Pattison[34] shows us how his real life began in the middle
teens, when his energy was "directed to one end, to improve myself";
"to form my own mind; to sound things thoroughly; to be free from the
bondage of unreason and the traditional prejudices which, when I first
began to think, constituted the whole of my mental fabric." He entered
upon life with a "hide-bound and contracted intellect," and depicts
"something of the steps by which I emerged from that frozen
condition." He believes that to "remember the dreams and confusions of
childhood and never to lose the recollection of the curiosity and
simplicity of that age, is one of the great gifts of the poetic
character," although this, he tells us, was extraordinarily true of
George Sand, but not of himself. From the age of twelve on, a
Fellowship at Oriel was the ideal of his life, and although he became
a commoner there at seventeen, his chief marvel is that he was so
immature and unimpressionable.
William Hale White[35] learned little at school, save Latin and good
penmanship, but his very life was divided into halves--Sundays and
week days--and he reflects at some length upon the immense dangers of
the early teens; the physiological and yet subtler psychic penalties
of error; callousness to fine pleasures; hardening of the conscience;
and deplores the misery which a little instruction might have saved
him. At fourteen he underwent conversion, understood in his sect to be
a transforming miracle, releasing higher and imprisoning lower powers.
He compares it to the saving of a mind from vice by falling in love
with a woman who is adored, or the reclamation of a young woman from
idleness and vanity by motherhood. But as a boy he was convinced of
many things which were mere phrases, and attended prayer-meetings for
the clanship of being marked off from the world and of walking home
with certain girls. He learned to say in prayer that there was nothing
good in him, that he was rotten and filthy and his soul a mass of
putrefying sores; but no one took him at his word and expelled him
from society, but thought the better of him. Soon he began to study
theology, but found no help in suppressing tempestuous lust, in
understanding the Bible, or getting his doubts answered, and all the
lectures seemed irrelevant chattering. An infidel was a monster whom
he had rarely ever seen. At nineteen he began to preach, but his heart
was untouched till he read Wordsworth's lyrical ballads, and this
recreated a living God for him, melted his heart to tears, and made
him long for companionship; its effect was instantly seen in his
preaching, and soon made him slightly suspected as heretical.[36]
John Addington Symonds, in his autobiography, describes his
"insect-like" devotion to creed in the green infancy of ritualism. In
his early teens at boarding-school he and his mates, with half
sincerity, followed a classmate to compline, donned surplices, tossed
censers, arranged altars in their studies, bought bits of painted
glass for their windows and illuminated crucifixes with gold dust and
vermilion. When he was confirmed, this was somewhat of an epoch.
Preparation was like a plowshare, although it turned up nothing
valuable, and stimulated esthetic and emotional ardor. In a dim way he
felt God near, but he did not learn to fling the arms of the soul in
faith around the cross of Christ. Later the revelation he found in
Plato removed him farther from boyhood. He fell in love with gray
Gothic churches, painted glass, organ lofts, etc.
Walter Pater has described phases of ferment, perhaps largely his own,
in the character of Florian Deleal; his rapture of the red hawthorn
blossoms, "absolutely the reddest of all things"; his times of
"seemingly exclusive predominance of interest in beautiful physical
things, a kind of tyranny of the senses"; and his later absorbing
efforts to estimate the proportion of the sensuous and ideal,
assigning most importance to sensible vehicles and occasions;
associating all thoughts with touch and sight as a link between
himself and things, till he became more and more "unable to care for
or think of soul but as in an actual body"; comforted in the
contemplation of death by the thought of flesh turning to violets and
almost oppressed by the pressure of the sensible world, his longings
for beauty intensifying his fear of death. He loved to gaze on dead
faces in the Paris Morgue although the haunt of them made the sunshine
sickly for days, and his long fancy that they had not really gone nor
were quite motionless, but led a secret, half fugitive life, freer by
night, and perhaps dodging about in their old haunts with no great
good-will toward the living, made him by turns pity and hate the
ghosts who came back in the wind, beating at the doors. His religious
nature gradually yielded to a mystical belief in Bible personages in
some indefinite place as the reflexes and patterns of our nobler self,
whose companionship made the world more satisfying. There was "a
constant substitution of the typical for the actual," and angels might
be met anywhere. "A deep mysticity brooded over real things and
partings," marriages and many acts and accidents of life. "The very
colors of things became themselves weighty with meanings," or "full of
penitence and peace." "For a time he walked through the world in a
sustained, not unpleasurable awe generated by the habitual
recognition, beside every circumstance and event of life, of its
celestial correspondent."
In D. C. Boulger's Life of General Charles Gordon[37] he records how,
like Nelson Clive, his hero was prone to boys' escapades and outbreaks
that often made him the terror of his superiors. He was no bookworm,
but famous as the possessor of high spirits, very often involved in
affairs that necessitated discipline, and seemed greatly out of
harmony with the popular idea of the ascetic of Mount Carmel. As a
schoolboy he made wonderful squirts "that would wet you through in a
minute." One Sunday twenty-seven panes of glass in a large storehouse
were broken with screws shot through them by his cross-bow "for
ventilation." Ringing bells and pushing young boys in, butting an
unpopular officer severely in the stomach with his head and taking the
punishment, hitting a bully with a clothes-brush and being put back
six months in the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich; these are the
early outcrops of one side of his dual character. Although more
soldier than saint, he had a very cheery, genial side. He was always
ready to take even the severest punishment for all his scrapes due to
excessive high spirits. When one of his superiors declared that he
would never make an officer, he felt his honor touched, and his
vigorous and expressive reply was to tear the epaulets from his
shoulders and throw them at his superior's feet. He had already
developed some of the rather moody love of seclusion that was marked
later, but religion did not strike him deeply enough to bring him into
the church until he was twenty-one, when he took his first sacrament.
