into the earth and was absorbed in it, whispering deep down to its center. Every natural impression, trees, insects, air, clouds, he used for prayer, "that my soul might be more than the cosmos of life." His "LjTa" prayer was to live a more exalted and intense soul life; enjoy more bodily pleasure and live long and find power to execute his designs. He often tried, but failed for years to write at least a meager account of these experiences. He felt himself immortal just as he felt beauty. He w^as in eternity already; the supernatural is only the natural misnamed. As he lay face down on the grass, seizing it with both hands, he longed for death, to be burned on a pyre of pine wood on a high hill, to have his ashes scattered wide and broadcast, to be thrown into the space he longed for while living, but he feared that such a luxury of resolution into the elements would be too costly, Thus his naked mind, close against naked mother Nature, wrested 1 Longmans, Green and Co. London, 1891, 2nd ed.
BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH from her the conviction of soul, immortality, deity, under conditions as primitive as those of the cave man, and his most repeated prayer was, "Give me the deepest soul life."
In other moods he felt the world outre-human, and his mind could by no twist be fitted to the cosmos. Ugly, designless creatures caused him to cease to look for deity in nature, where all happens by chance. He at length concluded there is something higher than soul and above deity, and better than God, for which he searched and labored. He found favorite thinking places, to which he made pilgrimages, where he ''felt out into the depths of the ether." His frame could not bear the labor his heart demanded. Work of body was his meat and drink. "Never have I had enough of it. I wearied long before I was satisfied, and weariness did not bring a cessation of desire, the thirst was still there. I rode; I used the ax; I split tree-trunks with wedges; my arms tired, but my spirit re- mained fresh and chafed against the physical weariness." Had he been indefinitely stronger, he would have longed for more strength. He was often out of doors all daj^ and often half the night; wanted more sunshine; wished the day was sixty hours long; took pleasure in braving the cold so that it should be not life's destroyer but its re- newer. Yet he abhorred asceticism. He wrestled with the problem of the origin of his soul and its destiny, but could find no solution; revolted at the assertion that all is designed for the best; "a man of intellect and humanity could cause everything to happen in an in- finitely superior manner." He discovered that no one ever died of old age, but only of disease; that we do not even know what old age would be like; found that his soul is infinite, but lies in abeyance; that we are murdered by our ancestors and must roll back the tide of death; that a hundredth part of man's labor would suffice for his support; that idleness is no evil; that in the future nine-tenths of the time will be leisure, and to that end he will work with all his heart. "I was not more than eighteen when an inner and esoteric meaning began to come to me from all the visible universe, and indefinable aspirations filled me."
Interesting as is this document, it is impossible to avoid the sus- picion that the seventeen years which intervened between the begin- ning of these experiences and their final record, coupled with the perhaps unconscious tendency toward literary effect, detract more or less from their value as documents of adolescent nature.
Mr. H. Fielding Hall, author of " The Soul of a People, ' ' has since written a book ^ in which, beginning 1 The Hearts of Men. Macmillan, London, 1891, p. 324.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE with many definitions of Christianity, weighing the opin- ion of those who think all our advance is made because of, against those who think it in spite of Christianity, he proceeds to give the story of a boy, probably himself, who till twelve was almost entirely reared by women and with children younger than himself.
He was sickly, and believed not in the Old but in the New Testa- ment; in the Sermon on the Mount, which he supposed all accepted and Uved by; that war and wealth were bad and learning apt to be a snare; that the ideal life was that of a poor curate, working hard and unhappy. At twelve, he went to a boarding-school, passed from a woman's world into a man's, out of the New Testament into the Old, out of dreams into reality. War was a glorious opportunity, and all followed the British victories, which were announced publicly. Big boys were going to Sandhurst or Woolwich; there were parties; and the school code never turned the other cheek. Wars were God's storms, stirring stagnant natures to new life; wealth was worshiped; certain lies were an honor; knowledge was an extremely desirable thing — all this was at first new and delightful, but extremely wicked. Sunday was the only other Old Testament rule, but was then for- gotten. Slowly a repugnance of religion in all its forms arose. He felt his teachers hypocrites; he raised no alarm, "for he was hardly conscious that his anchor had dragged or that he had lost hold" of it forever. At eighteen, he read Darwin and found that if he were right, Genesis was wrong; man had risen, not fallen; if a part was wrong, the whole was. If God made the world, the devil seemed to rule it; prayer can not influence him; the seven days of creation were periods, Heaven knows how long. Why did all profess and no one believe religion? Why is God so stern and yet so partial, and how about the Trinity? Then explanations were given. Heaven grew repulsive, as a place for the poor, the maimed, the stupid, the child- ish, and those unfit for earth generally.
Faiths came from the East. ''The North has originated only Thor, Odin, Balder, Valkyres." The gloom and cold drive man into himself; do not open him. In the East one can live in quiet solitude, with no effort, close to nature. The representatives of all faiths wear ostentatiously their badges, pray in public, and no one sneers at all religions. Oriental faiths have no organization; there is no head of Hinduism, Buddhism, or hardly of Mohammedanism. There are no missions, but religion grows rankly from a rich soil, so the boy wrote BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH three demands: a reasonable theon^ of the universe, a workable and working code of conduct, and a promise of something desirable here- after. So he read books and tried to make a system.
