balls, lisle-thread stockings, the books of A. C. Gunter and Albert Ross, wax flowers, soft old bachelors and widowers, nice young men, tin spoons, false teeth, thin shoes, etc. She does not seem real to herself, everything is a blank. Though she doubts everything else, she will keep the one atom of faith in love and the truth that is love and life in her heart. When something shrieks within her, she feels that all her anguish is for nothing and that she is a fool. She is exasperated that people call her peculiar, but confesses that she loves admiration; she can fascinate and charm company if she tries; imagines an ad- miration for Messalina. She most desires to cultivate badness when there is lead in the sky. " I would live about seven years of judicious badness, and then death if you will." "I long to cultivate the element of badness in me." She describes the fascination of making and eating fudge; devotes a chapter to describing how to eat an olive; BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH discusses her figure. "In the front of my shirt-vraist there are nine cambric handkerchiefs cunningly distributed." She discusses her foot, her beautiful hair, her hips; describes each of the seventeen little engraved portraits of Napoleon that she keeps, with each of which she falls in love; vows she would give up even her marvelous genius for one dear, bright day free from loneliness. AVhen her skirts need sewing, she simply pins them; this lasts longer, and had she mended them with needle and thread she would have been sensible, which she hates. As she walks over the sand one day she vows that she would like a man to come so be that he was strong and a perfect villain, and she would pray him to lead her to what the world calls her ruin. Nothing is of consequence to her except to be rid of unrest and pain. She would be positively and not merely negatively wicked. To poison her soul would rouse her mental power. ''Oh, to know just once what it is to be loved!" ''I know that I am a genius more than any genius that has lived," yet she often thinks herself a small vile creature for whom no one cares. The world is in- effably dull, heaven has always fooled her, and she is starving for love.
Ada Negri illustrates the other extreme of genuineness and is desperately in earnest.^ She began to teach school in a squalid, dismal Italian village, and at eighteen to write the poetry that has made her famous. She lived in a dim room back of a stable, up two flights, where the windows were not glass but paper, and where she seems to have been, like her mother, a mill hand before she was a teacher. She had never seen a theater, but had read of Duse with enthusiasm; had never seen the sea, mountains, or even a hill, lake, or large city, but she had read of them. After she began to write, friends gave her two dream days in the city. Then she returned, put on her wooden shoes, and began to teach her eighty children to spell. The poetry she writes is from the heart of her own experience.
She craved ''the kiss of genius and of light," but the awful figure of misfortune with its dagger stood by her bed at night. She writes: " I have no name — my home a hovel damp; I grew up from the mire; Wretched and outcast folk my family, And yet within me burns a flame of fire."
There is always a praying angel and an evil dwarf on either side. The black abyss attracts her, yet she is softened by a child's caress.
* Fate. Translated from the Italian by A. M. Von Blomberg. Cope- land and Day, Boston, 1898.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE she laughs at the blackest calamities that threaten her, but weeps over thin, wan children without bread. Her whole life goes into song. The boy criminal on the street fascinates her and she would kiss him. She writes of jealousy as a ghost of vengeance. If death comes, she fears ''that the haggard doctor will dissect my naked corpse," and pictures herself dying on the operating-table like a stray dog, and her well-made body " disgraced by the lustful kiss of the too eager blade " as, "with sinister smile untiring, they tear my bowels out and still gloat over my sold corpse, go on to bare my bones and veins at will, wrench out my heart," probe vainly for the secrets of hunger and the mystery of pain, until from her ''dead breast gurgles a gasp of male- diction." Much of her verse is imprecation. "A crimson rain of crying blood dripping from riddled chests" of those slain for liberty falls on her heart; the sultry factories where "monsters of steel, huge engines, snort all day," and where the pungent air poisons the blood of the pale weaver girls; the