Walter Pater has described phases of ferment, perhaps largely his own, in the character of Florian Deleal; his rapture of the red haw- thorn blossoms, " absolutely the reddest of all things," an experience with which all red things in art later reminded him; 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 meetings 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 un- pleasurable 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^ 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 57^ THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE 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 Wool- wich; 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 de- clared 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 older 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, 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 proba- tioner, and the next year, in 1845, ^s 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* 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 * See his Life. By his brother, Leslie Stephen. London, 1895.
ADOLESCENCE IN LITERATURE AND BIOGRAPHY 577 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 char- acters, however, are so overdrawn and caricatured as to be hardly true to life.'
In the Romance of John Inglesant, 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 suscep- tible 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 philoso- phy of obedience and of the subjection of reason to authority was early taught him, and he sought to live from within, hear- ing 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 him- ^ See the very impressive account of Dickens's characterization of childhood and youth, and of his great but hitherto inadequately recognized interest and influence as an educator. By James L. Hughes, New York, 1901, p. 319. 38 57^ THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE self 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 in- troduced 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 Pro- testant worship were celebrated here each day with great devo- tion, 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 con- fessed 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 ^ 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 fu- riously. 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 bap- tism 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 ^ The Autobiography of a Journalist. 2 vols, Boston, 1901.
ADOLESCENCE IN LITERATURE AND BIOGRAPHY 579 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 ^ was the son of a Connecticut farmer. He began a diary at twelve; aspired vainly to enter Yale, and after much rest- lessness 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.
Horace Bushnell's " 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, de- spite 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 dream- * See his Life and Philosophy, by Sanborn and Harris.
• Theodore F. Hunger: Life of Horace Bushnell. Boston, 1899.
580 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE ily 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 re- main 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 wit- ness my vow that I never again would visit this spot till all was ful- filled." " Alas! " he says, " I have never been there since. Once, to a summer party who went, I made excuse for not keeping this rendez- vous. 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 Douglass^ 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 '^ " 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 mid- night. 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 Ander- son.
» By C. W. Chestnutt. » The Making of an American.
ADOLESCENCE IN LITERATURE AND BIOGRAPHY 5^1 Ellery Sedgwick tells us that at thirteen the mind of Thomas Paine ran on stories of the sea which his teacher had told him, and 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 Allen's Reign of Law, who read Darwin, was expelled from the Bible College and the Church, and finally was engaged to Gabrielle; and scores more might be enumerated. There is even Sonny,^ 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 Boroughs, 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 stir- ring 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 serv- ice 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 elab- orated 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.
» Sonny. Ruth McEnery Stuart. New York, 1896.
582 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Goethe's first impression of female loveliness was of a girl named Gretchen, who served wine one evening, and whose face and form fol- lowed him for a long time. Their meetings always gave him a thrill of pleasure, and though his love was like many first loves, very spirit- ual 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 assist- ant, 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 in the style of a nurse 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 pas- sion of teasing her and dominating over her devotedness with wanton and tyrannical caprice, venting upon her the ill humor of his disap- pointments, 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 with 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 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 prompt- ed 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 ap- proaching 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 ADOLESCENCE IN LITERATURE AND BIOGRAPHY 5^3 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 al- most 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 grown up to consciousness in her two oldest children, and his first disappointment in love turned his thought all the more affection- ately toward her and his sister, a year younger. He was long consumed with amazement over the newly awakening sense impulse that took in- tellectual 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 be- ing 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.