On one occasion he declined promotion within his reach because he
would have had to pass a friend to get it. He acted generally on his
impulses, which were perhaps better than his judgments, took great
pleasure in corresponding on religious topics with his elder sister,
and early formed the habit of excessive smoking which gravely affected
his health later. His was the rare combination of inner repose and
confidence, interrupted by spells of gaiety.
Williamson, in his "Life of Holman Hunt,"[38] tells us that at
thirteen he was removed from school as inapt in study. He began to
spend his time in drawing in his copybooks. He was made clerk to an
auctioneer, who fortunately encouraged his passion, and at sixteen was
with a calico printer. Here he amused himself by drawing flies on the
window, which his employer tried to brush off. There was the greatest
home opposition to his studying art. After being rejected twice, he
was admitted at seventeen to the Academy school as a probationer, and
the next year, in 1845, as a student. Here he met Millais and Rossetti
and was able to relieve the strain on his mind, which the worry of his
father concerning his course caused him, and very soon his career
began.
At thirteen Fitzjames Stephen[39] roused himself to thrash a big boy
who had long bullied him, and became a fighter. In his sixteenth year,
he grew nearly five inches, but was so shy and timid at Eton that he
says, "I was like a sensible grown-up woman among a crowd of rough
boys"; but in the reaction to the long abuse his mind was steeled
against oppression, tyranny, and every kind of unfairness. He read
Paine's "Age of Reason," and went "through the Bible as a man might go
through a wood, cutting down trees. The priests can stick them in
again, but they will not make them grow."
Dickens has given us some interesting adolescents. Miss Dingwall in
"Sketches by Boz," "very sentimental and romantic"; the tempery young
Nickleby, who, at nineteen, thrashed Squeers; Barnaby Rudge, idiotic
and very muscular; Joe Willet, persistently treated as a boy till he
ran away to join the army and married Dolly Varden, perhaps the most
exuberant, good-humored, and beautiful girl in all the Dickens
gallery; Martin Chuzzlewit, who also ran away, as did David
Copperfield, perhaps the most true to adolescence because largely
reminiscent of the author's own life; Steerforth, a stranger from
home, and his victim, Little Emily; and to some extent Sam Weller,
Dick Swiveller, the Marchioness, young Podsnap, the Artful Dodger, and
Charley Bates; while Oliver Twist, Little Nell, and Little Dorrit, Joe
and Turveydrop in Bleak House, and Paul Dombey, young as they were,
show the beginning of the pubescent change. Most of his characters,
however, are so overdrawn and caricatured as to be hardly true to
life.[40]
In the "Romance of John Inglesant,"[41] by J. H. Shorthouse, we have
a remarkable picture of an unusually gifted youth, who played an
important rôle in the days of Cromwell and King Charles, and who was
long poised in soul between the Church of Rome and the English party.
He was very susceptible to the fascination of superstition, romance,
and day-dreaming, and at eleven absorbed his master's Rosicrucian
theories of spiritual existence where spirits held converse with each
other and with mankind. A mystic Platonism, which taught that Pindar's
story of the Argo was only a recipe for the philosopher's stone,
fascinated him at fourteen. The philosophy of obedience and of the
subjection of reason to authority was early taught him, and he sought
to live from within, hearing only the divine law, as the worshipers of
Cybele heard only the flutes. His twin brother Eustace was an active
worldling, and soon he followed him to court as page to the Queen, but
delighted more and more in wandering apart and building air castles.
For a time he was entirely swayed, and his life directed, by a Jesuit
Father, who taught him the crucifix and the rosary. At sixteen the
doctrine of divine illumination fascinated him. He struggled to find
the path of true devotion; abandoned himself to extremely ritualistic
forms of worship; dabbled a little in alchemy and astrology to help
develop the divine nature within him and to attain the beatific
vision. Soon he was introduced to the "Protestant nunnery," as it was
called, where the venerable Mr. Ferran, a friend of George Herbert's,
was greatly taken by Inglesant's accomplishments and grace of manner.
Various forms of extremely High Church yet Protestant worship were
celebrated here each day with great devotion, until he became
disgusted with Puritanism and craved to participate in the office of
mass. At this point, however, he met Mr. Hobbes, whose rude but
forcible condemnation of papacy restrained him from casting his lot
with it. At seventeen, he saw one night a real apparition of the just
executed Strafford. The last act of his youth, which we can note here,
was soon after he was twenty, when he fell in love with the charming
and saintly Mary Collet. The rough Puritan Thorne had made her
proposals at which she revolted, but she and Inglesant confessed love
to each other; she saw, however, that they had a way of life marked
out for themselves by an inner impulse and light. This calling they
must follow and abandon love, and now John plunged into the war on the
side of the King.
W. J. Stillman[42] has written with unusual interest and candor the
story of his own early life.
