are still apishly servile to man even in one of his greatest mis- takes, which has done woman most wrong. She will not pro- fane her own Sabbath of biological ordination, but will keep it holy as to the Lord, for he has hallowed it as a day of blessing from on high. Those interested in Sabbath psychology and pedagogy can find no better suggestions for its right keeping than those written in the language of woman's needs. This is one of the several reasons why she is more religious by nature than man, because at these seasons her frame of mind inclines her to a natural piety and sense of dependence and of being an organism in the hands of a higher power. Details for its better observance, attitudes and exercises of soul make a suggestive theme for noble women, who are emancipated from the man- aping fashion now just beginning to wane, and will no doubt sometime be wrought out. It will not be a Lord's day of Puri- tan severity or of ancient taboos, but of joy and pride, and those first rightly initiated into its observance will learn to look for- ward to its recurrence with pleasure, and later in life will look back to the months and years of their novitiate and all its glow of idealism and aspiration somewhat as Jehovah's people remembered the precious promises of old.
CHAPTER VIII ADOLESCENCE IN LITERATURE, BIOGRAPHY, AND HISTORY I. Plato's boys — Neoptolemus and Telemachus — Aristotle's description of youth. II. The disciples of Jesus — Youth of the saints — The age of chivalry. III. General characterization and results of the study of description of youth in biography and literature. IV. Men of Science. V. Literary women. VI. Difference between the accounts given of their adolescence by men and women — Literary men: English, American, German, and French.
Romance, poetry, and biography furnish many admirable descriptions of the psychic states and changes characteristic of every stage of the ephebic transformation, and now, before passing to a more detailed account of its normal aspects, it may be well to pause and consider a few silhouettes of representative types, beginning with the Greeks, whose athletic ideals and regimen of it were described in Chapter III. These cases, like returns to questionnaires, are in part either data or illustrations for some of the conclusions of later chapters in which they are often cited.
I. The Platonic dialogues are among the best of all literary sources for the study of the pedagogy of adolescence. After many years of teaching them and reading Jowett in seminary classes, it is ever clearer to me that some of the best of them owe much of their charm to the noble love of adolescent boys. At most of the dialogues one or more of them were present, and Socrates found much of his inspiration in them. In the Laws, where only old men appear, in the Timaeus, the Cratylus, the Crito, and perhaps the Critias alone, among the authentic dia- logues and in the lesser Hippias, it appears that no youth were present, and most of these, especially the longer of them, by general consent are the most uninteresting, if not tedious, to modern taste. Of the twenty-seven dialogues, which Jowett accepts, with about one hundred and ten characters, twelve or fourteen are obviously adolescents, although not all of them stand out very clearly.
SH THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Charmides is perhaps the most glorious of all Plato's boys. He appears in the Palaestra, where the dialogue which bears his name is held, drawn to the conversation of the sages con- cerning temperance. His friend and lover, Chserephon, a crazy-brained, impetuous young man, had pronounced him the reigning beauty of the day, whom all his companions loved, and he was always followed by a train of admirers. " There was not one, not even the smallest, who looked in any other direction; all gazed upon him as upon some sacred statue." He was said to be yet fairer in form than in face. There was a flutter when he entered, and all made place to have him sit be- side them. " All the world seemed enamored of him, and amazement and confusion reigned when he entered." His soul was found to be as beauteous as his body, so that he best illus- trates the Greek ideal of a fair soul in a fair body. As Socrates delicately proceeds to strip and cure his soul by conversing with him on temperance, the chief Greek virtue, he appears an almost ideal illustration of this also.
Lysis seems, with his shyness, impulsiveness, and artless candor, his insatiable eagerness to hear more, perhaps the youngest of Plato's boys. He, too, is of noble birth, and is found in the Palaestra with his pugnacious friend, Menexenus, and his praiser and idolizer, Hippothales. Among his mates, all in festive array, having just offered sacrifice and playing at knuckle-bones. Lysis, with a chaplet on his head, was pre- eminent among all the rest for beauty of form and grace of action. Socrates, with characteristic sympathy, easily engages him in conversation. Your parents love you and want you to be happy, but do they gratify all your wishes? When he re- plies No, that even his father's hirelings can drive the horses which he can not, Socrates expresses surprise, but leads on to the truth that men are trusted in things they know. The dia- logue on the nature of friendship is given added zest by the concealed presence of Lysis's unwelcome lover.
