Next to the selfish lie for protection-of special psychological interest for adolescent crime-is what we may call pseudomania, seen especially in pathological girls in their teens, who are honeycombed with selfishness and affectation and have a pa.s.sion for always acting a part, attracting attention, etc. The recent literature of telepathy and hypnotism furnishes many striking examples of this diathesis of impostors of both s.e.xes. It is a strange psychological paradox that some can so deliberately prefer to call black white and find distinct inebriation in flying diametrically in the face of truth and fact. The great impostors, whose entire lives have been a fabric of lies, are cases in point. They find a distinct pleasure not only in the sense of power which their ability to make trouble gives, but in the sense of making truth a lie, and of decreeing things into and out of existence.
Sheldon"s interesting statistics show that among the inst.i.tutional activities of American children,[12] predatory organizations culminate from eleven to fifteen, and are chiefly among boys. These include bands of robbers, clubs for hunting and fishing, play armies, organized fighting bands between separate districts, a.s.sociations for building forts, etc. This form of a.s.sociation is the typical one for boys of twelve. After this age their interests are gradually transferred to less loosely organized athletic clubs. Sheldon"s statistics are as follows:
Age 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 Total No. of predatory 4 5 3 0 7 1 1 3 1 0 25 = Girls societies 4 2 17 31 18 22 (11) 7 1 0 111 = Boys
Innocent though these predatory habits may be in small boys, if they are not naturally and normally reduced at the beginning of the teens and their energy worked off into athletic societies, they become dangerous. "The robber knight, the pirate chief, and the marauder become the real models." The stealing clubs gather edibles and even useless things, the loss of which causes mischief, into some den, cellar, or camp in the woods, where the plunder of their raids is collected. An organized gang of boy pilferers for the purpose of entering stores had a cache, where the stolen goods were brought together. Some of these bands have specialized on electric bells and connections, or golf sticks and b.a.l.l.s. Jacob Riis says that on the East Side of New York, every corner has its gang with a program of defiance of law and order, where the young tough who is a coward alone becomes dangerous when he hunts with the pack. He is ambitious to get "pinched" or arrested and to pose as a hero. His vanity may obliterate common fear and custom as his mind becomes inflamed with flash literature and "penny dreadfuls." Sometimes whole neighborhoods are terrorized so that no one dares to testify against the atrocities they commit. Riis even goes so far as to say that "a bare enumeration of the names of the best-known gangs would occupy the pages of this book."[13] The names are sufficiently suggestive-h.e.l.l"s kitchen gang, stable gang, dead men, floaters, rock, pay, hock gang, the soup-house gang, plug uglies, back-alley men, dead beats, cop beaters, and roasters, h.e.l.l benders, chain gang, sheeny skinners, street cleaners, tough kids, sluggers, wild Indians, cave and cellar men, moonlight howlers, junk club, crook gang, being some I have heard of. Some of the members of these gangs never knew a home, were found perhaps as babies wrapped in newspapers, survivors of the seventy-two dead infants Riis says were picked up on the streets in New York in 1889, or of baby farming. They grow up street arabs, slum waifs, the driftwood of society, its flotsam and jetsam, or plankton, fighting for a warn corner in their resorts or living in crowded tenement-houses that rent for more than a house on Fifth Avenue. Arrant cowards singly, they dare and do anything together. A gang stole a team in East New York and drove down the avenue, shopping to throw in supplies, one member sitting in the back of the wagon and shooting at all who interfered. One gang specialized on stealing baby carriages, depositing their inmates on the sidewalk. Another blew up a grocery store because its owner refused a gift they demanded. Another tried to saw off the head of a Jewish pedler. One member killed another for calling him "no gent." Six murderous a.s.saults were made at one time by these gangs within a single week. One who is caught and does his "bit" or "stretch" is a hero, and when a leader is hanged, as has sometimes happened, he is almost envied for his notoriety. A frequent ideal is to pound a policeman with his own club. The gang federates all nationalities. Property is depreciated and may be ruined if it is frequented by these gangs or becomes their lair or "hang-out." A citizen residing on the Hudson procured a howitzer and pointed it at a boat gang, forbidding them to land on his river frontage. They have their calls, whistles, signs, rally suddenly from no one knows where, and vanish in the alleys, bas.e.m.e.nts, roofs, and corridors they know so well. Their inordinate vanity is well called the slum counterpart of self-esteem, and Riis calls the gang a club run wild. They have their own ideality and a gaudy pinchbeck honor. A young tough, when arrested, wrenched away the policeman"s club, dashed into the street, rescued a baby from a runaway, and came back and gave himself up. They batten on the yellowest literature. Those of foreign descent, who come to speak our language better than their parents, early learn to despise them. Gangs emulate each other in hardihood, and this is one cause of epidemics in crime. They pa.s.sionately love boundless independence, are sometimes very susceptible to good influence if applied with great wisdom and discretion, but easily fall away. What is the true moral ant.i.toxin for this cla.s.s, or at least what is the safety-valve and how and when to pull it, we are now just beginning to learn, but it is a new specialty in the great work of salvage from the wreckage of city life. In London, where these groups are better organised and yet more numerous, war is often waged between them, weapons are used and murder is not so very infrequent. Normally this instinct pa.s.ses harmlessly over into a.s.sociations for physical training, which furnishes a safe outlet for these instincts, until the reductives of maturer years have perfected their work.