As a boy he was frenzied at the first sight of the sea; caught the
whip and lashed the horses in an unconscious delirium, and always
remembered this as one of the most vivid experiences of his life. He
had a period of nature worship. His first trout was a delirium, and he
danced about wildly and furiously. He relates his very vivid
impressions of the religious orthodoxy in which he was reared,
especially revival sermons; his occasional falsehoods to escape severe
punishment; his baptism at ten or eleven in a river in midwinter; the
somberness of his intellectual life, which was long very apathetic;
his phenomenal stupidity for years; his sudden insurrections in which
he thrashed bullies at school; his fear that he should be sent home in
disgrace for bad scholarship; and how at last, after seven years of
dulness, at the age of fourteen, "the mental fog broke away suddenly,
and before the term ended I could construe the Latin in less time than
it took to recite it, and the demonstrations of Euclid were as plain
and clear as a fairy story. My memory came back so distinctly that I
could recite long poems after a single reading, and no member of the
class passed a more brilliant examination at the end of the term than
I; and, at the end of the second term, I could recite the whole of
Legendre's geometry, plane and spherical, from beginning to end
without a question, and the class examination was recorded as the most
remarkable which the academy had witnessed for many years. I have
never been able to conceive an explanation of this curious phenomenon,
which I record only as of possible interest to some one interested in
psychology."
A. Bronson Alcott[43] was the son of a Connecticut farmer. He began a
diary at twelve; aspired vainly to enter Yale, and after much
restlessness at the age of nineteen left home with two trunks for
Virginia to peddle on foot, hoping to teach school. Here he had a
varying and often very hard experience for years.
Hornes Bushnell's[44] parents represented the Episcopal and liberal
Congregational Church. His early life was spent on a farm and in
attending a country academy. He became profoundly interested in
religion in the early teens and developed extreme interest in nature.
At seventeen, while tending a carding machine, he wrote a paper on
Calvinism. At nineteen he united with the church, and entered Yale
when he was twenty-one, in 1823. Later he tried to teach school, but
left it, declaring he would rather lay stone wall; worked on a
journal, but withdrew, finding it a terrible life; studied law for a
year, became a tutor at Yale, experienced a reconversion and entered
the ministry.
A well-known American, who wishes his name withheld, writes me of his
youth as follows:
"First came the love of emotion and lurid romance reading. My mind was
full of adventure, dreams of underground passages, and imprisoned
beauties whom I rescued. I wrote a story in red ink, which I never
read, but a girl friend did, and called it magnificent. The girl
fever, too, made me idealize first one five years older than I, later
another three years older, and still later one of my own age. I would
have eaten dirt for each of them for a year or two; was extremely
gallant and the hero of many romances for two, but all the time so
bashful that I scarcely dared speak to one of them, and no schoolmate
ever suspected it all. Music also became a craze at fourteen. Before,
I had hated lessons, now I was thrilled and would be a musician,
despite my parents' protests. I practised the piano furiously; wrote
music and copied stacks of it; made a list of several hundred pieces
and tunes, including everything musical I knew; would imagine a
crowded hall, where I played and swayed with fine airs. The vast
assembly applauded and would not let me go, but all the time it was a
simple piece and I was a very ordinary player. At fifty years, this is
still a relic. I now in hours of fatigue pound the piano and dreamily
imagine dazed and enchanted audiences. Then came oratory, and I glowed
and thrilled in declaiming Webster's "Reply to Hayne," "Thanatopsis,"
Byron's "Darkness," Patrick Henry, and best of all "The Maniac," which
I spouted in a fervid way wearing a flaming red necktie. I remember a
fervid scene with myself on a high solitary hill with a bald summit
two miles from home, where I once went because I had been blamed. I
tried to sum myself up, inventory my good and bad points. It was
Sunday, and I was keyed up to a frenzy of resolve, prayer,
idealization of life; all grew all in a jumble. My resolve to go to
college was clinched then and there, and that hill will always remain
my Pisgah and Moriah, Horeb and Sinai all in one. I paced back and
forth in the wind and shouted, 'I will make people know and revere me;
I will do something'; and called everything to witness my vow that I
never again would visit this spot till all was fulfilled." "Alas!" he
says, "I have never been there since. Once, to a summer party who
went, I made excuse for not keeping this rendezvous. It was too
sacramental. Certainly it was a very deep and never-to-be-forgotten
experience there all alone, when something of great moment to me
certainly took place in my soul."
In the biography of Frederick Douglas[45] we are told that when he was
about thirteen he began to feel deeply the moral yoke of slavery and
to seek means of escaping it. He became interested in religion, was
converted, and dreamed of and prayed for liberty. With great ingenuity
he extracted knowledge of the alphabet and reading from white boys of
his acquaintance. At sixteen, under a brutal master he revolted and
was beaten until he was faint from loss of blood, and at seventeen he
fought and whipped the brutal overseer Covey, who would have invoked
the law, which made death the punishment for such an offense, but for
shame of having been worsted by a negro boy and from the reflection
that there was no profit from a dead slave. Only at twenty did he
escape into the new world of freedom.
Jacob Riis[46] "fell head over heels in love with sweet Elizabeth"
when he was fifteen and she thirteen. His "courtship proceeded at a
tumultuous pace, which first made the town laugh, then put it out of
patience and made some staid matrons express the desire to box my ears
soundly." She played among the lumber where he worked, and he watched
her so intently that he scarred his shinbone with an adze he should
have been minding. He cut off his forefinger with an ax when she was
dancing on a beam near by, and once fell off a roof when craning his
neck to see her go round a corner. At another time he ordered her
father off the dance-floor, because he tried to take his daughter home
a few minutes before the appointed hour of midnight. Young as he was,
he was large and tried to run away to join the army, but finally went
to Copenhagen to serve his apprenticeship with a builder, and here had
an interview with Hans Christian Andersen.
Ellery Sedgwick tells as that at thirteen the mind of Thomas Paine ran
on stories of the sea which his teacher had told him, and that he
attempted to enlist on the privateer _Terrible_. He was restless at
home for years, and shipped on a trading vessel at nineteen.