Cleinias in the Euthydemus is a youth exposed to the rough horse-play of the eristic sluggers, who teach wisdom and also fighting in heavy armor, until Socrates must repeatedly come to his rescue and give him encouragement. He is a lad of illustrious name, in whose future all Athens felt a deep interest. Socrates seeks to relieve him from his painful bewilderment ADOLESCENCE IN LITERATURE AND BIOGRAPHY 5^5 that he may form sound opinions and no longer need the Sophists or any one to teach him, and finally leads up to the conclusion that as wisdom is the only good he must become a lover of it or a philosopher. " That I will," concludes Cleinias.
These " figures upon whom our attention centers belong to the flower of Athenian youth, and bear that stamp of breeding which seems to have been a birthright of noble parentage, which goes far to justify the aristocratic predilections of Plato. Free from concern as to their own reputation, they have no thought of concealing the * wonder,' which Socrates prizes as an * affec- tion peculiar to the philosophical mind.' All alike display a charming simplicity and genuineness, which are the more re- markable because of the admiration lavished upon them by young and old. It speaks well for healthfulness and sym- metry of Hellenic influence that a universal adoration, partak- ing almost of a religious character, has imparted to them no trace of vanity or self-consciousness, the taint of which must have inevitably diminished their zeal in the pursuit of truth."
Meno is another golden youth, highly sophisticated, charged to overflowing with the finished definition philosophy of the nihilistic Gorgias, whose sophistic half-knowledge Soc- rates so well exposes, who is so examined as to show the fallacy of this tendency of thought, and is almost tenderly taught that virtue can be imparted by no such method. At first Meno has no idea of any general conception of virtue, but only of that of a man, or woman, of every age and state. Then he conceives it as delighting in things honorable with the power to get them. When this definition is upset, he complains that Socrates acts on his mind like a torpedo shock. To others he can talk well of virtue, but in his presence he is perplexed. Every soul has a germ of latent knowledge, and from one of Meno's slaves, also a boy, the Pythagorean theorem is elicited and the doctrine of the preexistence of the soul inferred there- from. In this sense virtue is teachable, but alas! there are no teachers. The character of Meno has little to do with the Meno of history. He is a spoiled child of fortune, eager to learn from any one, and Socrates's cross-examination, which is half playful, shows forth the shortcomings of his teachers who had neglected dialectics.
Ion, the rhapsode, who had just won the first prize for his 5i6 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE impassioned recitations of Homer, is also a youth, and his discussion with Socrates on inspiration and sacred madness, in which his teacher reaches the well-known conclusion that poets are sacred persons who should be treated with respect, but are touched with madness and should not be tolerated in a well-ordered state, must also have acted as a shock upon this elocutionist's transparent childlike enthusiasm. His assump- tion that by being always in the good company of Homer, to whom his skill was restricted, brightening up when he is men- tioned and growing sleepy when others are discussed, he par- ticipated more or less in the creative power of his author, and could even judge of war, medicine, and prophecy, as well as experts, falls prostrate. It would be interesting to know the sequel of this shock.
Polus is an impetuous youth, a runaway colt, bad-man- nered, violent, angry at first, having never heard the other side, fascinated and astounded by the rhetoric of his master and ready to maintain his position against the world. As Soc- rates develops the view that rhetoric is flattery; is a " shadow of a part of politics "; the evil-doers are more miserable if they escape than if they suffer penalty, Polus laughs outright, but early in the dialogue he heeded Socrates's injunction to be less prolix, and almost seems to acquiesce in the end that it is bet- ter to suffer than to do injustice.