The causation of crime, which the cure seeks to remove, is a problem comparable with the origin of sin and evil. First, of course, comes heredity, bad antenatal conditions, bad homes, unhealthful infancy and childhood, overcrowded slums with their promiscuity and squalor, which are always near the border of lawlessness, and perhaps are the chief cause of crime. A large per cent of juvenile offenders, variously estimated, but probably one-tenth of all, are vagrants or without homes, and divorce of parents and illegitimacy seem to be nearly equal as causative agencies. If whatever is physiologically wrong is morally wrong, and whatever is physiologically right is morally right, we have an important ethical suggestion from somatic conditions. There is no doubt that conscious intelligence during a certain early stage of its development tends to deteriorate the strength and infallibility of instinctive processes, so that education is always beset with the danger of interfering with ancestral and congenital tendencies. Its prime object ought to be moralization, but it can not be denied that in conquering ignorance we do not thereby conquer poverty or vice. After the free schools in London were opened there was an increase of juvenile offenders. New kinds of crime, such as forgery, grand larceny, intricate swindling schemes, were doubled, while sneak thieves, drunkards, and pick-pockets decreased, and the proportion of educated criminals was greatly augmented.[14] To collect ma.s.ses of children and ram them with the same una.s.similated facts is not education in this sense, and we ought to confess that youthful crime is an expression of educational failure. Illiterate criminals are more likely to be detected, and also to be condemned, than are educated criminals. Every anthropologist knows that the deepest poverty and ignorance among primitive people are in nowise incompatible with honesty, integrity, and virtue. Indeed there is much reason to suspect that the extremes of wealth and poverty are more productive of crime than ignorance, or even intemperance. Educators have no doubt vastly overestimated the moral efficiency of the three R"s and forgotten that character in infancy is all instinct; that in childhood it is slowly made over into habits; while at adolescence more than at any other period of life, it can be cultivated through ideals. The dawn of p.u.b.erty, although perhaps marked by a certain moral hebetude, is soon followed by a stormy period of great agitation, when the very worst and best impulses in the human soul struggle against each other for its possession, and when there is peculiar p.r.o.neness to be either very good or very bad. As the agitation slowly subsides, it is found that there has been a renaissance of either the best or the worst elements of the soul, if not indeed of both.
Although pedagogues make vast claims for the moralizing effect of schooling, I cannot find a single criminologist who is satisfied with the modern school, while most bring the severest indictments against it for the blind and ignorant a.s.sumption that the three R"s or any merely intellectual training can moralize. By nature, children are more or less morally blind, and statistics show that between thirteen and sixteen incorrigibility is between two and three times as great as at any other age. It is almost impossible for adults to realize the irresponsibility and even moral neurasthenia incidental to this stage of development. If we reflect what a girl would do if dressed like a boy and leading his life and exposed to the same moral contagion, or what a boy would do if corseted and compelled to live like a girl, perhaps we can realize that whatever role heredity plays, the youth who go wrong are, in the vast majority of cases, victims of circ.u.mstances or of immaturity, and deserving of both pity and hope. It was this sentiment that impelled Zarnadelli to reconstruct the criminal law of Italy, in this respect, and it was this sympathy that made Rollet a self-const.i.tuted advocate, pleading each morning for the twenty or thirty boys and eight or ten girls arrested every day in Paris.