Indeed, modern literature in our tongue abounds in this element, from
"Childe Harold" to the second and third long chapters in Mrs. Ward's
"David Grieve," ending with his engagement to Lucy Purcell;
Thackeray's Arthur Pendennis and his characteristic love of the far
older and scheming Fanny Fotheringay; David in James Lane Allen's
"Reign of Law," who read Darwin, was expelled from the Bible College
and the church, and finally was engaged to Gabriella; and scores more
might be enumerated. There is even Sonny,[47] who, rude as he was and
poorly as he did in all his studies, at the same age when he began to
keep company, "tallered" his hair, tied a bow of ribbon to the buggy
whip, and grew interested in manners, passing things, putting on his
coat and taking off his hat at table, began to study his menagerie of
pet snakes, toads, lizards, wrote John Burroughs, helped him and got
help in return, took to observing, and finally wrote a book about the
forest and its occupants, all of which is very _bien trouvé_ if not
historic truth.
Two singular reflections always rearise in reading Goethe's
autobiographical writings: first, that both the age and the place,
with its ceremonies, festivals, great pomp and stirring events in
close quarters in the little province where he lived, were especially
adapted to educate children and absorb them in externals; and, second,
that this wonderful boy had an extreme propensity for moralizing and
drawing lessons of practical service from all about him. This is no
less manifest in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Travels, which
supplements the autobiography. Both together present a very unique
type of adolescence, the elaborate story of which defies epitome. From
the puppet craze well on into his precocious university life it was
his passion to explore the widest ranges of experience and then to
reflect, moralize, or poetize upon them. Perhaps no one ever studied
the nascent stages of his own life and elaborated their every incident
with such careful observation and analysis. His peculiar diathesis
enabled him to conserve their freshness on to full maturity, when he
gave them literary form. Most lack power to fully utilize their own
experience even for practical self-knowledge and guidance, but with
Goethe nothing was wasted from which self-culture could be extracted.
Goethe's first impression of female loveliness was of a girl named
Gretchen, who served wine one evening, and whose face and form
followed him for a long time. Their meetings always gave him a thrill
of pleasure, and though his love was like many first loves, very
spiritual and awakened by goodness and beauty, it gave a new
brightness to the whole world, and to be near her seemed to him an
indispensable condition of his being. Her _fiancé_ was generally with
her, and Goethe experienced a shock in finding that she had become a
milliner's assistant for although, like all natural boys of
aristocratic families, he loved common people, this interest was not
favored by his parents. The night following the coronation day several
were compelled to spend in chairs, and he and his Gretchen, with
others, slept, she with her head upon his shoulder, until all the
others had awakened in the morning. At last they parted at her door,
and for the first and last time they kissed but never met again,
although he often wept in thinking of her. He was terribly affronted
to fully realize that, although only two years older than himself, she
should have regarded him as a child. He tried to strip her of all
loving qualities and think her odious, but her image hovered over him.
The sanity of instinct innate in youth prompted him to lay aside as
childish the foolish habit of weeping and railing, and his
mortification that she regarded him somewhat as a nurse might,
gradually helped to work his cure.
He was very fond of his own name, and, like young and uneducated
people, wrote or carved it anywhere; later placed near it that of a
new love, Annette, and afterward on finding the tree he shed tears,
melted toward her, and made an idyl. He was also seized with a passion
of teasing her and dominating over her devotedness with wanton and
tyrannical caprice, venting upon her the ill humor of his
disappointments, and grew absurdly jealous and lost her after she had
borne with him with incredible patience and after terrible scenes with
her by which he gained nothing. Frenzied by his loss, he began to
abuse his physical nature and was only saved from illness by the
healing power of his poetic talent; the "Lover's Caprice" was written
with the impetus of a boiling passion. In the midst of many serious
events, a reckless humor, which was due to the excess of life,
developed which made him feel himself superior to the moment, and even
to court danger. He played tricks, although rarely with premeditation.
Later he mused much upon the transient nature of love and the
mutability of character; the extent to which the senses could be
indulged within the bounds of morality; he sought to rid himself of
all that troubled him by writing song or epigram about it, which made
him seem frivolous and prompted one friend to seek to subdue him by
means of church forms, which he had severed on coming to Leipzig. By
degrees he felt an epoch approaching when all respect for authority
was to vanish, and he became suspicious and even despairing with
regard to the best individuals he had known before and grew chummy
with a young tutor whose jokes and fooleries were incessant. His
disposition fluctuated between gaiety and melancholy, and Rousseau
attracted him. Meanwhile his health declined until a long illness,
which began with a hemorrhage, caused him to oscillate for days
between life and death; and convalescence, generally so delightful,
was marred by a serious tumor. His father's disposition was stern, and
he could become passionate and bitter, and his mother's domesticity
made her turn to religion, so that on coming home he formed the
acquaintance of a religious circle. Again Goethe was told by a hostile
child that he was not the true son of his father. This inoculated him
with a disease that long lurked in his system and prompted various
indirect investigations to get at the truth, during which he compared
all distinguished guests with his own physiognomy to detect his own
likeness.