fate of the mason who fell from a high roof and struck the stone flagging, whose funeral she attends, all in- spire her to sing occasionally the songs of enfranchised labor. Misery as a drear, toothless ghost visits her, as when gloomy pinions had overspread her dying mother's bed, to wrench with sharp nails all the hope from her breast with which she had defied it. A wretched old man on the street inspires her to sing of what she imagines is his happy though humble prime. There is the song of the pickaxe brandished in revolution when mobs cry "Peace, labor, bread," and in mines of industry beneath the earth. She loves the "defeated" in whose house no fire glows, who live in caves and dens, and writes of the mutilation of a woman in the factory machinery. At eighteen years "a loom, two handsome eyes that know no tears, a cotton dress, a love, belong to me." She is inspired by a master of the forge beat- ing a red-hot bar, with his bare neck swelled. He is her demon, her God, and her pride in him is ecstasy. She describes jealousy of two rival women, so intense that they fight and bite, and the pure joy of a guileless, intoxicating, life-begetting first kiss. She longs for infinite stretches of hot, golden sand, over which she would gallop wildly on her steed; anticipates an old age of cap and spectacles; revels in the hurricane, and would rise in and fly and whirl with it adrift far out in the immensity of space. She tells us, "Of genius and light I'm a blithe millionaire," and elsewhere she longs for the ever- lasting ice of lofty mountains, the immortal silence of the Alps; sings of her "sad twenty years," "how all, all goes when love is gone and spent." She imagines herself springing into the water which closes over her, while her naked soul, ghostly pale, whirls past through the lonely dale. She imprecates the licentious world of crafty burghers, BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH coquettes, gamblers, well-fed millionaires, cursed geese and serpents that make the cowardly vile world, and whom she would smite in the face with her indignant verse. *'Thou crawlest and I soar." She chants the champions of the spade, hammer, pick, though they are ground and bowed with toil, disfigured within, with furrowed brows. She pants for war with outrage and with wTong; questions the abyss for its secret; hears moans and flying shudders; and sees phantoms springing from putrid tombs. The full moon is an old malicious spy, peeping stealthily with evil eye. She is a bird caught in a cursed cage, and prays some one to unlock the door and give her space and light, and let her soar away in ecstasy and glory. Nothing less than infinite space will satisfy her. Even the tempest, the demon, or a malevolent spirit might bear her away on unbridled wings. In one poem she apostrophizes Marie Bashkirtseff as warring with vast genius against unknown powers, but who now is in her coffin among worms, her skull grinning and showing its teeth. She would be possessed by her and thrilled as by an electric current. A dwarf beggar wrings her heart with pity, but she will not be overwhelmed. Though a daring peasant, she will be free and sing out her psean to the sun, though amid the infernal glow of furnaces, forges, and the ring- ing noise of hammers and wheels.
Literary men who record their experiences during this stage seem to differ from women in several impor- tant respects. First, they write with less abandon. I can recall no male MacLanes. A Bashkirtseff would be less impossible, and a Negri with social reform in her heart is still less so. But men are more prone to char- acterize their public metamorphoses later in life, when they are a little paled, and perhaps feel less need of confessionalism for that reason. It would, however, be too hazardous to elaborate this distinction too far. Sec- ondly and more clearly, men tend to vent their ephebic calentures more in the field of action. They would break the old moorings of home and strike out new careers, or vent their souls in efforts and dreams of reconstructing the political, industrial, or social world. Their impracticabilities are more often in the field of practical life and remoter from their own immediate YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE surroundings. This is especially true in our practical country, which so far lacks subjective characterizations of this age of eminent literary merit, peculiarly intense as it is here. Thirdly, they erupt in a greater variety of ways, and the many kinds of genius and talent that now often take possession of their lives like fate are more varied and individual. This