Those smitten with the inst.i.tution craze or with any extreme correctionalist views will never solve the problem of criminal youths. First of all, they must be carefully and objectively studied, lived with, and understood as in this country Gulick, Johnson, Forbush and Yoder are doing in different ways, but each with success. Criminaloid youth is more sharply individualized than the common good child, who is less differentiated. Virtue is more uniform and monotonous than sin. There is one right but there are many wrong ways, hence they need to be individually studied by every paidological method, physical and psychic. Keepers, attendants, and even sponsors who have to do with these children should be educators with souls full of fatherhood and motherhood, and they should understand that the darkest criminal propensities are frequently offset by the very best qualities; that juvenile murderers are often very tender-hearted to parents, sisters, children, or pets;[15] they should understand that in the criminal const.i.tution there are precisely the same ingredients, although perhaps differently compounded, accentuated, mutually controlled, etc., by the environment, as in themselves, so that to know all would, in the great majority of cases, be to pardon all; that the home sentiments need emphasis; that a little less stress of misery to overcome the effects of economic malaise and, above all, a friend, mentor, adviser are needed.
I incline to think that many children would be better and not worse for reading, provided it can be done in tender years, stories like those of Captain Kidd, Jack Sheppard, d.i.c.k Turpin, and other gory tales, and perhaps later tales like Eugene Aram, and the ophidian medicated novel, Elsie Venner, etc., on the principle of the Aristotelian catharsis to arouse betimes the higher faculties which develop later, and whose function it is to deplete the bad centers and suppress or inhibit their activity. Again, I believe that judicious and incisive scolding is a moral tonic, which is often greatly needed, and if rightly administered would be extremely effective, because it shows the instinctive reaction of the sane conscience against evil deeds and tendencies. Special pedagogic attention should be given to the sentiment of justice, which is almost the beginning of personal morals in boys; and plays should be chosen and encouraged that hold the beam even, regardless of personal wish and interest. Further yet benevolence and its underlying impulse to do more than justice to our a.s.sociates; to do good in the world; to give pleasure to those about, and not pain, can be directly cultivated. Truth-telling presents a far harder problem, as we have seen. It is no pedagogical triumph to clip the wings of fancy, but effort should be directed almost solely against the cowardly lies, which cover evil; and the heroism of telling the truth and taking the consequences is another of the elements of the moral sense, so complex, so late in development, and so often permanently crippled. The money sense, by all the many means now used for its development in school, is the surest safeguard against the most common juvenile crime of theft, and much can be taught by precept, example, and moral regimen of the sacredness of property rights. The regularity of school work and its industry is a valuable moralizing agent, but entirely inadequate and insufficient by itself. Educators must face the fact that the ultimate verdict concerning the utility of the school will be determined, as Talleck well says, by its moral efficiency in saving children from personal vice and crime.
Wherever any source of pollution of school communities occurs, it must be at once and effectively detected, and some artificial elements must be introduced into the environment. In other words, there must be a system of moral orthopedics. Garofalo"s[16] new term and principle of "temibility" is perhaps of great service. He would thus designate the quantum of evil feared that is sufficient to restrain criminal impulsion. We can not measure guilt or culpability, which may be of all degrees from nothing to infinity perhaps, but we can to some extent scale the effectiveness of restraint, if criminal impulse is not absolutely irresistible. Pain then must be so organised as to follow and measure the offense by as nearly a natural method as possible, while on the other hand the rewards for good conduct must also be more or less accentuated. Thus the problem of criminology for youth can not be based on the principles now recognised for adults. They can not be protective of society only, but must have marked reformatory elements. Solitude[17] which tends to make weak, agitated, and fearful, at this very gregarious age should be enforced with very great discretion. There must be no personal and unmotivated clemency or pardon in such scheme, for, according to the old saw, "Mercy but murders, pardoning those who kill"; nor on the other hand should there be the excessive disregard of personal adjustments, and the uniformitarian, who perhaps celebrated his highest triumph in the old sentence, "Kill all offenders and suspects, for G.o.d will know his own," should have no part nor lot here. The philosopher Hartmann has a suggestive article advocating that penal colonies made up of transported criminals should be experimented upon by statesmen in order to put various theories of self-government to a practical test. However this may be, the penologist of youth must face some such problem in the organization of the house of detention, boys" club, farm, reformatory, etc. We must pa.s.s beyond the clumsy apparatus of a term sentence., or the devices of a jury, clumsier yet, for this purpose; we must admit the principle of regret, fear, penance, material restoration of damage, and understand the sense in which, for both society and for the individual, it makes no practical difference whether experts think there is some taint of insanity, provided only that irresponsibility is not hopelessly complete.