Up to the Leipzig period he had great joy in wandering unknown,
unconscious of self; but he soon began to torment himself with an
almost hypertrophied fancy that he was attracting much attention, that
others' eyes were turned on his person to fix it in their memories,
that he was scanned and found fault with; and hence he developed a
love of the country, of the woods and solitary places, where he could
be hedged in and separated from all the world. Here he began to throw
off his former habit of looking at things from the art standpoint and
to take pleasure in natural objects for their own sake. His mother had
almost grownup to consciousness in her two oldest children, and his
first disappointment in love turned his thought all the more
affectionately toward her and his sister, a year younger. He was long
consumed with amazement over the newly awakening sense impulse that
took intellectual forms and the mental needs that clothed themselves
in sense images. He fell to building air castles of opposition lecture
courses and gave himself up to many dreams of ideal university
conditions. He first attended lectures diligently, but suffered much
harm from being too advanced; learned a great deal that he could not
regulate, and was thereby made uncomfortable; grew interested in the
fit of his clothes, of which hitherto he had been careless. He was in
despair at the uncertainty of his own taste and judgment, and almost
feared he must make a complete change of mind, renouncing what he had
hitherto learned, and so one day in great contempt for his past burned
up his poetry, sketches, etc.
He had learned to value and love the Bible, and owed his moral culture
to it. Its events and symbols were deeply stamped upon him, so without
being a pietist he was greatly moved at the scoffing spirit toward it
which he met at the university. From youth he had stood on good terms
with God, and at times he had felt that he had some things to forgive
God for not having given better assistance to his infinite good-will.
Under all this influence he turned to cabalism and became interested
in crystals and the microcosm and macrocosm, and fell into the habit
of despair over what he had been and believed just before. He
conceived a kind of hermetical or neoplatonic godhead creating in more
and more eccentric circles, until the last, which rose in
contradiction, was Lucifer to whom creation was committed. He first of
all imagined in detail an angelic host, and finally a whole theology
was wrought out _in petto_. He used a gilt ornamented music-stand as a
kind of altar with fumigating pastils for incense, where each morning
God was approached by offerings until one day a conflagration put a
sudden end to these celebrations.
Hans Anderson,[48] the son of a poor shoemaker, taught in a charity
school at the dawn of puberty; vividly animated Bible stories from
pictures painted on the wall; was dreamy and absent-minded; told
continued stories to his mates; at confirmation vowed he would be
famous and finally, at fourteen, left home for Copenhagen, where he
was violently stage-struck and worked his way from friendship with the
bill-poster to the stage as page, shepherd, etc.; called on a famous
dancer, who scorned him, and then, feeling that he had no one but God
to depend on, prayed earnestly and often. For nearly a year, until his
voice broke, he was a fine singer. He wet with his tears the eyes of a
portrait of a heartless man that he might feel for him. He played with
a puppet theater and took a childish delight in decking the characters
with gay remnants that he begged from shops; wrote several plays which
no one would accept; stole into an empty theater one New Year's day to
pray aloud on the middle of the stage; shouted with joy; hugged and
kissed a beech-tree till people thought him insane; abhorred the
thought of apprenticeship to Latin as he did to that of a trade, which
was a constant danger; and was one of the most dreamy and sentimental,
and by spells religious and prayerful, of youth.
George Ebers[49] remembered as a boy of eleven the revolution of '48
in Berlin, soon after which he was placed in Froebel's school at
Keilhau. This great teacher with his noble associates, Middendorf,
Barop, and Langekhal, lived with the boys; told the stirring stories
of their own lives as soldiers in the war of liberation; led their
pupils on long excursions in vacation, often lasting for months, and
gave much liberty to the boys, who were allowed to haze not only their
new mates, but new teachers. This transfer from the city to the
country roused a veritable passion in the boy, who remained here till
he was fifteen. Trees and cliffs were climbed, collections made, the
Saale by moonlight and the lofty Steiger at sunset were explored.
There were swimming and skating and games, and the maxim of the
school, "_Friede, Freude, Freiheit_,"[Peace, joy, freedom] was lived up
to. The boys hung on their teachers for stories. The teachers took
their boys into their confidence for all their own literary aims,
loves, and ideals. One had seen the corpse of Körner and another knew
Prohaska. "The Roman postulate that knowledge should be imparted to
boys according to a thoroughly tested method approved by the mature
human intellect and which seems most useful to it for later life" was
the old system of sacrificing the interests of the child for those of
the man. Here childhood was to live itself out completely and
naturally into an ever renewed paradise. The temperaments,
dispositions, and characters of each of the sixty boys were carefully
studied and recorded. Some of these are still little masterpieces of
psychological penetration, and this was made the basis of development.
The extreme Teutonism cultivated by wrestling, shooting, and fencing,
giving each a spot of land to sow, reap, and shovel, and all in an
atmosphere of adult life, made an environment that fitted the
transition period as well as any that the history of education
affords. Every tramp and battle were described in a book by each boy.
When at fifteen Ebers was transferred to the Kottbus Gymnasium, he
felt like a colt led from green pastures to the stable, and the period
of effervescence made him almost possessed by a demon, so many sorts
of follies did he commit. He wrote "a poem of the world," fell in love
with an actress older than himself, became known as foolhardy for his
wild escapades, and only slowly sobered down.
In Gottfried Kelley's "Der grüne Heinrich,"[50] the author, whom R.M.
Meyer calls "the most eminent literary German of the nineteenth
century," reviews the memories of his early life. This autobiography
is a plain and very realistic story of a normal child, and not
adulterated with fiction like Goethe's or with psychoses like Rousseau
or Bashkirtseff. He seems a boy like all other boys, and his childhood
and youth were in no wise extraordinary. The first part of this work,
which describes his youth up to the age of eighteen, is the most
important, and everything is given with remarkable fidelity and
minuteness. It is a tale of little things. All the friendships and
loves and impulses are there, and he is fundamentally selfish and
utilitarian; God and nature were one, and only when his beloved Army
died did he wish to believe in immortality. He, too, as a child, found
two kinds of love in his heart--the idea and the sensual, very
independent--the one for a young and innocent girl and the other for a
superb young woman years older than he, pure, although the
personification of sense. He gives a rich harvest of minute and
sagacious observations about his strange simultaneous loves; the
peculiar tastes of food; his day-dream period; and his rather
prolonged habit of lying, the latter because he had no other vent for
invention. He describes with great regret his leaving school at so
early an age; his volcanic passion of anger; his self-distrust; his
periods of abandon; his passion to make a success of art though he did
not of life; his spells of self-despair and cynicism; his periods of
desolation in his single life; his habit of story-telling; his
wrestling with the problem of theology and God; the conflict between
his philosophy and his love of the girls, etc.
