YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE at seventeen and was soon famous. Ida Lewis rescued four men in a boat at sixteen. Joan of Arc began at thirteen to have the visions which were the later guide of her life.
Mr. Swift has collected interesting biographical ma- terial ^ to show that school work is analytic, while life is synthetic, and how the narrowness of the school en- closure prompts many youth in the wayward age to jump fences and seek new and more alluring pastures. According to school standards, many were dull and in- dolent, but their nature was too large or their ideals too high to be satisfied with it. Wagner at the Niko- laischule at Leipzig w^as relegated to the third form, having already attained to the second at Dresden, which so embittered him that he lost all taste for philology and, in his own words, " became lazy and slovenly." Priestley never improved by any systematic course of study. \Y. H. Gibson was very slow and was rebuked for wasting his time in sketching. James Russell Lowell was reprimanded, at first privately and then publicly, in his sophomore year '' for general negligence in themes, forensics, and recitations," and finally sus- pended in 1838 *' on account of continued neglect of his college duties." In early life Goldsmith's teacher thought him the dullest boy she had ever taught. His tutor called him ignorant and stupid. Irving says that a lad " whose passions are not strong enough in youth to mislead him from that path of science which his tutors, and not his inclinations, have chalked out, by four or five years' perseverance, will probably obtain every advantage and honor his college can bestow. I 1 Standards of Efficiency in School and in Life. Pedagogical Semi- nary, March, 1903, vol. 10, pp. 3-22.
BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH would compare the man whose youth has been thus passed in the tranquility of dispassionate prudence, to liquors that never ferment, and, consequently, continue always muddy." Huxley detested writing till past twenty. His schooling was very brief, and he declared that those set over him '' cared about as much for his intellectual and moral welfare as if they were baby farmers." Humphry Davy was faithful but showed no talent in school, having ^' the reputation of being an idle boy, with a gift for making verses, but with no aptitude for studies of a graver sort." Later in life he considered it fortunate that he was left so much to himself. Byron was so poor a scholar that he only stood at the head of the class when, as was the custom, it was inverted, and the bantering master repeatedly said to him, " Now, George, man, let me see how soon you'll be at the foot." Schiller's negligence and lack of alertness called for repeated reproof, and his final school thesis was unsatisfactory. Hegel was a poor scholar, and at the university it was stated " that he was of middling industry and knowledge but especially deficient in philosophy." John Hunter nearly became a cabinetmaker. Lyell had excessive aversion to work. George Combe wondered why he was so inferior to other boys in arithmetic. Heine agreed with the monks that Greek was the invention of the devil. " God knows what misery I suffered with it." He hated French meters, and his teacher vowed he had no soul for poetry. He idled away his time at Bonn, and was " horribly bored " by the '* odious, stiff, cut-and-dried tone " of the leathery professors. Humboldt was feeble as a child and " had less facility in his studies than most children." " Until I reached the age of sixteen," he says, *' I showed little inclination for YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE scientific pursuits. ' ' He was essentially self-taught, and acquired most of his knowledge rather late in life. At nineteen he had never heard of botany. Sheridan was called inferior to many of his schoolfellows. He was remarkable for nothing but idleness and winning man- ners, and was " not only slovenly in construing, but unusually defective in his Greek grammar." Swift was refused his degree because of '' dulness and insuffi- ciency," but given it later as a special favor. Words- worth was disappointing. General Grant was never above mediocrity, and was dropped as corporal in the junior class and served the last year as a private. W. H. Seward was called ' ' too stupid to learn. ' ' Napoleon graduated forty-second in his class. '' Who," asks Swift, '^ were the forty-one above him? " Darwin was ^' singularly incapable of mastering any language." When he left school, he says, '' I was considered by all my masters and by my father as a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect. To my deep mortification, my father once said to me, ' You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and to all your family.' " Harriet Martineau was thought very dull. Though a born musician, she could do absolutely nothing in the presence of her irritable master. She wrote a cramped, untidy scrawl until past twenty. A visit to some very brilliant cousins at the age of sixteen had much to do in arousing her backward nature. At this age J. Pierpont Morgan wrote poetry and was devoted to mathematics. Booker T. Washington, at about thir- teen or fourteen (he does not know the date of his birth), felt the new meaning of life and started off on foot to Hampton, five hundred miles away, not knowing even the direction, sleeping under a sidewalk his first night BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH in Richmond. Vittorino da Feltre/ according to Dr. Burnham, had a slow, tardy development, lingering on a sluggish dead level from ten to fourteen, which to his later unfoldment was as the barren, improving years sometimes called the middle ages, compared with the remainder which followed when a new world-conscious- ness intensified his personality.