In few aspects of this theme do conceptions of and practises in regard to adolescence need more radical reconstruction. A mere accident of circ.u.mstance often condemns to criminal careers youths capable of the highest service to society, and for a mere brief season of temperamental outbreak or obstreperousness exposes them to all the infamy to which ignorant and cruel public opinion condemns all those who have once been detected on the wrong side of the invisible and arbitrary line of rect.i.tude. The heart of criminal psychology is here; and not only that, but I would conclude with a most earnest personal protest against the current methods of teaching and studying ethics in our academic inst.i.tutions as a speculative, historical, and abstract thing. Here in the concrete and saliently objective facts of crime it should have its beginning, and have more blood and body in it by getting again close to the hot battle line between vice and virtue, and then only, when balanced and sanified by a rich ballast of facts, can it with advantage slowly work its way over to the larger and higher philosophy of conduct, which, when developed from this basis, will be a radically different thing from the shadowy phantom, schematic speculations of many contemporary moralists, taught in our schools and colleges.
[Footnote 1: Problematische Kindesnaturen. Eine Studie fur Schule und Haus. Voigtlander, Leipzig, 1889.]
[Footnote 2: Die padagogische Pathologie in der Erziehungskunde des 19 Jahrhunderts. Bertelsman, Gutersloh, 1893, p. 494.]
[Footnote 3: Peculiar and Exceptional Children. Pedagogical Seminary, October, 1896, vol. 4, pp. 3-60.]
[Footnote 4: La p.u.b.erte. Schleicher Freres, Paris, 1902, p. 72.]
[Footnote 5: Home and School Punishments. Pedagogical Seminary, March, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 159-187.]
[Footnote 6: A Study of the Faults of Children. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1903, vol. 10, p. 200 et seq.]
[Footnote 7: The Child and the Weather, by Edwin G. Dexter.
Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1898, vol. 5, pp. 512-522.]
[Footnote 8: Psychic Effects of the Weather, by J.S. Lemon. American Journal of Psychology, January, 1894, vol. 6, pp. 277-279.]
[Footnote 9: Truancy as Related to the Migrating Instinct, by L.W.
Kline. Pedagogical Seminary, January, 1898, vol. 5, pp. 381-420.]
[Footnote 10: Children"s Lies. American Journal of Psychology, January, 1890, vol. 3, pp. 59-70.]
[Footnote 11: Poems. With memoir by his brother, 2 vols., London, 1851.]
[Footnote 12: American Journal of Psychology, July, 1898, vol. 9, pp. 425-448.]
[Footnote 13: How the Other Half Lives. Scribner"s Sons, New York, 1890, p. 229.]
[Footnote 14: The Curse in Education, by Rebecca Harding Davis. North American Review, May, 1899, vol. 168, pp. 609-614.]
[Footnote 15: Holtzendorff: Psychologie des Mordes. C. Pfeiffer, Berlin, 1875]
[Footnote 16: La Criminologie. Paris, Alcan, 1890, p. 332]
[Footnote 17: See its psychology and dangers well pointed out by M.H.
Small: Psychical Relations of Society and Solitude. Pedagogical Seminary, April, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 13-69]
CHAPTER VIII
BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH
Knightly ideals and honor-Thirty adolescents from Shakespeare-Goethe-C.D. Warner-Aldrich-The fugitive nature of adolescent experience-Extravagance of autobiographies-Stories that attach to great names-Some typical crazes-Ill.u.s.trations from George Eliot, Edison, Chatterton, Hawthorne, Whittier, Spencer, Huxley, Lyell, Byron, Heine, Napoleon, Darwin, Martineau, Aga.s.siz, Madame Roland, Louisa Alcott, F.H. Burnett, Helen Keller, Marie Bashkirtseff, Mary MacLane, Ada Negri, De Quincey, Stuart Mill, Jefferies, and scores of others.
The knightly ideals and those of secular life generally during the middle ages and later were in striking contrast to the ascetic ideals of the early Christian Church; in some respects they were like those of the Greeks. Honor was the leading ideal, and muscular development and that of the body were held in high respect; so that the spirit of the age fostered conceptions not unlike those of the j.a.panese Bushido. Where elements of Christianity were combined with this we have the spirit of the pure chivalry of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, which affords perhaps the very best ideals for youth to be found in history, as we shall see more fully later.