From a private school in Leipzig, where he had shown all a boy's tact
in finding what his masters thought the value of each subject they
taught; where he had joined in the vandalism of using a battering-ram
to break a way to the hated science apparatus and to destroy it;
feeling that the classical writers were overpraised; and where at the
age of sixteen he had appeared several times in public as a reciter of
his own poems, Max Müller returned to Leipzig and entered upon the
freedom of university life there at the age of seventeen. For years
his chief enjoyment was music.[51] He played the piano well, heard
everything he could in concert or opera, was an oratorio tenor, and
grew more and more absorbed in music, so that he planned to devote
himself altogether to it and also to enter a musical school at Dessau,
but nothing came of it. At the university he saw little of society,
was once incarcerated for wearing a club ribbon, and confesses that
with his boon companions he was guilty of practises which would now
bring culprits into collision with authorities. He fought three duels,
participated in many pranks and freakish escapades, but nevertheless
attended fifty-three different courses of lectures in three years.
When Hegelism was the state philosophy, he tried hard to understand
it, but dismissed it with the sentiments expressed by a French officer
to his tailor, who refused to take the trousers he had ordered to be
made very tight because they did not fit so closely that he could not
get into them. Darwin attracted him, yet the wildness of his followers
repelled. He says, "I confess I felt quite bewildered for a time and
began to despair altogether of my reasoning powers." He wonders how
young minds in German universities survive the storms and fogs through
which they pass. With bated breath he heard his elders talk of
philosophy and tried to lay hold of a word here and there, but it all
floated before his mind like mist. Later he had an Hegelian period,
but found in Herbart a corrective, and at last decided upon Sanskrit
and other ancient languages, because he felt that he must know
something that no other knew, and also that the Germans had then heard
only the after-chime and not the real striking of the bells of Indian
philosophy. From twenty his struggles and his queries grew more
definite, and at last, at the age of twenty-two, he was fully launched
upon his career in Paris, and later went to Oxford.
At thirteen Wagner[52] translated about half the "Odyssey"
voluntarily; at fourteen began the tragedy which was to combine the
grandeur of two of Shakespeare's dramas; at sixteen he tried "his
new-fledged musical wings by soaring at once to the highest peaks of
orchestral achievement without wasting any time on the humble
foot-hills." He sought to make a new departure, and, compared to the
grandeur of his own composition, "Beethoven's Ninth Symphony appeared
like a simple Pleyel Sonata." To facilitate the reading of his
astounding score, he wrote it in three kinds of ink--red for strings,
green for the wood-wind, and black for the brass instruments. He
writes that this overture was the climax of his absurdities, and
although the audience before which an accommodating orchestra played
it were disgusted and the musicians were convulsed with laughter, it
made a deep impression upon the author's mind. Even after
matriculating at the university he abandoned himself so long to the
dissipations common to student life before the reaction came that his
relatives feared that he was a good-for-nothing.
In his "Hannele," Hauptmann, the dramatist, describes in a kind of
dream poem what he supposed to pass through the mind of a dying girl
of thirteen or fourteen, who does not wish to live and is so absorbed
by the "Brownies of her brain" that she hardly knows whether she is
alive on earth or dead in heaven, and who sees the Lord Jesus in the
form of the schoolmaster whom she adores. In her closing vision there
is a symbolic representation of her own resurrection. To the
passionate discussions in Germany, England, and France, as to whether
this character is true to adolescence, we can only answer with an
emphatic affirmative; that her heaven abounds in local color and in
fairy tale items, that it is very material, and that she is troubled
by fears of sin against the Holy Ghost, is answer enough in an
ill-used, starving child with a fevered brain, whose dead mother
taught her these things.
Saint-Pierre's "Paul and Virginia" is an attempt to describe budding
adolescence in a boy and girl born on a remote island and reared in a
state of natural simplicity The descriptions are sentimental after the
fashion of the age in France, and the pathos, which to us smacks of
affectation and artificiality, nevertheless has a vein of truth in it.
The story really begins when the two children were twelve; and the
description of the dawn of love and melancholy in Virginia's heart,
for some time concealed from Paul, of her disquiet and piety, of the
final frank avowal of eternal love by each, set of by the pathetic
separation, and of the undying love, and finally the tragic death and
burial of each--all this owes its charm, for its many generations of
readers, to its merits as an essentially true picture of the human
heart at this critical age. This work and Rousseau[53] have
contributed to give French literature its peculiar cast in its
description of this age.
"The first explosions of combustible constitution" in Rousseau's,
precocious nature were troublesome, and he felt premature sensations
of erotic voluptuousness, but without any sin. He longed "to fall at
the feet of an imperious mistress, obey her mandates or implore
pardon." He only wanted a lady, to become a knight errant. At ten he
was passionately devoted to a Mlle. Vulson, whom he publicly and
tyrannically claimed as his own and would allow no other to approach.