On a hill, in a thunder-storm in the East, he realized how Thor was born. Man fears thunder; it seems the voice of a greater man. Deny eyes, legs, and body of the Deity, and nothing is left. God as an abstract spirit is unthinkable, but Buddhism offers us no God, only law. Necessity, blind force, law, or a free personal will — that is the alternative. Freedom limits omnipotence; the two can never mix. "The German Emperor's God, clanking round the heavenly mansions wearing a German Pickelhaube and swearing German oaths," is not satisfactory. Man's God is what he admires most in himself; he can be propitiated, hence atonement; you can not break a law, but you can study it. Inquiry, not submission, is the attitude. Perhaps both destiny and freedom are true, but truth is for the sake of light.
Thor had no moral code; the Greeks were unmoral. Jehovah at first asked only fear, reverence, and worship. This gives no guide to life. Most codes are directed against a foe and against pain. Truth, mercy, courtesy — these were slowly added to reverence; then sanitary rules, hence castes. Two codes, those of Christ and Buddha, tower above all others. They are the same in praising not wealth, greatness, or power, but purity, renunciation of the world, as if one fitted one's self for one by being unfitted for the other world.
Is heaven a bribe? Its ideals are those of children, of girl angels, white wings, floating dresses, no sheep, but lambs. "Surely there is nothing in all the world so babyish." One can hardly imagine a man with a deep voice, with the storm of life beating his soul, amid those baby faces. If happiness in any act or attitude is perfect, it will last forever. Where is due the weariness or satiety? But if happiness be perfect, this is impossible; so life would be monotony akin to annihilation. But life is change, and change is misery. There is effort here; but there will be none in the great peace that passes understanding; no defeat, therefore no victory; no friends, because no enemies; no joyous meetings, because no farewells. It is the shadows and the dark mysteries that sound the depths of our hearts. No man that ever lived, if told that he could be young again or go to any heaven, would choose the latter. Men die for many things, but all fear the beyond. Thus no religion gives us an intelligible First Cause, a code or a heaven that we want. The most religious man is the peasant listening to the angelus, putting out a little ghi for his God; the woman crying in the pagoda. Thus we can only turn to the hearts of men for the truth of religion.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE Biographies and autobiographies furnish many pho- tographic glimpses of the struggles and experiences of early adolescent years.
Anthony Trollope's autobiography * is pitiful. He was poor and disliked by most of his masters and treated with ignominy by his fellow pupils. He describes himself as always in disgrace. At fifteen he walked three miles each way twice a day to and from school. As a sizar he seemed a wretched farmer's boy, reeking from the dunghill, sitting next the sons of big peers. All were against him, and he was allowed to join no games, and learned, he tells us, absolutely nothing but a little Greek and Latin. Once only, goaded to desperation, he rallied and whipped a bully. The boy was never able to overcome the isolation of his school position, and while he coveted popularity with an eagerness which was almost mean, and longed exceedingly to excel in cricket or with the racquet, was allowed to know nothing of them. He remembers at nineteen never to have had a lesson in writing, arithmetic, French, or German. He knew his masters by their ferules and they him. He believes that he has " been flogged oftener than any human being alive." ''It was just possible to obtain five scourgings in one day at Winchester, and I have often boasted that I have obtained them all." Prizes were distributed prodigally, but he never got one. For twelve years of tuition, he says, "I do not remember that I ever knew a lesson."
At this age he describes himself as "an idle, desolate, hanger-on...without an idea of a career or a profession or a trade," but he was tolerably happy because he could fancy himself in love with pretty girls and had been removed from the real misery of school, but- had not a single aspiration regarding his future. Three of his house- hold were dying of consumption, and his mother was day nurse, night nurse, and divided her time between pill-boxes and the ink- bottle, for when she was seventy-six she had written one hundred and forty volumes, the first of which was not written till she was fiftj'-.
Gradually the boy became alive to the blighted ambition of his father's life and the strain his mother was enduring, nursing the dying household and writing novels to provide a decent roof for them to die under. Anthony got a position at the post-office without an examination. He knew no French nor science; was a bad speller and worse writer and could not have sustained an examination on any subject. Still he could not bear idleness, and was always going » An Autobiography. Edited by H. M. TroUope. 2 vols. London, BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH about with some castle in the air firmly built in his mind, carrying on for weeks and years the same continuous story; binding himself down to certain laws, proprieties, and unities; always his own hero, ex- cluding everything violently improbable. To this practise, which he calls dangerous and which began six or seven years before he went to the post-office, he ascribes his power to maintain an interest in a fic- titious story and to live in an entirely outside imaginative life. During these seven years he acquired a character of irregularity and grew reckless.