In a very interesting paper, ent.i.tled "Shakespeare and Adolescence," Dr. M.F. Libby[1] very roughly reckons "seventy-four interesting adolescents among the comedies, forty-six among the tragedies, and nineteen among the histories." He selects "thirty characters who, either on account of direct references to their age, or because of their love-stories, or because they show the emotional and intellectual plasticity of youth, may be regarded as typical adolescents." His list is as follows: Romeo, Juliet, Hamlet, Ophelia, Imogen, Perdita, Arviragus, Guiderius, Palamon, Arcite, Emilia, Ferdinand, Miranda, Isabella, Mariana, Orlando, Rosalind, Biron, Portia, Jessica, Phebe, Katharine, Helena, Viola, Troilus, Cressida, Ca.s.sio, Marina, Prince Hal, and Richard of Gloucester. The proof of the youth of these characters, as set forth, is of various kinds, and Libby holds that besides these, the sonnets and poems perhaps show a yet greater, more profound and concentrated knowledge of adolescence. He thinks "Venus and Adonis" a successful attempt to treat s.e.x in a candid, naive way, if it be read as it was meant, as a catharsis of pa.s.sion, in which is latent a whole philosophy of art. To some extent he also finds the story of the Pa.s.sionate Pilgrim "replete with the deepest knowledge of the pa.s.sions of early adolescence" The series culminates in Sonnet 116, which makes love the sole beacon of humanity. It might be said that it is connected by a straight line with the best teachings of Plato, and that here humanity picked up the clue, lost, save with some Italian poets, in the great interval.
In looking over current autobiographies of well-known modern men who deal with their boyhood, one finds curious extremes. On the one hand are those of which Doctor"s is a type, where details are dwelt upon at great length with careful and suggestive philosophic reflections. The development of his own tastes, capacities, and his entire adult consciousness was a.s.sumed to be due to the incidents of childhood and youth, and especially the latter stage was to him full of the most serious problems essential to his self-knowledge; and in the story of his life he has exploited all available resources of this genetic period of storm and stress more fully perhaps than any other writer. At the other extreme, we have writers like Charles Dudley Warner,[2] a self-made man, whose early life was pa.s.sed on the farm, and who holds his own boyhood there in greater contempt than perhaps any other reputable writer of such reminiscences. All the incidents are treated not only with seriousness, but with a forced drollery and catchy superficiality which reflect unfavorably at almost every point upon the members of his household, who are caricatured; all the precious a.s.sociations of early life on a New England farm are not only made absurd, but from beginning to end his book has not a scintilla of instruction or suggestion for those that are interested in child life. Aldrich[3] is better, and we have interesting glimpses of the pet horse and monkeys, of his fighting the boy bully, running way, and falling in love with an older girl whose engagement later blighted his life. Howells,[4] White,[5] Mitter,[6] Grahame,[7] Heidi,[8] and Mrs. Barnett,[9] might perhaps represent increasing grades of merit in this field in this respect.
Yoder,[10] in his interesting study of the boyhood of great men, has called attention to the deplorable carelessness of their biographers concerning the facts and influences of their youth. He advocates the great pedagogic influence of biography, and would restore the high appreciation of it felt by the Bolandists, which Comte"s positivist calendar, that renamed all the days of the year from three hundred and sixty-five such accounts in 1849, also sought to revive. Yoder selected fifty great modern biographies, autobiographies preferred, for his study. He found a number of lives whose equipment and momentum have been strikingly due to some devoted aunt, and that give many glimpses of the first polarization of genius in the direction in which fame is later achieved. He holds that, while the great men excelled in memory, imagination is perhaps still more a youthful condition of eminence; magnifies the stimulus of poverty, the fact that elder sons become prominent nearly twice as often as younger ones; and raises the question whether too exuberant physical development does not dull genius and talent.
One striking and cardinal fact never to be forgotten considering its each and every phenomenon and stage is that the experiences of adolescence are extremely transitory and very easily forgotten, so that they are often totally lost to the adult consciousness. Lancaster[11] observes that we are constantly told by adults past thirty that they never had this and that experience, and that those who have had them are abnormal; that they are far more rare than students of childhood a.s.sert, etc. He says, "Not a single young person with whom I have had free and open conversation has been free from serious thoughts of suicide," but these are forgotten later. A typical case of many I could gather is that of a lady, not yet in middle life, precise and carefully trained, who, on hearing a lecture on the typical phases of adolescence, declared that she must have been abnormal, for she knew nothing of any of these experiences. Her mother, however, produced her diary, and there she read for the first time since it was written, beginning in the January of her thirteenth year, a long series of resolutions which revealed a course of conduct that brought the color to her face, that she should have found it necessary to pledge not to swear, lie, etc., and which showed conclusively that she had pa.s.sed through about all the phases described. These phenomena are sometimes very intense and may come late in life, but it is impossible to remember feelings and emotions with definiteness, and these now make up a large part of life. Hence we are p.r.o.ne to look with some incredulity upon the immediate records of the tragic emotions and experiences typical and normal at this time, because development has scored away their traces from the conscious soul.