affords many extreme con- trasts, as, e. g., between Trollope's pity for, and Goethe's apotheosis of his youth; Mill's loss of feeling, and Jef- feries's unanalytic, passionate outbursts of sentiment; the esthetic ritualism of Symonds, and the progressive religious emancipation of Fielding Hall; the moral and religious supersensitiveness of Oliphant, who was a rein- carnation of medieval monkhood, and the riotous storminess of Miiller and Ebers; the abnormalities and precocity of De Quincey, and the steady, healthful growth of Patterson, the simultaneity of a fleshly and spiritual love in Keller and Goethe, and the duality of Pater, with his great and tyrannical intensification of sensation for nature and the sequent mysticity and symbolism. In some it is fulminating but episodic, in others gradual and lifelong like the advent of eternal spring. Fourth, in their subjective states women outgrow less in their consciousness, and men depart farther from their youth, in more manifold ways. Lastly, in its religious aspects, the male struggles more with dogma, and his enfranchisement from it is more intellectually belabored. Y^et, despite all these differences, the anal- ogies between the sexes are probably yet more numerous, more all-pervasive. All these biographic facts reveal nothing not found in questionnaire returns from more ordinary youth, so that for our purposes they are only the latter, writ large because superior minds only utter what all more inwardly feel. The arrangement by na- BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH tionality which follows gives no yet adequate basis for inference unless it be the above American peculiarity. In his autobiography from 1785-1803, De Quincey ^ remembered feeling that life was finished and blighted for him at the age of six, up to which time the influence of his sister three years older had brooded over him.
His first remembrance, however, is of a dream of terrific grandeur before he was two, which seemed to indicate that his dream tend- encies were constitutional and not due to morphine, but the chill was upon the first glimpse that this was a world of evil. He had been brought up in great seclusion from all knowledge of poverty and op- pression in a silent garden with three sisters, but the rumor that a female servant had treated one of them rudely just before her death plunged him into early pessimism. He felt that little Jane would come back certainly in the spring with the roses, and he was glad that his utter misery with the blank anarchy and confusion which her death brought could not be completely remembered. He stole into the chamber where her corpse lay, and as he stood, a solemn wind, the saddest he ever heard, that might have swept the fields of mortality for a thousand centuries, blew, and that same hollow Memnonian wind he often had heard since, and it brought back the open summer window and the corpse. A vault above opened into the sky, and he slept and dreamed there, standing by her, he knew not how long; a worm that could not die was at his heart, for this was the holy love between children that could not perish. The funeral was full of darkness and despair for him, and after it he sought solitude, gazed into the heavens to see his sister till he was tired, and realized that he was alone. Thus, before the end of his sixth year, with a mind already adolescent, although with a retarded body, the minor tone of life became dominant and his awakening to it was hard.
As a penniless schoolboy wandering the streets of London at night, he was on familiar and friendly terms of innocent relationship with a number of outcast women. In his misery they were to him simply sisters in calamity, but he found in them humanity, disinterested gen- erosity, courage, and fidelity. One night, after he had walked the streets for weeks with one of these friendless girls who had not com- pleted her sixteenth year, as they sat on the steps of a house, he grew 1 Confessions of an Opium Eater. Part I. Introductory Narrative. (Cambridge Classics) 1896.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE very ill, and had she not rushed to buy from her slender purse cordials and tenderly ministered to and revived him, he would have died. Many years later he used to wander past this house, and he recalled with real tenderness this youthful friendship; he longed again to meet the "noble-minded Ann " with whom he had so often con- versed familiarly "more Socratico," whose betrayer he had vainly sought to punish, and yearned to hear from her in order to convey to her some authentic message of gratitude, peace, and forgiveness.