Mark Pattison ^ shows us how his real life began in the middle teens, when his energy was ''directed to one end, to improve myself"; "to form my own mind; to sound things thoroughly; to be free from the bondage of unreason and the traditional prejudices which, when I first began to think, constituted the whole of my mental fabric." He entered upon life with a ''hide-bound and contracted intellect," and depicts "something of the steps by which I emerged from that frozen condition." He believes that to "remember the dreams and confusions of childhood and never to lose the recollection of the curi- osity and simplicity of that age, is one of the great gifts of the poetic character," although this, he tells us, was extraordinarily true of George Sand, but not of himself. From the age of twelve on, a Fel- lowship at Oriel was the ideal of his life, and although he became a commoner there at seventeen, his chief marvel is that he was so im- mature and unimpressionable.
William Hale White ^ learned little at school, save Latin and good penmanship, but his very life was divided into halves — Sundays and week days — and he reflects at some length upon the immense dan- gers of the early teens; the physiological and yet subtler psychic pen- alties of error; callousness to fine pleasures; hardening of the con- science; and deplores the misery which a little instruotion might have saved him. At fourteen he underwent conversion, understood in his sect to be a transforming miracle, releasing higher and imprisoning lower powers. He compares it to the saving of a mind from vice by falling in love with a woman who is adored, or the reclamation of a young woman from idleness and vanity by motherhood. But as a boy he was convinced of many things which were mere phrases, and attended prayer-meetings for the clanship of being marked off from iSee his Memoirs. London, 1885.
2 See Autobiography of Mark Rutherford (pseudonym for W. H. White), edited by Reuben Shapcott. 2 vols. London, 188L YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE the world and of walking home with certain girls. He learned to say in prayer that there was nothing good in him, that he was rotten and filthy and his soul a mass of putrefying sores; but no one took him at his word and expelled him from society, but thought the better of him. Soon he began to study theology, but found no help in sup- pressing tempestuous lust, in understanding the Bible, or getting his doubts answered, and all the lectures seemed irrelevant chattering. An infidel was a monster whom he had rarely ever seen. At nineteen he began to preach, but his heart was untouched till he read Words- worth's lyrical ballads, and this recreated a living God for him, melted his heart to tears, and made him long for companionship; its effect was instantly seen in his preaching, and soon made him slightly suspected as heretical. ^ John Addington Symonds, in his autobiography, describes his "in- sect-like" devotion to creed in the green infancy of ritualism. In his early teens at boarding-school he and his mates, with half sincerity, followed a classmate to compline, donned surplices, tossed censers, arranged altars in their studies, bought bits of painted glass for their windows and illuminated crucifixes with gold dust and vermilion. When he was confirmed, this was somewhat of an epoch. Prepara- tion was like a plowshare, although it turned up nothing valuable, and stimulated esthetic and emotional ardor. In a dim way he felt God near, but he did not learn to fling the arms of the soul in faith around the cross of Christ. Later the revelation he found in Plato removed him farther from boyhood. He fell in love with gray Gothic churches, painted glass, organ lofts, etc.
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"; 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, 1 The rest of the two volumes is devoted to his further life as a dis- senting minister, who later became something of a literary man; relating how he was slowly driven to leave his little church, how he outgrew and broke with the girl to whom he was engaged, whom he marvelously met and married when both were well on in years, and how strangely he was influenced by the free-thinker Mardon and his remarkable daughter. All in all it is a rare study of emancipation.
BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 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 motion- less, 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 companion- ship made the world more satisfying. There was "a constant sub- stitution of the typical for the actual," and angels might be met any- where. ''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 unpleasurable awe generated by the habitual recogni- tion, 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 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 Woolwich; 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 declared that he would never make an officer, he YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 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 correspond- ing on religious topics with his elder 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, inter- rupted 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 pro- bationer, and the next year, in 1845, as 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 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 iMacmillan, 1902.
2 Life of Sir J. F. Stephen. By his brother, Leslie Stephen. Lon- ■ BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 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 Var- den, perhaps the most exuberant, good-humored, and beautiful girl in all the Dickens gallery; Martin Chuzzle- wit, who also ran away, as did David Copperfield, per- haps the most true to adolescence because largely reminis- cent of the author 's own life; Steerf orth, a stranger from home, and his victim. Little Emily; and to some extent Sam Weller, Dick Swiveller, the Marchioness, young Pod- snap, the Artful Dodger, and Charley Bates; while Oli- ver Twist, Little Nell, and Little Dorrit, Joe and Turvey- drop in Bleak House, and Paul Dombey, young as they were, show the beginning of the pubescent change. Most of his characters, however, are so overdrawn and carica- tured 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 susceptible to the fascina- tion 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 1 See the very impressive account of Dickens's characterization of childhood and youth, and of his great but hitherto inadequately recog- nized interest and influence as an educator. Dickens as an Educator. James L. Hughes. D. Appleton and Co., New York, 1901, p. 319.
2 John Inglesant: A Romance. 6th ed. Macmillan, 1886.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE fourteen. The philosophy of obedience and of the sub- jection of reason to authority was early taught him, and he sought to live from within, hearing only the divine law, as the worshipers of Cybele heard only the flutes. His twin brother Eustace was an active world- ling, 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 himself to extremely ritualistic forms of worship; dab- bled a little in alchemy and astrology to help develop the divine nature within him and to attain the beatific vision. Soon he was introduced to the '' Protestant nunnery," as it w^as 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 Protestant 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