There is a wall around the town of Boyville, says White,[12] in substance, which is impenetrable when its gates have once shut upon youth. An adult may peer over the wall and try to ape the games inside, but finds it all a mockery and himself banished among the purblind grown-ups. The town of Boyville was old when Nineveh was a hamlet; it is ruled by ancient laws; has its own rulers and idols; and only the dim, unreal noises of the adult world about it have changed.
In exploring such sources we soon see how few writers have given true pictures of the chief traits of this developmental period, which can rarely be ascertained with accuracy. The adult finds it hard to recall the emotional and instinctive life of the teens which is banished without a trace, save as scattered hints may be gathered from diaries, chance experiences, or the recollections of others. But the best observers see but very little of what goes on in the youthful soul, the development of which is very largely subterranean. Only when the feelings erupt in some surprising way is the process manifest. The best of these sources are autobiographies, and of these only few are full of the details of this stage. Just as in the mythic prehistoric stage of many nations there is a body of legendary matter, which often reappears in somewhat different form, so there is a floating plankton-like ma.s.s of tradition and storiology that seems to attach to eminence wherever it emerges and is repeated over and over again, concerning the youth of men who later achieve distinction, which biographers often incorporate and attach to the time, place, and person of their heroes.
As Burnham[13] well intimates, many of the literary characterizations of adolescence are so marked by extravagance, and sometimes even by the struggle for literary effects, that they are not always the best doc.u.ments, although often based on personal experience. Confessionalism is generally overdrawn, distorted, and especially the pains of this age are represented as too keen. Of George Eliot"s types of adolescent character, this may best be seen in Maggie Tulliver, with her enthusiastic self-renunciation, with "her volcanic upheavings of imprisoned pa.s.sions," with her "wide, hopeless yearning for that something, whatever it was, that was greatest and best on this earth," and in Gwendolen, who, from the moment she caught Deronda"s eye, was "totally swayed in feeling and action by the presence of a person of the other s.e.x whom she had never seen before." There was "the resolute action from instinct and the setting at defiance of calculation and reason, the want of any definite desire to marry, while all her conduct tended to promote proposals." Exaggeration, although not the perversions of this age often found in adult characterizations, is marked trait of the writings of adolescents, whose conduct meanwhile may appear rational, so that this suggests that consciousness may at this stage serve as a harmless vent for tendencies that would otherwise cause great trouble if turned to practical affairs. If Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the adolescent tyrant slayers of Greece, had been theorists, they might have been harmless on the principle that its a.n.a.lysis tends to dissipate emotion.
Lancaster[14] gathered and glanced over a thousand biographies, from which he selected 200 for careful study, choosing them to show different typical directions of activity. Of these, 120 showed a distinct craze for reading in adolescence; 109 became great lovers of nature; 58 wrote poetry, 58 showed a great and sudden development of energy; 55 showed great eagerness for school; 53 devoted themselves for a season to art and music; 53 became very religious; 51 left home in the teens; 51 showed dominant instincts of leadership; 49 had great longings of many kinds; 46 developed scientific tastes; 41 grew very anxious about the future; 34 developed increased keenness of sensation or at least power of observation; in 32 cases health was better; 31 were pa.s.sionately altruistic; 23 became idealists; 23 showed powers of invention; 17 were devoted to older friends; 15 would reform society; 7 hated school. These, like many other statistics, have only indicative value, as they are based on numbers that are not large enough and upon returns not always complete.
