He had learned to value and love the Bible, and owed his moral culture to it. Its events and symbols were deeply stamped upon him, so without being a pietist he was greatly moved at the scoffing spirit toward it which he met at the university. From youth he had stood on good terms with God, and at times he had felt that he had some things to forgive God for not having given better assistance to his infinite good-will. Under all this influence he turned to cabalism and became interested in crystals and the microcosm and macrocosm, and fell into the habit of despairing what he had been and believed just before. He conceived a kind of hermetical or neoplatonic godhead creating in more and more eccentric circles, until the last, which rose in contra- diction, was Lucifer to whom creation was committed. He first of all imagined in detail an angelic host, and finally a whole theology was 5^4 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE wrought out in petto. He used a gilt ornamented music-stand as a kind of altar with fumigating pastils for incense, where each morning God was approached by offerings until one day a conflagration put a sudden end to these celebrations.
Hans Andersen/ the son of a poor shoemaker, taught in a charity school at the dawn of puberty; vividly animated Bible stories from pictures painted on the wall; was dreamy and absent-minded; told continued stories to his mates; at confirmation vowed he would be famous, and finally at fourteen left home for Copenhagen, where he was violently stage-struck and worked his way from friendship with the bill-poster to the stage as page, shepherd, etc.; called on a famous dancer, who scorned him, and then, feeling that he had no one but God to depend on, prayed earnestly and often. For nearly a year, until his voice broke, he was a fine singer. He wet with his tears the eyes of a portrait of a heartless man that he might feel for him. He played with a puppet theater and took a childish delight in decking the characters with gay remnants that he begged from shops; wrote several plays which no one would accept; stole into an empty theater one New Year's day to pray aloud on the middle of the stage; shouted with joy; hugged and kissed a beech-tree till people thought him in- sane; 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.
Georg Ebers ^ remembered as a boy of eleven the revolution of '48 in Berlin, soon after which he was placed in Froebel's school at Keil- hau. This great teacher, with his noble associates, Middendorf, Barop, and Langekhal, lived with the boys; told the stirring stories of their own lives as soldiers in the war of liberation; led their pupils on long excursions in vacation, often lasting for months, and gave much lib- erty to the boys, who were allowed to haze not only their new mates but new teachers. This transfer from the city to the country roused a veritable passion in the boy^ who remained here till he was fifteen. Trees and cliffs were climbed, collections made, the Saale by moonlight and the lofty Steiger at sunset were explored. There were swimming and skating and games, and the maxim of the school, " Friede, Freude, Freiheit/' 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 inter- ests of the child for those of the man. Here childhood was to live itself out completely and naturally into an ever-renewed paradise. The ^ The Story of My Life.
* The Story of My Life from Childhood to Manhood.
ADOLESCENCE IN LITERATURE AND BIOGRAPHY 5^5 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 edu- cation affords. Every tramp and battle were described in a book by each boy. When at fifteen Ebers was transferred to the Kottbus Gym- nasium, 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 fool- hardy for his wild escapades, and only slowly sobered down.
In Gottfried Keller's Der griine Heinrich, 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 Bash- kirtseff. 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 im- portant, and everything is given with remarkable fidelity and minute- ness. It is a tale of little things. All the friendships and loves and impulses are there, and he is fundamentally selfish and utilitarian; God and nature were one, and only when his beloved Anna died did he wisK to believe in immortality. He, too, as a child, found two kinds of love in his heart — the ideal and the sensual, very independent — the one for a young and innocent girl and the other for a superb young woman years older than he, pure, although the personification of sense. He gives a rich harvest of minute and sagacious observations about his strange simultaneous loves; the peculiar tastes of food; his day-dream period; and his rather prolonged habit of lying, the latter because he had no other vent for invention. He describes with great regret his leaving school at so early an age; his volcanic passion of anger; his self-distrust; his periods of abandon; his passion to make a success of art though he did not of life; his spells of self-despair and cynicism; his periods of desolation in his single life; his habit of story-telling; his wrestling with the problem of theology and God; the conflict be- tween his philosophy and his love of the girls, etc.