Lancaster's summaries show that of 100 actors, the average age of their first great success was exactly 18 years. Those he chose had taken to the stage of their own accord, for actors are more born than made. Nearly half of them were Irish, the unemotional Ameri- can stock having furnished far less. Few make their first success on the stage after 22, but from 16 to 20 is the time to expect talent in this line, although there is a second rise in his curve before and still more after 25, representing those whose success is more due to intellect. Taking the average age of 100 novelists when their first story met with public approval, the curve reaches its highest point between 30 and 35. Averag- ing 53 poets, the age at which most first poems were pub- lished falls between 15 and 20. The average age at which first publication showed talent he places at 18, which is in striking contrast with the average age of inventors at time of the first patent, which is 33 years.
A still more striking contrast is that between 100 musicians and 100 professional men. IMusic is by far the most precocious and instinctive of all talents. The average age when marked talent was first shown is a little less than 10 years, 95 per cent showed rare talent before 16, while the professional men graduated at an average age of 24 years and 11 months, and 10 years * See also Vittorino da Feltre and other Humanist Educators, by W. H. Woodward. Cambridge University Press, 1897.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE must be added to mark the point of recognized success. Of 53 artists, 90 per cent showed talent before 20, the average age being 17.2 years. Of 100 pioneers who made their mark in the Far West, leaving home to seek fortunes near the frontier, the greatest number de- parted before they were 18. Of 118 scientists, Lancas- ter estimates that their life interest first began to glow on the average a little before they were 19. In general, those whose success is based on emotional traits antedate by some years those whose renown is more purely in intellectual spheres, and taking all together, the curves of the first class culminate between 18 and 20.
"While men devoted to physical science, and their bi- ographers, give us perhaps the least breezy accounts of this seething age, it may be, because they mature late, nearly all show its ferments and its circumnutations, as a few almost random illustrations clearly show: Tycho Brahe, born in 1546 of illustrious Danish stock, was adopted by an uncle, and entered the University of Copenhagen at thirteen, where multiplication, division, philosophy, and metaphysics were taught. When he was fourteen, an eclipse of the sun occurred, which aroused so much interest that he decided to devote himself to the study of the heavenly bodies. He was able to construct a series of interesting instruments on a progressive scale of size, and finally to erect the great Observatory of Uraniberg on the Island of Hven. Strange to say, his scientific conclusions had for him profound astrological significance. An important new star he declared was "at first like Venus and Jupiter, and its efTects will therefore first be pleasant; but as it then became like Mars, there will next come a period of wars, seditions, captivity, and death of princes, and de- struction of cities, together with dryness and fiery meteors in the air, pestilence, and venomous snakes. Lastly, the star became like Saturn, and thus will finally come a time of want, death, imprison- ment, and all kinds of sad things!" He says that "a special use of astronomy is that it enables us to draw conclusions from the move- ments in the celestial regions as to human fate." He labored on his island twenty years. He was always versifying, and inscribed a BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH poem over the entrance of his underground observatory expressing the astonishment of Urania at finding in the interior of the earth a cavern devoted to the study of the heavens.
GaUleo ^ was born in 1564 of a Florentine noble, who was poor. As a youth he became an excellent lutist, then thought of devoting himself to painting, but when he was seventeen studied medicine, and at the University of Pisa fell in love with mathematics.
Isaac Newton,^ born in 1642, very frail and sickly, solitary, had a very low place in the class lists of his school; wrote poetry, and at sixteen tried farming. In one of his university examinations in Euclid he did so poorly as to incur special censure. His first in- centive to diligent study came from being severely kicked by a high class boy. He then resolved to pass him in studies, and soon rose to the head of the school. He made many ingenious toys and wind- mills; a carriage, the wheels of which were driven by the hands of the occupants, and a clock which moved by water; curtains, kites, lanterns, etc.; and before he was fourteen fell in love with Miss Storey, several years older than himself. He entered Trinity College at Cambridge at eighteen.
William Herschel, born in 1738, at the outbreak of the Seven Years* War, when he was eighteen, was a performer in the regimental band, and after a battle passed a night in a ditch and escaped in disguise, to England, where he eked out a precarious livelihood by teaching music. He supported himself until middle age as an organist. In much of his later work he was greatly aided by his sister Caroline. When he discovered a sixth planet he became fa- mous, and devoted himself exclusively to astronomy, training his only son to follow in his footsteps, and dying in 1822.
Agassiz 3 at twelve had developed a mania for collecting. He memorized Latin names, of which he accumulated "great volumes of MSS.," and "modestly expressed the hope that in time he might be able to give the name of every known animal." At fourteen he re- volted at mercantile life, for which he was designed, and issued a manifesto planning to spend four j^ears at a German university, then in Paris, when he could begin to write. Books were scarce, and a little later he copied, with the aid of his brother, several large vol- umes, and had fifty live birds in his room at one time.