A few typical instances from Lancaster must here suffice. Savonarola was solitary, pondering, meditating, felt profoundly the evils of the world and need of reform, and at twenty-two spent a whole night planning his career. Sh.e.l.ley during these years was unsocial, much alone, fantastic, wandered much by moonlight communing with stars and moon, was attached to an older man. Beecher was intoxicated with nature, which he declared afterward to have been the inspiration of his life. George Eliot at thirteen had a pa.s.sion for music and became a clever pianist. At sixteen she was religious, founded societies for the poor and for animals, and had fitting spells of misanthropy. Edison undertook to read the Detroit Free Library through, read fifteen solid feet as the books stand on the shelves, was stopped, and says he has read comparatively little since. Tolstoi found the aspect of things suddenly changed. Nature put on a new appearance. He felt he might commit the most dreadful crimes with no purpose save curiosity and the need of action. The future looked gloomy. He became furiously angry without cause; thought he was lost, hated by everybody, was perhaps not the son of his father, etc. At seventeen he was solitary, musing about immortality, human destiny, feeling death at hand, giving up his studies, fancying himself a great man with new truths for humanity. By and by he took up the old virtuous course of life with fresh power, new resolutions, with the feeling that he had lost much time. He had a deep religious experience at seventeen and wept for joy over his new life. He had a period before twenty when he told desperate lies, for which he could not account, then a pa.s.sion for music, and later for French novels. Rousseau at this age was discontented, immensely in love, wept often without cause, etc. Keats had a great change at fourteen, wrestling with frequent obscure and profound stirrings of soul, with a sudden hunger for knowledge which consumed his days with fire, and "with pa.s.sionate longing to drain the cup of experience at a draft." He was "at the morning hour when the whole world turns to gold." "The boy had suddenly become a poet." Chatterton was too proud to eat a gift dinner, though nearly starved, and committed suicide at seventeen for lack of appreciation. John Hunter was dull and hated study, but at twenty his mind awoke as did that of Patrick Henry, who before was a lonely wanderer, sitting idly for hours under the trees. Alexander Murray awoke to life at fifteen and acquired several languages in less than two years. Gifford was distraught for lack of reading, went to sea at thirteen, became a shoemaker, studying algebra late at night, was savagely unsociable, sunk into torpor from which he was roused to do splenetic and vexatious tricks, which alienated his friends. Rittenhouse at fourteen was a plowboy, covering the fences with figures, musing on infinite time and s.p.a.ce. Benjamin Thompson was roused to a frenzy for sciences at fifteen; at seventeen walked nine miles daily to attend lectures at Cambridge; and at nineteen married a widow of thirty-three. Franklin had a pa.s.sion for the sea; at thirteen read poetry all night; wrote verses and sold them on the streets of Boston; doubted everything at fifteen; left home for good at seventeen; started the first public library in Philadelphia before he was twenty-one. Robert Fulton was poor, dreamy, mercurial, devoted to nature, art, and literature. He became a painter of talent, then a poet, and left home at seventeen. Bryant was sickly till fourteen and became permanently well thereafter; was precociously devoted to nature, religion, prayed for poetic genius and wrote Thanatopsis before he was eighteen. Jefferson doted on animals and nature at fourteen, and at seventeen studied fifteen hours a day. Garfield, though living in Ohio, longed for the sea, and ever after this period the sight of a ship gave him a strange thrill. Hawthorne was devoted to the sea and wanted to sail on and on forever and never touch sh.o.r.e again. He would roam through the Maine woods alone; was haunted by the fear that he would die before twenty-five. Peter Cooper left home at seventeen; was pa.s.sionately altruistic; and at eighteen vowed he would build a place like his New York Inst.i.tute. Whittier at fourteen found a copy of Burns, which excited him and changed the current of his life. Holmes had a pa.s.sion for flowers, broke into poetry at fifteen, and had very romantic attachments to certain trees. J. T. Trowbridge learned German, French, and Latin alone before twenty-one; composed poetry at the plow and wrote it out in the evening. Henry followed a rabbit under the Public Library at Albany, found a hole in the floor that admitted him to the shelves, and, unknown to any one, read all the fiction the library contained, then turned to physics, astronomy, and chemistry, and developed a pa.s.sion for the sciences. He was stage-struck, and became a good amateur actor. H. H. Boyesen was thrilled by nature and by the thought that he was a Norseman. He had several hundred pigeons, rabbits, and other pets; loved to be in the woods at night; on leaving home for school was found with his arms around the neck of a calf to which he was saying good-by. Maxwell, at sixteen, had almost a horror of destroying a leaf, flower, or fly. Jahn found growing in his heart, at this age, an inextinguishable feeling for right and wrong-which later he thought the cause of all his inner weal and outer woe. When Nansen was in his teens he spent weeks at a time alone in the forest, full of longings, courage, altruism, wanted to get away from every one and live like Crusoe. T. B. Reed, at twelve and thirteen, had a pa.s.sion for reading; ran away at seventeen; painted, acted, and wrote poetry. Cartwright, at sixteen, heard voices from the sky saying, "Look above, thy sins are forgiven thee." Herbert Spencer became an engineer at seventeen, after one idle year. He never went to school, but was a private pupil of his uncle. Sir James Mackintosh grew fond of history at eleven; fancied he was the Emperor of Constantinople; loved solitude at thirteen; wrote poetry at fourteen; and fell in love at seventeen. Thomas Buxton loved dogs, horses, and literature, and combined these while riding on an old horse. At sixteen be fell in love with an older literary woman, which aroused every latent power to do or die, and thereafter he took all the school prizes. Scott