From a private school in Leipzig, where he had shown all a boy's tact in finding what his masters thought the value of each subject they taught; where he had joined in the vandalism of using a battering-ram to break a way to the hated science apparatus and to destroy it, feeling that the classical writers were overpraised; and where at the age of sixteen he had appeared several times in pubHc as a reciter of his own poems. Max Miiller returned to Leipzig and entered upon the freedom of university life there at the age of seventeen. For years his chief 586 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE enjoyment was music/ 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 alto- gether 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 incar- cerated for wearing a club ribbon, and confesses that with his boon companions he was guilty of practises which would now bring culprits into collision with authorities. He fought three duels, participated in many pranks and freakish escapades, but nevertheless attended fifty- three different courses of lectures in three years. When Hegelism was the state philosophy, he tried hard to understand it, but dismissed it with the sentiments expressed by a French officer to his tailor, who re- fused to take the trousers he had ordered to be made very tight be- cause they did not fit so closely that he could not get into them. Dar- win attracted him, yet the wildness of his followers repelled. He says, " I confess I felt quite bewildered for a time and began to despair al- together of my reasoning powers." He wonders how young minds in German universities survive the storms and fogs through which they pass. With bated breath he heard his elders talk of philosophy and tried to lay hold of a word here and there, but it all floated before his mind like mist. Later he had an Hegelian period, but found in Her- bart 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 ^ 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-fiedged 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 sim- ple Pleyel Sonata." To facilitate the reading of his astounding score, he wrote it in three kinds of ink — red for strings, green for the wood- wind, and black for the brass instruments. He writes that this over- ture was the climax of his absurdities, and although the audience be- fore 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.
» Wagner and His Works. By Henry T. Finck.
ADOLESCENCE IN LITERATURE AND BIOGRAPHY 5^7 In his Hannele, Hauptmann, the dramatist, describes in a kind of dream poem what he supposed to pass through the mind of a dying girl of thirteen or fourteen, who does not wish to hve 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 passion- ate discussions in Germany, England, and France, whether this char- acter 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 off by the pathetic separation, and of the undying love, and finally the tragic death and burial of each — all this owes its charm, for the many gen- erations of readers since it was written, to its merits as an es- sentially true picture of the human heart at this critical age. This work and Rousseau have contributed to give French liter- ature its peculiar cast in its description of this age.
" The first explosions of a combustible constitution " in Rousseau's precocious nature were troublesome, and he felt premature sensa- tions of erotic voluptuousness, but without any sin. He longed " to fall at the feet of an imperious mistress, obey her mandates or implore pardon." He only wanted a lady to become a knight errant. At ten he was passionately devoted to a Mile. Vulson, whom he publicly and tyrannically claimed as his own and would allow no other to approach. He had very different sensuous feelings toward Mile. Goton, with whom his relations were very passionate, though pure. Absolutely under the power of both these mistresses, the effects they produced upon him were in no wise related to each other. The former was a brother's affection with the jealousy of a lover added, but the latter a furious, tigerish, Turkish rage. When told of the former's marriage, in his indignation and heroic fury he swore never more to see a per- 588 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE fidious girl. A slightly neurotic vein of prolonged ephebeitis pervades much of his life.
. " In order to comprehend a religion," said Renan, " one must have believed in it and have left it." He bade the Church farewell in 1845, emancipated at fifteen, which " is the critical age for faith in French education." ^ He could not " commit the sacrilege of serving a God who still possessed his heart but no longer mastered his reason. Leav- ing religious illusion behind, he remembered all its magic spells and all its evasions, but also all its charm and all its benefit." He vowed al- ways to love the ideal Jesus, whatever view he took of his nature. Even if he should abandon him, it would be to him a pleasing but most costly sacrifice. He was greatly troubled before he was eighteen by the persistent query, whether or not holding these views he was a Christian; and at this age he was initiated into Goethe and Herder and felt that " he was entering a temple." His confession, really and sub- stantially written in 1848, when he was overflowing with illusions and enthusiasm, seemed to him later, when he saw that his " life had al- ways been governed by a faith which he no longer possessed," the product of an entirely natural state, yet living solely in his fevered in- tellect. Like Miiller, he turned to philology, because he thought it the basis for philosophy.
Pierre Loti's Story of a Child was written in the author's old age and contains hardly a fact, but it is one of the best of inner autobiogra- phies, 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 older 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 be- lieves 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 most of the perilous * Darmesteter: Selected Essays, p. 186.
ADOLESCENCE IN LITERATURE AND BIOGRAPHY 5^9 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 be- hind 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 she was a mere illusion^ and as he realized that she had vanished he felt overwhelmed with hopelessness. It was the first stirring " of true love with all its great melancholy and deep mystery, with its overwhelming but sad enchantment — love which like a perfume endows with a fragrance all it touches."
It is, I believe, high time that ephebic literature should be recognized as a class by itself, and have a place of its own in the history of letters and in criticism. Much of it should be individually prescribed for the reading of the young, for whom it has a singular zest and is a true stimulus and corrective. This stage of life now has what might almost be called a school of its own. Here the young appeal to and listen to each other as they do not to adults, and in a way the latter have failed to appreciate. Again, no biography, and especially no autobiography, should henceforth be complete if it does not describe this period of transformation so all-determining for future life to which it alone can often give the key. To rightly draw the lessons of this age not only saves us from waste inefifable 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 confes- sional 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 ex- pression peculiar to itself.
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