Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene Part 6

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 fict.i.tious 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, const.i.tuted 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 ma.s.s 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 l.u.s.t, 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 G.o.d 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 cla.s.smate to compline, donned surplices, tossed censers, arranged altars in their studies, bought bits of painted gla.s.s 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 G.o.d 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 gla.s.s, 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, a.s.signing most importance to sensible vehicles and occasions; a.s.sociating 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 n.o.bler self, whose companionship made the world more satisfying. There was "a constant subst.i.tution 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 circ.u.mstance 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 p.r.o.ne 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 gla.s.s in a large storehouse were broken with screws shot through them by his cross-bow "for ventilation." Ringing bells and pushing young boys in, b.u.t.ting 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 sc.r.a.pes 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sion, 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."

d.i.c.kens 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 d.i.c.kens 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, d.i.c.k 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 p.u.b.escent 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 role 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 superst.i.tion, 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 partic.i.p.ate in the office of ma.s.s. 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 cla.s.s pa.s.sed 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 cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sages, 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 a.s.sembly 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, h.o.r.eb 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 f.a.n.n.y 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, pa.s.sing 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 trouve 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 pa.s.sion 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 a.n.a.lysis. 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 fiance was generally with her, and Goethe experienced a shock in finding that she had become a milliner's a.s.sistant 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion. 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 pa.s.sionate 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 G.o.d, and at times he had felt that he had some things to forgive G.o.d for not having given better a.s.sistance 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 G.o.dhead 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 G.o.d 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 p.u.b.erty; 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 G.o.d 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 n.o.ble a.s.sociates, 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 pa.s.sion 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 Korner 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 grune 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; G.o.d 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 pa.s.sion of anger; his self-distrust; his periods of abandon; his pa.s.sion 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 G.o.d; 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 cla.s.sical 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 Muller 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, partic.i.p.ated 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 pa.s.s. 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 bra.s.s 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 pa.s.s 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 pa.s.sionate 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 const.i.tution" 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 pa.s.sionately 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 pa.s.sionate, 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 cla.s.s 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 Heloise, and Letters of Heloise, 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.