began to like poetry at thirteen. Pascal wrote treatises on conic sections at sixteen and invented his arithmetical machine at nineteen. Nelson went to sea at twelve; commanded a boat in peril at fifteen, which at the same age he left to fight a polar bear. Banks, the botanist, was idle and listless till fourteen, could not travel the road marked out for him; when coming home from bathing, he was struck by the beauty of the flowers and at once began his career. Montcalm and Wolfe both distinguished themselves as leaders in battle at sixteen. Lafayette came to America at nineteen, thrilled by our bold strike for liberty. Gustavus Adolphus declared his own majority 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 material[15] to show that school work is a.n.a.lytic, while life is synthetic, and how the narrowness of the school enclosure 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 indolent, but their nature was too large or their ideals too high to be satisfied with it. Wagner at the Nikolaischule at Leipzig was 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. W.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 soph.o.m.ore year "for general negligence in themes, forensics, and recitations," and finally suspended 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 pa.s.sions 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 would compare the man whose youth has been thus pa.s.sed in the tranquility of dispa.s.sionate 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 apt.i.tude 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 cla.s.s 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. "G.o.d 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 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 manners, and was "not only slovenly in construing, but unusually defective in his Greek grammar." Swift was refused his degree because of "dulness and insufficiency," but given it later as a special favor. Wordsworth was disappointing. General Grant was never above mediocrity, and was dropped as corporal in the junior cla.s.s and served the last year as a private. W. H. Seward was called "too stupid to learn." Napoleon graduated forty-second in his cla.s.s. "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 horn 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 thirteen 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 in Richmond. Vittorino da Feltre,[16] according to Dr. Burnham, had a low, 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-consciousness 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 American 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. Averaging 53 poets, the age at which most first poems were published 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. Music 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 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 departed before they were 18. Of 118 scientists, Lancaster 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 cla.s.s culminate between 18 and 20.
While men devoted to physical science, and their biographers, 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 circ.u.mnutations, as a few almost random ill.u.s.trations clearly show:
Tycho Brahe, born in 1596 of ill.u.s.trious 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 effects 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 destruction 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, imprisonment, and all kinds of sad things!" He says that "a special use of astronomy is that it enables us to draw conclusions from the movements in the celestial regions as to human fate." He labored on his island twenty years. He was always versifying, and inscribed a 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.
Galileo[17] was born in 1564 of a Florentine n.o.ble, 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,[18] born in 1642, very frail and sickly, solitary, had a very low piece in the cla.s.s lists of his school; wrote poetry, and at sixteen tried farming. In one of his university examinations in Euclid be did so poorly as to incur special censure. His first incentive to diligent study came from being severely kicked by a high cla.s.s boy. He then resolved to pa.s.s him in studies, and soon rose to the head of the school. He made many ingenious toys and windmills; 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 yeas 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 pa.s.sed 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 famous, and devoted himself exclusively to astronomy, training his only son to follow in his footsteps, and dying in 1822.
Aga.s.siz[19] at twelve had developed a mania for collecting. He memorized Latin names, of which he acc.u.mulated "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 revolted at mercantile life, for which he was designed, and issued a manifesto planning to spend four years at a Cermem university, then in Paris, when he could begin to write. Rooks were scarce, and a little later he copied, with the aid of his brother, several large volumes, and had fifty live birds in his room at one time.
At twelve Huxley[20] 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 partic.i.p.ated 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 conservatism; and reproached himself that he did not work and get on enough. At seventeen he attempted a comprehensive cla.s.sification 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 us 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 surpa.s.s men in their power to reproduce and describe the great but so often evanescent ebullitions of this age; perhaps because their later lives, on account of their more generic nature, depart less from this totalizing period, or because, 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 const.i.tutes 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 circ.u.mstances. 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, dream of the past glories of antiquity, and exclaim, weeping, "Why was I not born a Greek?" She desired 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 follow 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 G.o.d 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 moat beautiful, perhaps the n.o.blest woman in all France, and here the curtain moat drop upon her girlhood. All her traits were, of course, set off by the great life she lived and the yet greater death she died.