He had very different sensuous feelings toward Mlle. Goton, with whom
his relations were very passionate, though pure. Absolutely under the
power of both these mistresses, the effects they produced upon him
were in no wise related to each other. The former was a brother's
affection with the jealousy of a lover added, but the latter a
furious, tigerish, Turkish rage. When told of the former's marriage,
in his indignation and heroic fury he swore never more to see a
perfidious girl. A slightly neurotic vein of prolonged ephebeitis
pervades much of his life.
Pierre Loti's "Story of a Child"[54] was written when the author was
forty-two, and contains hardly a fact, but it is one of the best of
inner autobiographies, and is nowhere richer than in the last
chapters, which bring the author down to the age of fourteen and a
half. He vividly describes the new joy at waking, which he began to
feel at twelve or thirteen; the clear vision into the bottomless pit
of death; the new, marvelous susceptibility to nature as comradeship
with boys of his own age was lacking; the sudden desires from pure
bravado and perversity to do something unseemly, e. g., making a fly
omelet and carrying it in a procession with song; the melting of
pewter plates and pouring them into water and salting a wild tract of
land with them; organizing a band of miners, whom he led as if with
keen scent to the right spot and rediscovered his nuggets, everything
being done mysteriously and as a tribal secret. Loti had a new feeling
for the haunting music of Chopin, which he had been taught to play but
had not been interested in; his mind was inflamed, by a home visit of
an elder brother, with the idea of going to the South Sea Islands, and
this became a long obsession which finally led him to enlist in the
navy, dropping, with a beating heart, the momentous letter into the
post-office after long misgivings and delays. He had a superficial and
a hidden self, the latter somewhat whimsical and perhaps ridiculous,
shared only with a few intimate friends for whom he would have let
himself be cut into bits. He believes his transition period lasted
longer than with the majority of men, and during it he was carried
from one extreme to another; had rather eccentric and absurd manners,
and touched moat of the perilous rocks on the voyage of life. He had
an early love for an older girl whose name he wrote in cipher on his
books, although he felt it a little artificial, but believed it might
have developed into a great and true hereditary friendship, continuing
that which their ancestors had felt for many generations. The birth of
love in his heart was in a dream after having read the forbidden poet,
Alfred de Musset. He was fourteen, and in his dream it was a soft,
odorous twilight. He walked amid flowers seeking a nameless some one
whom he ardently desired, and felt that something strange and
wonderful, intoxicating as it advanced, was going to happen. The
twilight grew deeper, and behind a rose-bush he saw a young girl with
a languorous and mysterious smile, although her forehead and eyes were
hidden. As it darkened rather suddenly, her eyes came out, and they
were very personal and seemed to belong to some one already much
beloved, who had been found with "transports of infinite joy and
tenderness." He woke with a start and sought to retain the phantom,
which faded. He could not conceive that was a mere illusion, and as he
realized that she had vanished he felt overwhelmed with hopelessness.
It was the first stirring "of true love with all its great melancholy
and deep mystery, with its overwhelming but sad enchantment--love
which like a perfume endows with a fragrance all it touches."
It is, I believe, high time that ephebic literature should be
recognized as a class by itself, and have a place of its own in the
history of letters and in criticism. Much of it should be individually
prescribed for the reading of the young, for whom it has a singular
zest and is a true stimulus and corrective. This stage of life now has
what might almost be called a school of its own. Here the young appeal
to and listen to each other as they do not to adults, and in a way the
latter have failed to appreciate. Again, no biography, and especially
no autobiography, should henceforth be complete if it does not
describe this period of transformation so all-determining for future
life to which it alone can often give the key. Rightly to draw the
lessons of this age not only saves us from waste ineffable of this
rich but crude area of experience, but makes maturity saner and more
complete. Lastly, many if not most young people should be encouraged
to enough of the confessional private journalism to teach them
self-knowledge, for the art of self-expression usually begins now if
ever, when it has a wealth of subjective material and needs forms of
expression peculiar to itself.
For additional references on the subject of this chapter, see:
Alcafarado, Marianna, Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun. Translated by
R. H., New York, 1887. Richardson, Abby Sage, Abelard and Héloise, and
Letters of Héloise, Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston. Smith, Theodote
L., Types of Adolescent Affection. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1904,
vol. II, pp. 178-203.
[Footnote 1: Pedagogical Seminary, June 1901, vol. 8, pp. 163-205]
[Footnote 2: Being a Boy.]
[Footnote 3: Story of a Bad Boy.]
[Footnote 4: A Boy's Town.]
[Footnote 5: Court of Boyville.]
[Footnote 6: The Spoilt Child, by Peary Chandmitter. Translated by G.
D. Oswell. Thacker, Spink and Co., Calcutta, 1893.]
[Footnote 7: The Golden Age]
[Footnote 8: Frau Spyri.]
[Footnote 9: The One I Knew the Best of All.]
[Footnote 10: The Study of the Boyhood of Great Men. Pedagogical
Seminary, October, 1894, vol. 3, pp. 134-156.]
[Footnote 11: The Vanishing Character of Adolescent Experiences.
Northwestern Monthly, June, 1898, vol. 8, p. 644.]
[Footnote 12: The Count of Boyville, by William Allen White. New York,
1899, p. 358.]
[Footnote 13: The Study of Adolescence. Pedagogical Seminary, June,
1891, vol. 1, pp. 174-195.]
[Footnote 14: Lancaster: The Psychology and Pedagogy of Adolescence.
Pedagogical Seminary, July, 1897, vol. 5, p. 106.]
[Footnote 15: Standards of Efficiency in School and in Life.
Pedagogical Seminary, March, 1903, vol. 10, pp. 3-22.]
[Footnote 16: See also Vittorio da Feltre and other Humanist
Educators, by W. H. Woodward. Cambridge University Press, 1897.]