* See The Private Life of Galileo; from his Correspondence and that of his Eldest Daughter. Anon. Macmillan, London, 1870.
2 See Sir David Brewster's Life of Newton. Harper, New York, 3 Louis Agassiz, His Life and Work, by C. F. Holder. G. P. Put- nam's Sons, New York, 1893.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE At twelve Huxley ^ became an omnivorous reader, and two or three years later devoured Hamilton's Logic and became deeply interested in metaphysics. At fourteen he saw and participated in his first post-mortem examination, was left in a strange state of apathy by it, and dates his life-long dyspepsia to this experience. His training was irregular; he taught himself German with a book in one hand while he made hay with the other; speculated about the basis of matter, soul, and their relations, on radicalism and con- servatism; and reproached himself that he did not work and get on enough. At seventeen he attempted a comprehensive classification of human knowledge, and having finished his survey, resolved to master the topics one after another, striking them out from his table with ink as soon as they were done. " May the list soon get black, although at present I shall hardly be able, I am afraid, to spot the paper." Beneath the top skimmings of these years he afterward conceived seething depths working beneath the froth, but could give hardly any account of it. He undertook the practise of pharmacy, etc.
Women with literary gifts perhaps surpass men in their power to reproduce and describe the great but so often evanescent ebullitions of this age; perhaps be- cause their later lives, on account of their more generic nature, depart less from this totalizing period, or be- cause, although it is psychologically shorter than in men, the necessities of earning a livelihood less frequently arrest its full development, and again because they are more emotional, and feeling constitutes the chief psychic ingredient of this stage of life, or they dwell more on subjective states.
Manon Philipon (Madame Roland) was born in 1754. Her father was an engraver in comfortable circum- stances. Her earliest enthusiasm was for the Bible and Lives of the Saints, and she had almost a mania for reading books of any kind. In the corner of her father's workshop she would read Plutarch for hours, 1 Life and Letters of Thomas H. Huxley, by his son Leonard Huxley. D. Apple ton and Co., New York, 190L BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH dream of the past glories of antiquity, and exclaim, weeping, " Why was I not born a Greek? " She de- sired to emulate the brave men of old.
Books and flowers aroused her to dreams of enthusiasm, romantic sentiment, and lofty aspiration. Finding that the French society afforded no opportunity for heroic living, in her visionary fervor she fell back upon a life of religious mysticism, and Xavier, Loyola, St. Elizabeth, and St. Theresa became her new idols. She longed to fol- low even to the stake those devout men and women who had borne obloquy, poverty, hunger, thirst, wretchedness, and the agony of a martyr's death for the sake of Jesus. Her capacities for self-sacrifice became perhaps her leading trait, always longing after a grand life like George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke. She was allowed at the age of eleven to enter a convent, where, shunning her companions, she courted solitude apart, under the trees, reading and thinking. Artificial as the atmosphere was here, it no doubt inspired her life with permanent tenderness of feeling and loftiness of purpose, and gave a mystic quality to her imagination. Later she experienced to the full revulsion of thought and experience which comes when doubt reacts upon youthful credulity. It was the age of the encyclopedia, and now she came to doubt her creed and even God and the soul, but clung to the Gospels as the best possible code of morals, and later realized that while her intellect had wandered her heart had remained constant. At seventeen she was, if not the most beautiful, perhaps the noblest woman in all France, and here the curtain must drop upon her girlhood. All her traits were, of course, set ofT by the great life she lived and the yet greater death she died.
Gifted people seem to conserve their youth and to be all the more children, and perhaps especially all the more intensely adolescents, because of their gifts, and it is certainly one of the marks of genius that the plasticity and spontaneity of adolescence persists into maturity. Sometimes even its passions, reveries, and hoydenish freaks continue. In her '* Histoire de Ma Vie," it is plain that George Sand inherited at this age an unusual dower of gifts. She composed many and interminable stories, carried on day after day, so that her confidants YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE tried to tease her by asking if the prince had got out of the forest yet, etc. She personated an echo and con- versed with it. Her day-dreams and plays were so intense that she often came back from the world of imagination to reality with a shock. She spun a weird zoological romance out of a rustic legend of la grande hete.