His much older brother came home in his thirty-ninth year to die. He had been unmanageable in youth and his genius for mischief was an inspiration, yet he was hostile to everything pusillanimous, haughty, aspiring, ready to fasten a quarrel on his shadow for run- ning before, at first inclined to reduce his boy brother to a fag, but finally before his death became a great influence in his life. Prom- inent were the fights between De Quincey and another older brother on the one hand, and the factory crowd of boys on the other, a fight incessantly renewed at the close of factory hours, with victory now on one and now on the other side; fought with stones and sticks, where thrice he was taken prisoner, where once one of the factory women kissed him, to the great delight of his heart. He finally in- vented a kingdom like Hartley Coleridge, called Gom Broon. He thought first that it had no location, but finally because his brother's imaginary realm was north and he wanted wide waters between them, his was in the far south. It was only two hundred and seventy miles in circuit, and he was stunned to be told by his brother one day that his own domain swept south for eighty degrees, so that the distance he had relied on vanished. Here, however, he continued to rule for well or ill, raising taxes, keeping an imaginary standing army, fishing herring and selling the product of his fishery for manure, and ex- periencing how ''uneasy lies the head that wears a crown." He worried over his obligations to Gom Broon, and the shadow froze into reality, and although his brother's kingdom Tigrosylvania was larger, his was distinguished for eminent men and a history not to be ashamed of. A friend had read Lord Monboddo's view that men had sprung from apes, and suggested that the inhabitants of Gom Broon had tails, so that the brother told him that his subjects had not emerged from apedom and he must invent arts to eliminate the tails. They must be made to sit down for six hours a day as a beginning. Abdicate he would not, though all his subjects had three tails apiece. They had suffered together. Vain was his brother's suggestion that they have a Roman toga to conceal their ignominious appendages. He was greatly interested in two scrofulous idiots, who finally died, and feared that his subjects were akin to them.
BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH John Stuart Llill's Autobiography presents one of the most remarkable modifications of the later phases of adolescent experience. No boy ever had more dili- gent and earnest training than his father gave him or responded better. lie can not remember when he began to learn Greek, but was told that it was at the age of three. The list of classical authors alone that he read in the original, to say nothing of history, political, scientific, logical, and other works before he was twelve, is perhaps unprecedented in all history. He associated with his father and all his many friends on their own level, but modestly ascribes everything to his environ- ment, insists that in natural gifts he is rather below than above par, and declares that everything he did could be done by every boy of average capacity and healthy physical constitution. His father made the Greek virtue of temperance or moderation cardinal, and thought human life *' a poor thing at best after the freshness of youth and unsatisfied curiosity had gone by." He scorned " the intense " and had only con- tempt for strong emotion.
In his teens Mill was an able debater and writer for the quarterlies, and devoted to the propagation of the theories of Bentham, Ricardo, and associationism. From the age of fifteen he had an object in life, viz., to reform the world. This gave him happiness, deep, perma- nent, and assured for the future, and the idea of struggling to promote utilitarianism seemed an inspiring program for life. But in the autumn of 1826, when he was twenty years of age, he fell into **a dull state of nerves," where he could no longer enjoy and what had pro- duced pleasure seemed insipid; ''the state, I should think, in which converts to Methodism usually are when smitten by their first ' con- viction of sin.' In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: 'Suppose that all your objects in hfe were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to could be completely effected at this very instant; would this be a great joy and happiness to you?' And an YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered. 'No.' At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for. At first I hoped that the cloud would pass away of itself, but it did not. A night's sleep, the sovereign remedy for the smaller vexations of life, had no effect on it. I awoke to a renewed consciousness of the woful fact. I carried it with me into all companies, into all occupations. Hardly anything had power to cause me even a few minutes' oblivion of it. For some months the cloud seemed to grow thicker and thicker. The lines in Coleridge's ' Dejection ' — I was not then acquainted with them — exactly described my case: " ' A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief. Which finds no natural outlet or relief In word, or sigh, or tear.'