[Footnote 17: See The Private Life of Galileo; from his Correspondence
and that of his Eldest Daughter. Anon, Macmillan, London, 1870.]
[Footnote 18: See Sir David Brewster's Life of Newton. Harper, New
York, 1874.]
[Footnote 19: Louis Agassiz, His Life and Work, by C. F. Holder. G. P.
Putnam's Sons, New York, 1893.]
[Footnote 20: Life and Letters of Thomas H. Huxley, by his son Leonard
Huxley. D. Appleton and Co., New York, 1901.]
[Footnote 21: See also Sully: A Girl's Religion. Longman's Magazine,
May, 1890, pp. 89-99.]
[Footnote 22: Sheldon (Institutional Activities of American Children;
American Journal of Psychology, July, 1898, vol. 9, p. 434) describes
a faintly analogous case of a girl of eleven, who organised the
worship of Pallas Athena on two flat rocks, in a deep ravine by a
stream where a young sycamore grew from an old stump, as did Pallas
from the head of her father Zeus. There was a court consisting of
king, queen and subjects, and priests who officiated at sacrifices.
The king and queen wore goldenrod upon their heads and waded in
streams attended by their subjects; gathered flowers for Athena;
caught crayfish which were duly smashed upon her altar. "Sometimes
there was a special celebration, when, in addition to the slaughtered
crayfish and beautiful flower decorations, and pickles stolen from the
dinner-table, there would be an elaborate ceremony," which because of
its uncanny acts was intensely disliked by the people at hand.]
[Footnote 23: The One I Know The Best of All. A Memory of the Mind of
a Child. By Frances Hodgson Burnett. Scribner's Sons, New York, 1893]
[Footnote 24: The Beth Book, by Sarah Grand. D. Appleton and Co., New
York, 1897.]
[Footnote 25: Autobiography of a Child. Hannah Lynch, W. Blackwood and
Sons, London, 1899, p. 255.]
[Footnote 26: The Story of My Life. By Helen Keller. Doubleday, Page
and Co., New York, 1903, p. 39.]
[Footnote 27: Journal of a Young Artist. Cassell and Co., New York,
1889, p. 434.]
[Footnote 28: The Story of Mary MacLane. By herself. Herbert S. Stone
and Co., Chicago, 1902, p. 322.]
[Footnote 29: Fate. Translated from the Italian by A.M. Von Blomberg.
Copeland and Day, Boston, 1898.]
[Footnote 30: Confessions of an Opium Eater. Part I. Introductory
Narrative. (Cambridge Classics) 1896.]
[Footnote 31: Longmans, Green and Co. London, 1891, 2nd ed.]
[Footnote 32: The Hearts of Men. Macmillan, London, 1891, p. 324.]
[Footnote 33: An Autobiography. Edited by H.M. Trollope. 2 vols.
London, 1883.]
[Footnote 34: See his Memoirs. London, 1885.]
[Footnote 35: See Autobiography of Mark Rutherford (pseudonym for W.H.
White), edited by Reuben Shapcott. 2 vols. London, 1881.]
[Footnote 36: The rest of the two volumes is devoted to his further
life as a dissenting minister, who later became something of a
literary man; relating how he was slowly driven to leave his little
church, how he outgrew and broke with the girl to whom he was engaged,
whom he marvelously met and married when both were well on in years,
and how strangely he was influenced by the free-thinker Mardon and his
remarkable daughter. All in all it is a rare study of emancipation.]
[Footnote 37: London, 1896, vol. 1.]
[Footnote 38: Macmillan, 1902.]
[Footnote 39: Life of Sir J.F. Stephen. By his brother, Leslie
Stephen, London, 1895.]
[Footnote 40: See the very impressive account of Dicken's
characterization of childhood and youth, and of his great but hitherto
inadequately recognized interest and influence as an educator. Dickens
as an Educator. James L. Hughes. D. Appleton and Co., New York, 1901,
p. 319.]
[Footnote 41: John Inglesant: A Romance. 6th ed. Macmillan, 1886.]
[Footnote 42: The Autobiography of a Journalist. 2 vols. Houghton,
Mifflin and Co., Boston, 1901.]
[Footnote 43: A. Bronson Alcott, His Life and Philosophy. By F. B.
Sanborn and W. T. Harris. Roberts Bros., Boston, 1893.]
[Footnote 44: Horace Bushnell, Preacher and Theologian. By Theodore F.
Munger. Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston, 1899.]
[Footnote 45: By C.W. Chesnutt. (Beacon Biographies.) Small, Maynard
and Co., Boston, 1899.]
[Footnote 46: The Making of an American. Macmillan, 1901.]
[Footnote 47: Sonny. By Ruth McEnery Stuart. The Century Co., New
York, 1896.]
[Footnote 48: The Story of My Life. Works, vol. 8 new edition.
Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston, 1894.]
[Footnote 49: The Story of My Life. Translated by M. J. Safford. D.
Appleton and Co., New York 1893.]
[Footnote 50: Gesammelte Werke. Vierter Band. Wilhelm Hertz, Berlin,
1897.]
[Footnote 51: My Autobiography, p. 106. Chas. Scribner's Sons, New
York, 1901.]
[Footnote 52: Wagner and His Works. By Henry T. Finck. Chas.
Scribner's Sons, New York, 1893.]
[Footnote 53: Les Confessions. Oeuvres Complètes, vols. 8 and 9.
Hachette et Cie., Paris, 1903.]
[Footnote 54: Translated from the French by C.F. Smith. C.C. Birchard
and Co., Boston, 1901.]
* * * * *