When her aunt sent her to a convent, she passed a year of rebellion and revolt, and was the leader of les diables, or those who refused to be devout, and engaged in all wild pranks. At fifteen she became profoundly interested in the lives of the saints, although ridiculing miracles. She entered one evening the convent church for service, without permission, which was an act of disobedience. The mystery and holy charm of it penetrated her; she forgot everything outward and was left alone, and some mysterious change stole over her. She " breathed an atmosphere of ineffable sweetness " more with the mind than the senses; had a sudden indescribable perturbation; her eyes swam; she was enveloped in a white glunmer, and heard a voice mur- mur the words written under a convent picture of St. Augustine, Tolle, lege, and turned around thinking Mother Alicia spoke, but she was alone. She knew it was an hallucination, but saw that faith had laid hold of her, as she wished, by the heart, and she sobbed and prayed to the unknown God till a nun heard her groaning. At first her ardor impelled her not only to brave the jeers of her madcap club of harum-scarums and tomboys, but she planned to become a nun, until this feverish longing for a recluse life passed, but left her changed. ^ When she passed from the simple and Catholic faith of her gri- sette mother to the atmosphere of her cynical grandmother at Nohant, who was a disciple of Voltaire, she found herself in great straits between the profound sentiments inspired by the first com- munion and the concurrent contempt for this faith, instilled by her grandmother for all these mummeries through which, however, for conventional reasons she was obliged to pass. Her heart was deeply stirred, and yet her head holding all religion to be fiction or metaphor, it occurred to her to invent a story which might be a religion or a religion which might be a story into any degree of belief in which she 1 See also Sully: A Girl's Religion. Longman's Magazine, May, 1890, BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH could lapse at will. The name and the form of her new deity was revealed to her in a dream. He was Corambe, pure as Jesus, beauti- ful as Gabriel, as graceful as the nymphs and Orpheus, less austere than the Christian God, and as much woman as man, because she could best understand this sex from her love for her mother. He ap- peared in many aspects of physical and moral beauty; was eloquent, master of all arts, and above all of the magic of musical improvisa- tion; loved as a friend and sister, and at the same time revered as a god; not awful and remote from impeccability, but with the fault of excess of indulgence. She estimated that she composed about a thousand sacred books or songs developing phases of his mundane existence. In each of these he became incarnate man on touching the earth, always in a new group of people who were good, yet suffer- ing martyrdoms from the wicked known only by the effects of their malice. In this ''gentle hallucination" she could lose herself in the midst of friends and turn to her hero deity for comfort. There must be not only sacred books, but a temple and ritual, and in a garden thicket, which no eye could penetrate, in a moss-carpeted chamber she built an altar against a tree-trunk, ornamented with a wreath hung over it. Instead of sacrificing, which seemed barbaric, she proceeded to restore life and liberty to butterflies, lizards, green frogs, and birds, which she put in a box, laid on the altar, and ''after having invoked the good genius of liberty and protection," opened it. In these mimic rites and delicious reveries she found the germs of a religion that fitted her heart. From the instant, however, that a boy playmate discovered and entered this sanctuary, "Corambe ceased to dwell in it. The dryads and the cherubim deserted it," and it seemed unreal. The temple was destroyed with great care, and the garlands and shells were buried under the tree. ^ ' Sheldon (Institutional Activities of American Children; American Journal of Psychology, July, 1898, vol. 9, p. 434) describes a faintly anal- ogous case of a girl of eleven, who organized the worship of Pallas Athena on two flat rocks, in a deep ravine by a stream where a young sycamore grew from an old stump, as did Pallas from the head of her father Zeus. There was a court consisting of king, queen, and subjects, and priests who officiated at sacrifices. The king and queen wore goldenrod upon their heads and waded in streams attended by their subjects; gathered flowers for Athena; caught crayfish which were duly smashed upon her altar. "Sometimes there was a special celebration, when, in addition to the slaughtered crayfish and beautiful flower decorations, and pickles stolen from the dinner-table, there would be an elaborate ceremony," which because of its uncanny acts was intensely disliked by the people at hand.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE Louisa Alcott's romantic period opened at fifteen, when she began to write poetry, keep a heart journal, and wander by moonlight, and wished to be the Bettine of Emerson, in whose library she foraged; wrote him letters which were never sent; sat in a tall tree at midnight; left wild flowers on the doorstep of her mas- ter; sang Mignon's song under his window; and was refined by her choice of an idol. Her diary was all about herself.
If she looked in the glass at her long hair and weU-shaped head, she tried to keep down her vanity; her quick tongue, moodiness, pov- erty, impossible longings, made every day a battle until she hardly wished to live, only something must be done, and waiting is so hard. She imagined her mind a room in confusion which must be put in order; the useless thought swept out; foolish fancies dusted away; newly furnished with good resolutions. But she was not a good housekeeper; cobwebs got in, and it was hard to rule. She was smitten with a mania for the stage, and spent most of her leisure in writing and acting plays of melodramatic style and high-strung sentiment, improbable incidents, with no touch of common life or sense of humor, full of concealments and surprises, bright dialogues, and lofty sentiments. She had much dramatic power and loved to transform herself into Hamlet and declaim in mock heroic style. From sixteen to twenty-three was her apprenticeship to life. She taught, wrote for the papers, did housework for pay as a servant, and found sewing a pleasant resource because it was tranquillizing, left her free, and set her thoughts going.