Philebus, confused as youth so often is concerning the rela- tion of pleasure to goodness and wisdom, and his friend, Pro- tarchus, the noble son of Callias, inspire one of the best exposi- tions of this favorite Socratic topic. Philebus, who had been his teacher and perhaps his lover, had left him still a partizan of pleasure, but had not taught him that pleasure, like color, is both one and many. The problem of pleasure, always a burn- ing one with youth, is implicated with that of the infinite and the finite, the one and the many; and its ethical nature and the relations to knowledge and to the good are taught in a way suggestive to modern pedagogical methods in college phi- losophy.
The most radiant and conscious boy beauty of all the more or less juvenile interlocutors of Socrates was Alcibiades, who first appears in the brief and doubtful dialogue bearing his name. Here he is very young and about to enter public life.
ADOLESCENCE IN LITERATURE AND BIOGRAPHY 5^7 and would persuade the people, but of what and to what end? Socrates leads him to say that he would seek justice rather than wealth or power. Only the virtuous deserve freedom. " Are you free? " and he replies, " I feel that I am not, but I hope, Socrates, that by your aid I may become free, and from this day forward I will never leave you." We have another glimpse of this favorite in the Protagoras, where we are told his beard is just appearing. In the Symposium he seems in the early twen- ties, and intrudes intoxicated and with his followers into the assemblage, lawless, a lion's whelp, but already known as one of the ablest and most gifted of all Greeks. He tells of his vain effort to ensnare Socrates, the Silenus-faced master of dia- lectics, by his homosexual blandishments, and then proceeds to the most brilliant eulogy of his character. Here his own traits are well set off by those of the other fair youth, Agathon, whose encomium on love is an almost dithyrambic praise of the gods for his gifts.
In the Republic, Polimarchus, who appears in the early part of the dialogue, is a frank, impetuous youth, who would de- tain Socrates by force and compel him to tell him what he knows about women and children. Like his father, Cephalus, he is " limited in his point of view and represents the pro- verbial stage of morality, which has rules of life rather than principles." He has not felt the charm of the Sophists, and is so confused by Socrates that he hardly knows what he says. In the Protagoras, the most dramatic of the dialogues, Hippoc- rates, with youthful ardor, pounds upon Socrates's door before dawn to make the momentous announcement that Protagoras the Great is in town at the house of Callias. Socrates knew his " courageous madness," and could hardly restain him from almost making an assault upon the great sophister to relieve him of some of his wisdom. At first the youth is fascinated by be- ing told that he will be made an ever better and wiser man, but perpends as his hero is entangled in the meshes of Socrates, and as his unfitness to train the flower of Athenian youth and to receive their pay is exposed. In the Statesman, an unknown or fictitious " Young Socrates " is a somewhat wooden re- sponder throughout. In the Parmenides, Socrates himself appears to be rather young and attacks the paradoxes of Zeno with great subtlety. Phaedo, in the dialogue of that name.
5i8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE although he is a beloved disciple and says nothing, is evidently young as is the madman, ApoUodorus, who is emotional and whose grief is violent. In the Phaedrus, Isocrates is still young and full of promise. They are in the country, and fit- tingly end the discussion of the relation of rhetoric to dialectics, with a prayer to Pan for inner beauty of soul. Euthryphro, the religionist and definer of piety as doing as he does or doing what is dear to the gods, is thought by some to be a youth.
Thesetetus is an adolescent Socrates of unattractive exte- rior, and who might be described as that weird English poet, Francis Thompson, speaks of a plain but gifted lady, whose countenance one could not see for her soul. He is introduced to us as striving to accomplish the Hercules labor of passing from mathematics to metaphysics, and seeking, like some ingenuous academic students of our day, to make an Hegelian voyage of discovery to find out what knowledge really is. Socrates can hardly treat seriously the callow but earnest poetic passion of his ephebic ectype. With characteristic irony he is drawn out and lured on, each crude definition being welcomed with a gratitude sometimes effusive, till on second thought the inevi- table little scruple arises which shows its inanity. When told that knowledge is sense perception, the master reflects that a tadpole, a pig, or a dog-faced baboon may then have true knowl- edge; and when at last true opinion rightly defined is proposed as the best description of it, doubts thicken as the thought- midwife perpends, till the pupil is told that there is no escape from the domain of the god of flux and Herakleitic motion, and that his mind will be the better for being rid of the embryo ideas of which it has just been delivered, and that they are of no value, but should be exposed like monstrous births. The end of the prolonged dialectics of the Theaetetus, like that of the other dialogues of search, is negative and almost collapsing, and the moral is an at least tentative but most tonic confession of nescience. He appears again in the Sophist, but is no longer young.