"In vain I sought relief from mj^ favorite books, those memorials of past nobleness and greatness from which I had always hitherto drawn strength and animation. I read them now without feeling, or with the accustomed feeling minus all its charm; and I became per- suaded that my love of mankind, and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself out. I sought no comfort by speaking to others of what I felt. If I had loved any one sufficiently to make confiding my griefs a necessity, I should not have been in the condition I was. I felt, too, that mine was not an interesting or in anyway respectable distress. There was nothing in it to attract sympathy. Advice, if I had known where to seek it, would have been most precious. The words of Macbeth to the physician often occurred to my thoughts. But there was no one on whom I could build the faintest hope of such assistance. My father, to whom it would have been natural to me to have recourse in any practical difficulties, was the last person to whom, in such a case as this, I looked for help. Everything con- vinced me that he had no knowledge of any such mental state as I was suffering from, and that even if he could be made to understand it, he was not the physician who could heal it. My education, which was wholly his work, had been conducted without any regard to the possibility of its ending in this result, and I saw no use in giving him the pain of thinking that his plans had failed, when the failure was probably irremediable, and, at all events, beyond the power of his remedies. Of other friends, I had at that time none to whom I had BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH any hope of making my condition intelligible. It was, however, abundantly intelligible to myself, and the more I dwelt upon it the more hopeless it appeared."
He now saw what had hitherto seemed incredible, that the habit of analysis tends to wear away the feelings. He felt " stranded at the commencement of my voyage, w^ith a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but no. sail; Avithout any real desire for the ends which I had been so carefully fitted out to work for: no delight in virtue, or the general good, but also just as little in anything else. The fountains of vanity and ambition seemed to have dried up within me as com- pletely as those of benevolence." His vanity had been gratified at too early an age, and, like all premature pleasures, they had caused indifference, until he despaired of creating any fresh association of pleasure with any objects of human desire. Meanwhile, dejected and melancholy as he was through the winter, he went on mechanic- ally with his tasks; thought he found in Coleridge the first description of what he was feeling; feared the idiosyncrasies of his education had made him a being unique and apart, " I asked myself if I could or if I was bound to go on living, when life must be passed in this manner. I generally answered to myself that I did not think I could possibly bear it beyond a year." But within about half that time, in reading a pathetic passage of how a mere boy felt that he could save his family and take the place of all they had lost, a vivid conception of the scene caine over him, and he was moved to tears. From that moment his burden grew lighter. He saw that his heart was not dead and that he still had some stuff left of which character and happiness are made; and although there were several later lapses, some of which lasted many months, he was never again as miserable as he had been.
These experiences left him changed in two respects. He had a new theory of life, having much in common with the anti-self-con- sciousness theory of Carlyle. He still held happiness the end of life, but thought it must be aimed at indirectly and taken incidentally. The other change was that for the first time he gave its proper place to internal culture of the individual, especially the training of the feelings which became now cardinal. He realized and felt the power of poetry and art; was profoundly moved by music; fell in love with Wordsworth and with nature; and his later depressions were best re- lieved by the power of rural beauty, which wrought its charm not because of itself but by the states and feelings it aroused. His ode on the intimations of immortality showed that he also had felt that the first freshness of youthful joy was not lasting, and had sought and found compensation. He had thus come to a very different YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE standpoint from that of his father, who had up to this time formed his mind and Ufe, and developed on this basis his unique individuaUty.
Jefferies, when eighteen, began his '' Story of My Heart, ' ' ^ which he said was an absolutely true confes- sion of the stages of emotion in a soul from which all traces of tradition and learning were erased, and which stood face to face with nature and the unknown.
His heart long seemed dusty and parched for want of feeling, and he frequented a hill, where the pores of his soul opened to a new air. " Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea...I desired to have its strength, its mystery and glory. I addressed the sun, desiring the sole equiva- lent of his light and brilliance, his endurance, and unwearied race. I turned to the blue heaven over, gazing into its depth, inhaling its exquisite color and sweetness. The rich blue of the unobtainable flower of the sky drew my soul toward it, and there it rested, for pure color is the rest of the heart. By all these I prayed. I felt an emotion of the soul beyond all definition; prayer is a puny thing to it." He prayed by the thyme; by the earth; the flowers which he touched; the dust which he let fall through his fingers; was filled with "a, rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus. With this inflatus I prayed...I hid my face in the grass; I was wholly prostrated; I lost myself in the wTestle...I see now that what I labored for was soul life, more soul learning." After gazing upward he would turn his face into the grass, shutting out everything with hands each side, till he felt down