Although Socrates abhors every form of afflatus, he is strangely drawn toward ingenuous boyhood, as if by its very naivete. It is perhaps precisely because he would despoil them of their unconsciousness and elevate their mental im- pulses to the plane of reason. In a land and age of unnatural ADOLESCENCE IN LITERATURE AND BIOGRAPHY 5^9 lust, he passionately strove to seduce youth only to wisdom and to discourse solely of high themes, striving to do and suffer nothing base, knowing that to love boys is the key to their education. Their presence and the duty of adults to inspire and set noble examples turn the discourse to high thoughts and glorious deeds. While he felt it his mission to give no information but only to kindle latent genius and turn the soul toward truth, his amplest theme, and that perhaps wherein his thoughts ran deepest, was that in which youth has a strange zest — love. All who strive are lovers; and the only true love is of knowledge and virtue and the deathless beautiful-good, which is so impersonal and pure that wisdom- love is a kind of dying. And yet it was precisely the charge of corrupting youth which seems to have had great, if not chief, weight in his condemnation. In the Apology, he ex- horts the Athenians to trouble his sons as he has troubled them, if they prefer riches to virtue, or think themselves something when they are nothing. He was commissioned by the oracle to find a wiser man than he, and therefore had to expose pretended wisdom, and was obliged to meet the " stock accusation " of free-thinking and atheism, when all others failed. But, as represented in Plato,.he has always remained an ideal teacher of philosophy to the adolescent mind. It should also be added that the Platonic myths are pedagogic masterpieces, precisely suited to this stage of psychic development when sentiment is three-fourths of life, and symbolism and parable are perhaps chief among the methods of reason. Altogether Plato presents most of the chief types of ephebic perplexity and the elucidation of each, as if he considered it one of his chief missions to be a true intellectual midwife, presiding over the new birth of the soul. Those who best know Plato will most fully realize how far inferior our own age still is in understanding the real nature of youth and in the development of the right means of min- istering to its needs. Greek superiority in this respect may have been largely due to the fact that the race and age repre- sented a more youthful stage of development than does our own. Could Socrates and Plato but come again to the philosophical classes of our modern colleges and universities, would they find us modern teachers of wisdom anything more 520 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE than modern Sophists? and if not, as I often fear, what would their great insight into the mental and moral nature and needs of adolescent mind and life suggest as the same reform they wrought, put into the language of our modern life and needs?
Neoptolemus is, in the opinion of Professor Gildersleeve, next to Telemachus, the most interesting of the Greek char- acterizations of youth, " not only young, but young for his years."
Sophocles introduces this son of Achilles as the tool of Ulysses in beguiling Philoctetes to leave his lonely island of Lemnos, where he had passed nine weary years in pain from his gangrene wound, and bring with him the wondrous bows and arrows bequeathed him by Hector, for an oracle had revealed that Troy could never fall but by the bow of Hercules and with the aid of a son of Achilles. Neoptole- mus was a mere boy in far-off Phthiotis when the hero was deserted, and so was guileless of this treachery. Ulysses lands with him; explores the double-mouthed cave, keeping himself in the background for fear of the poisoned arrows and sending Neoptolemus ahead, who finds the bed of leaves, the rags for dressing the wounded foot, and only at the last moment, when it is too late to withdraw, the man of many wiles explains to the youth his role. He must pretend to have been deprived of the arms of his father, Achilles, by Ulysses, upon whom he must heap reproach, and state that, stung by insult, he is on the way home and will give Philoctetes a safe passage to his own land. The youth at first revolts at this treachery, which even in word he loathed to hear, for his nature was not made for crooked guile, although for the great end of conquering Troy he would take the man by force. Failure is better than a foul success. Thus he is " gallant, impetuous, open, chivalrous, the true son of the ideal knight of Greek romance," who detested " as the gates of hell " one who dared think one thing and say another. At last, however, the plausible Ulysses wins against the better feelings of his comrade, as if their end would sanctify any means. When Philoctetes approached pain- fully, Neoptolemus acts the role ascribed him and tells his tale and reports the news of Troy. He begs to be taken home; Neoptolemus does the by-play of hesitation, and at last pretends reluctant assent. Other messengers from Ulysses arise and seek to hurry them, repre- senting that Neoptolemus is pursued, and as they approach the ship Philoctetes has one of his paroxysms of agony, begs his friend to smite off his limb, and bids him hold his bow and arrows during the slumber that must follow such pain, and into which, like a death-trance, the sufferer soon sinks. Before he awakes, the better nature of Neoptolemus has conquered. The interest in the Greek cause and his per- sonal renown, prophesied in the capture of Troy, are weighed in the ADOLESCENCE IN LITERATURE AND BIOGRAPHY 521 balance and found wanting, and he confesses his abominable role and how noisome and base he has been by deserting his own true self. At first he would not give back the weapons, however, and when he makes a motion to restore the bow Ulysses intervenes. At last Neop- tolemus makes up his mind to " do the right, come what may." The glory of taking Troy will be bought at too high a price if self-respect is lost. He braves Ulysses with his sword; gives Philoctetes back his weapons; and only the intervention of Hercules in the air saves the life of Ulysses. This struggle between interest and duty constitutes the tragic interest in the drama, and in the sequel, in the glory of his father's armor^ it is this pyrrhic or red-haired youth who leads the Greeks to the storm and sack of the city by night, while the Trojans slept or held council. The last glimpse of the young hero appears in the Andromache of Euripides, where the Argive prince is put out of the way for coveting Hermione.
Perhaps the fullest portrayal of adolescence in which Greek life and Greek ideals are symmetrically mingled is that of Telemachus, the only son of Ulysses, to whom a large part of the first four books of the Odyssey is devoted.
He is represented as a rather tame, home-staying, and affectionate son, who had to have strength put into his heart by a visit of Minerva, who roused him from his perhaps Hamlet-like musings by the hearth- stone of his mother, Penelope, as to whether his father would return and take vengeance on the insolent suitors. The young prince, stirred by this visit of divine wisdom, awoke to his responsibilities, took his place again among the revelers, a changed man, reminded his mother that the loom and distaff were woman's kingdom and that his father's place now belonged to him, and warned the suitors to leave. In the council of the rulers the next day his mien showed forth a new maj- esty in contrast with his former supineness. He appealed to the gods for vengeance, but when mocked wandered to the seashore, prayed his guardian goddess to show him forth the true son of his father, and was helped by her on his voyage to find him to the consternation of the suitors at his bold step, to the grief of his mother, now twice bereaved, and the dismay of his old nurse, Eurycleia.
Fenelon amplifies the story of his search for his father in his well-known tale, which has for some generations been a standard text-book in French, especially for young ladies, and which is a kind of Wilhelm Meister or typical adolescent experience for a prince in classical times. Perhaps no work even of antiquity describes with such detail and fidelity to nature the stirrings of youthful impulses and their masterly guidance by Mentor. Fenelon drew richly upon all the resources of Greek culture. His hero, by the aid of his guide, resists the wiles of Calypso, and even his passion for her nymph, Eucharis, is controlled. He becomes a slave. in Ethiopia, but com- 522 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE pels the love and admiration of all about him, even of his cruel master. He is urgently offered the crown of Crete, establishes a new govern- ment at Salentum, seeks Ulysses through the dreary realms of Tar- tarus, falls in love with Antiope, whom he rescues from a wild boar, teaches good government to a reprobate prince, is always wisely counseled, and at last, just before meeting his father, is given final parting counsel by Mentor, who now bids him farewell, assuring him that his apprenticeship to life is complete and he must now guide his own actions. Homer completes the tale in the seventh book with his return from Sparta to Ithaca. When his father's rags fell off and royal robes took their place and he was at last convinced of his identity, the suitors planned vengeance, and while Ulysses plied his wondrous bow Telemachus by his side dealt death to them with his spear.
Aristotle has given the best ancient characterization of youth. He says: