Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene Part 5

Gifted people seem to conserve their youth and to be all the more children, and perhaps especially all the more intensely adolescents, because of their gifts, and it is certainly one of the marks of genius that the plasticity and spontaneity of adolescence persists into maturity. Sometimes even its pa.s.sions, reveries, and hoydenish freaks continue. In her "Histoire de Ma Vie," it is plain that George Sand inherited at this age an unusual dower of gifts. She composed many and interminable stories, carried on day after day, so that her confidants tried to tease her by asking if the prince had got out of the forest yet, etc. She personated an echo and conversed with it. Her day-dreams and plays were so intense that she often came back from the world of imagination to reality with a shock. She spun a weird zoological romance out of a rustic legend of la grande bete.

When her aunt sent her to a convent, she pa.s.sed a year of rebellion and revolt, and was the leader of les diables, or those who refused to be devout, and engaged in all wild pranks. At fifteen she became profoundly interested in the lives of the saints, although ridiculing miracles. She entered one evening the convent church for service, without permission, which was an act of disobedience. The mystery and holy charm of it penetrated her; she forgot everything outward and was left alone, and some mysterious change stole over her. She "breathed an atmosphere of ineffable sweetness" more with the mind than the senses; had a sudden indescribable perturbation; her eyes swam; she was enveloped in a white glimmer, and heard a voice murmur the words written under a convent picture of St. Augustine, Tolle, lege, and turned around thinking Mother Alicia spoke, but she was alone. She knew it was an hallucination, but saw that faith had laid hold of her, as she wished, by the heart, and she sobbed and prayed to the unknown G.o.d till a nun heard her groaning. At first her ardor impelled her not only to brave the jeers of her madcap club of harum-scarums and tomboys, but she planned to become a nun, until this feverish longing for a recluse life pa.s.sed, but left her changed.[21]

When she pa.s.sed from the simple and Catholic faith of her grisette mother to the atmosphere of her cynical grandmother at Nohant, who was a disciple of Voltaire, she found herself in great straits between the profound sentiments inspired by the first communion and the concurrent contempt for this faith, instilled by her grandmother for all those mummeries through which, however, for conventional reasons she was obliged to pa.s.s. Her heart was deeply stirred, and yet her head holding all religion to be fiction or metaphor, it occurred to her to invent a story which might be a religion or a religion which might be a story into any degree of belief in which she could lapse at will. The name and the form of her new deity was revealed to her in a dream. He was Corambe, pure as Jesus, beautiful as Gabriel, as graceful as the nymphs and Orpheus, less austere than the Christian G.o.d, and as much woman as man, because she could best understand this s.e.x from her love for her mother. He appeared in many aspects of physical and moral beauty; was eloquent, master of all arts, and above all of the magic of musical improvisation; loved as a friend and sister, and at the same time revered as a G.o.d; not awful and remote from impeccability, but with the fault of excess of indulgence. She estimated that she composed about a thousand sacred books or songs developing phases of his mundane existence. In each of these he became incarnate man on touching the earth, always in a new group of people who were good, yet suffering martyrdoms from the wicked known only by the effects of their malice. In this "gentle hallucination" she could lose herself in the midst of friends, and turn to her hero deity for comfort. There must be not only sacred books, but a temple and ritual, and in a garden thicket, which no eye could penetrate, in a moss-carpeted chamber she built an altar against a tree-trunk, ornamented with a wreath hung over it. Instead of sacrificing, which seemed barbaric, she proceeded to restore life and liberty to b.u.t.terflies, lizards, green frogs, and birds, which she put in a box, laid on the altar, and "after having invoked the good genius of liberty and protection," opened it. In these mimic rites and delicious reveries she found the germs of a religion that fitted her heart. From the instant, however, that a boy playmate discovered and entered this sanctuary, "Corambe ceased to dwell in it. The dryads and the cherubim deserted it," and it seemed unreal. The temple was destroyed with great care, and the garlands and sh.e.l.ls were buried under the tree.[22]

Louisa Alcott's romantic period opened at fifteen, when she began to write poetry, keep a heart journal, and wander by moonlight, and wished to be the Bettine of Emerson, in whose library she foraged; wrote him letters which were never sent; sat in a tall tree at midnight; left wild flowers on the doorstep of her master; sang Mignon's song under his window; and was refined by her choice of an idol. Her diary was all about herself.

If she looked in the gla.s.s at her long hair and well-shaped head, she tried to keep down her vanity; her quick tongue, moodiness, poverty, impossible longings, made every day a battle until she hardly wished to live, only something must be done, and waiting is so hard. She imagined her mind a room in confusion which must be put in order; the useless thought swept out; foolish fancies dusted away; newly furnished with good resolutions. But she was not a good housekeeper; cobwebs got in, and it was hard to rule. She was smitten with a mania for the stage, and spent most of her leisure in writing and acting plays of melodramatic style ad high-strung sentiment, improbable incidents, with no touch of common life or sense of humor, full of concealments and surprises, bright dialogues, and lofty sentiments. She had much dramatic power and loved to transform herself into Hamlet and declaim in mock heroic style. From sixteen to twenty-three was her apprentices.h.i.+p to life. She taught, wrote for the papers, did housework for pay as a servant, and found sewing a pleasant resource because it was tranquillizing, left her free, and set her thoughts going.

Mrs. Burnett,[23] like most women who record their childhood and adolescent memories, is far more subjective and interesting than most men. In early adolescence she was never alone when with flowers, but loved to "speak to them, to bend down and say caressing things, to stoop and kiss them, to praise them for their pretty ways of looking up at her as into the eyes of a friend and beloved. There were certain little blue violets which always seemed to lift their small faces childishly, as if they were saying, 'Kiss me; don't go by like that.'" She would sit on the porch, elbows on knees and chin on hands, staring upward, sometimes lying on the gra.s.s. Heaven was so high and yet she was a part of it and was something even among the stars. It was a weird, updrawn, overwhelming feeling as she stared so fixedly and intently that the earth seemed gone, left far behind. Every hour and moment was a wonderful and beautiful thing. She felt on speaking terms with the rabbits. Something was happening in the leaves which waved and rustled as she pa.s.sed. Just to walk, sit, lie around out of doors, to loiter, gaze, watch with a heart fresh as a young dryad, following birds, playing hide-and-seek with the brook-these were her halcyon hours.

With the instability of genius, Beth[24] did everything suddenly. When twelve or thirteen, she had grown too big to be carried, pulled or pushed; she suddenly stood still one day, when her mother, commanded her to dress. She had been ruled before by physical force, but her will and that of her mother were now in collision, and the latter realised she could make her do nothing unless by persuasion or moral influence. Being constantly reproved, scolded, and even beaten by her mother, Beth one day impulsively jumped into the sea, and was rescued with difficulty. She had spells of being miserable with no cause. She was well and happy, but would burst into tears suddenly, which seemed often to surprise her. Being very sensitive herself, she was morbidly careful of the feelings of others and incessantly committed grave sins of insincerity without compunction in her effort to spare them. To those who confided in her abilities, praised her, and thought she could do things, her nature expanded, but her mother checked her mental growth over and over, instead of helping her by saying, "Don't try, you can't do it," etc.

Just before the dawn of adolescence she had pa.s.sed through a long period of abject superst.i.tion, largely through the influence of a servant. All the old woman's signs were very dominant in her life. She even invented methods of divination, as, "if the boards do not creak when I walk across the room I shall get through my lessons without trouble." She always preferred to see two rooks together to one and became expert in the black arts. She used to hear strange noises at night for a time, which seemed signs and portents of disaster at sea, fell into the ways of her neighbors, and had more faith in incantations than in doctors' doses. She not only heard voices and very ingeniously described them, but claimed to know what was going to happen and compared her forebodings with the maid. She "got religion" very intensely under the influence of her aunt, grew thin, lost her appet.i.te and sleep, had heartache to think of her friends burning in h.e.l.l, and tried to save them.

Beth never thought at all of her personal appearance until she overheard a gentleman call her rather nice-looking, when her face flushed and she had a new feeling of surprise and pleasure, and took very clever ways of cross-examining her friends to find if she was handsome. All of a sudden the care of her person became of great importance, and every hint she had heard of was acted on. She aired her bed, brushed her hair glossy, pinched her waist and feet, washed in b.u.t.termilk, used a parasol, tortured her natural appet.i.te in every way, put on gloves to do dirty work, etc.

The house always irked her. Once stealing out of the school by night, she was free, stretched herself, drew a long breath, bounded and waved her arms in an ecstasy of liberty, danced around the magnolia, buried her face in the big flowers one after another and bathed it in the dew of the petals, visited every forbidden place, was particularly attracted to the water, enjoyed scratching and making her feet bleed and eating a lot of green fruit. This liberty was most precious and all through a hot summer she kept herself healthy by exercise in the moonlight. This revived her appet.i.te, and she ended these night excursions by a forage in the kitchen. Beth had times when she hungered for solitude and for nature. Sometimes she would shut herself in her room, but more often would rove the fields and woods in ecstasy. Coming home from school, where she had long been, she had to greet the trees and fields almost before she did her parents. She had a great habit of stealing out often by the most dangerous routes over roofs, etc., at night in the moonlight, running and jumping, waving her arms, throwing herself on the ground, rolling over, walling on all-fours, turning somersaults, hugging trees, playing hide-and-seek with the shadow fairy-folk, now playing and feeling fear and running away. She invoked trees, stars, etc.

Beth's first love affair was with a bright, fair-haired, fat-faced boy, who sat near her pew Sundays. They looked at each other once during service, and she felt a glad glow in her chest spread over her, dwelt on his image, smiled, and even the next day felt a new desire to please. She watched for him to pa.s.s from school. When he appeared, "had a most delightful thrill shoot through her." The first impulse to fly was conquered; she never thought a boy beautiful before. They often met after dark, wrote; finally she grew tired of him because she could not make him feel deeply, sent him off, called him an idiot, and then soliloquized on the "most dreadful grief of her life." The latter stages of their acquaintance she occasionally used to beat him, but his attraction steadily waned. Once later, as she was suffering from a dull, irresolute feeling due to want of a companion and an object, she met a boy of seventeen, whose face, like her own, brightened as they approached. It was the first appearance of nature's mandate to mate. This friendly glance suffused her whole being with the "glory and vision of love." Religion and young men were her need. They had stolen interviews by night and many an innocent embrace and kiss, and almost died once by being caught. They planned in detail what they would do after they were married, but all was taken for granted without formal vows. Only when criticized did they ever dream of caution and concealment, and then they made elaborate parades of ignoring each other in public and fired their imaginations with thoughts of disguises, masks, etc. This pa.s.sion was nipped in the bud by the boy's removal from his school.

In preparing for her first communion, an anonymous writer[25] became sober and studious, proposing to model her life on that of each fresh saint and to spend a week in retreat examining her conscience with vengeance. She wanted to revive the custom of public confession and wrote letters of penitence and submission, which she tore up later, finding her mind not "all of a piece." She lay prostrate on her prie-dieu weeping from ecstasy, lying on the rim of heaven held by angels, wanting to die, now bathed in bliss or aching intolerably with spiritual joy, but she was only twelve and her old nature often rea.s.serted itself. Religion at that time became an intense emotion nourished on incense, music, tapers, and a feeling of being tangible. It was rapturous and sensuous. While under its spell, she seemed to float and touch the wings of angels. Here solemn Gregorian chants are sung, so that when one comes back to earth there is a sense of hunger, deception, and self-loathing. Now she came to understand how so many sentimental and virtuous souls sought oblivion in the narcotic of religious excitement. Here, at the age of twelve, youth began and childhood ended with her book.

Pathetic is the account of Helen Keller's effort to understand the meaning of the word "love" in its season.[26]

Is it the sweetness of flowers? she asked. No, said her teacher. Is it the warm sun? Not exactly. It can not be touched, "'but you feel the sweetness that it pours into everything. Without love, you would not be happy or want to play.' The beautiful truth burst upon my mind. I felt that there were invisible lines stretched between my spirit and the spirit of others." This period seems to have came gradually and naturally to this wonderful child, whose life has been perhaps the purest ever lived and one of the sweetest. None has ever loved every aspect of nature accessible to her more pa.s.sionately, or felt more keenly the charm of nature or of beautiful sentiments. The unhappy Frost King episode has been almost the only cloud upon her life, which unfortunately came at about the dawn of this period, that is perhaps better marked by the great expansion of mind which she experienced at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893, when she was thirteen. About this time, too, her great ambition of going to college and enjoying all the advantages that other girls did, which, considering her handicap, was one of the greatest human resolutions, was strengthened and deepened. The fresh, spontaneous, and exquisite reactions of this pellucid mind, which felt that each individual could comprehend all the experiences and emotions of the race and that chafed at every pedagogical and technical obstacle between her soul and nature, and the great monuments of literature, show that she has conserved to a remarkable degree, which the world will wish may be permanent, the best impulses of this golden age.

Marie Bashkirtseff,[27] who may be taken as one of the best types of exaggerated adolescent confessionalists, was rich and of n.o.ble birth, and began in 1873, at the age of twelve, to write a journal that should be absolutely true and frank, with no pretense, affectation, or concealment. The journal continues until her death, October, 1884, at the age of twenty-three. It may be described as in some sense a feminine counterpart of Rousseau's confessions, but is in some respects a more precious psychological doc.u.ment than any other for the elucidation of the adolescent ferment in an unusually vigorous and gifted soul. Twice I have read it from cover to cover and with growing interest.

At twelve she is pa.s.sionately in love with a duke, whom she sometimes saw pa.s.s, but who had no knowledge of her existence, and builds many air castles about his throwing himself at her feet and of their life together. She prays pa.s.sionately to see him again, would dazzle him on the stage, would lead a perfect life, develop her voice, and would be an ideal wife. She agonizes before the gla.s.s on whether or not she is pretty, and resolves to ask some young man, but prefers to think well of herself even if it is an illusion; constantly modulates over into pa.s.sionate prayer to G.o.d to grant all her wishes; is oppressed with despair; gay and melancholy by turn; believes in G.o.d because she prayed Him for a set of croquet and to help her to learn English, both of which He granted. At church some prayers and services seem directly aimed at her; Paris now seems a frightful desert, and she has no motive to avoid carelessness in her appearance. She has freaky and very changeable ideas of arranging the things in her room. When she hears of the duke's marriage she almost throws herself over a bridge, prays G.o.d for pardon of her sins, and thinks all is ended; finds it horrible to dissemble her feelings in public; goes through the torture of altering her prayer about the duke. She is disgusted with common people, harrowed by jealousy, envy, deceit and every hideous feeling, yet feels herself frozen in the depth, and moving only on the surface. When her voice improves she welcomes it with tears and feels an all-powerful queen. The man she loves should never speak to another. Her journal she resolves to make the most instructive book that ever was or ever will be written. She esteems herself so great a treasure that no one is worthy of her; pities those who think they can please her; thinks herself a real divinity; prays to the moon to show her in dreams her future husband, and quarrels with her photographs.

In some moods she feels herself beautiful, knows she shall succeed, everything smiles upon her and she is absolutely happy and yet in the next paragraph the fever of life at high pressure palls upon her and things seem asleep and unreal. Her attempts to express her feelings drive her to desperation because words are inadequate. She loves to weep, gives up to despair to think of death, and finds everything transcendently exquisite. She comes to despise men and wonder whether the good are always stupid and the intelligent always false and saturated with baseness, but on the whole believes that some time or other she is destined to meet one true good and great man. Now she is inflated with pride of her ancestry, her gifts, and would subordinate everybody and everything; she would never speak a commonplace word, and then again feels that her life has been a failure and she is destined to be always waiting. She falls on her knees sobbing, praying to G.o.d with outstretched hands as if He were in her room; almost vows to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem one-tenth of the way on foot; to devote her money to good works; lacks the pleasures proper to her age; wonders if she can ever love again. On throwing a bouquet from a window into a crowd in the Corso a young man choked so beautifully a workman who caught it that by that one act of strangling and s.n.a.t.c.hing the bouquet she fell in love. The young man calls and they see each other often. Now she is clad from head to foot in an armor of cold politeness, now vanity and now pa.s.sion seem uppermost in their meetings. She wonders if a certain amount of sin, like air, is necessary to a man to sustain life. Finally they vow mutual love and Pietro leaves, and she begins to fear that she has cherished illusions or been insulted; is torments at things unsaid or of her spelling in French. She coughs and for three days has a new idea that she is going to die; prays and prostrates herself sixty times, one for each bead in her rosary, touching the floor with her forehead every time; wonders if G.o.d takes intentions into account; resolves to read the New Testament, but can not find one and reads Dumas instead. In novel-reading she imagines herself the heroine of every scene; sees her lover and they plan their mode of life together and at last kiss each other, but later she feels humiliated, chilled, doubts if it is real love; studies the color of her lips to see if they have changed; fears that she has compromised herself; has eye symptoms that make her fear blindness. Once on reading the Testament she smiled and clasped her hands, gazed upward, was no longer herself but in ecstasy; she makes many programs for life; is haunted by the phrase "We live but once"; wants to live a dozen lives in one, but feels that she does not live one-fourth of a life; has several spells of solitary illumination. At other times she wishes to be the center of a salon and imagines herself to be so. She soars on poets' wings, but often has h.e.l.l in her heart; slowly love is vowed henceforth to be a word without meaning to her. Although she suffers from ennui, she realizes that women live only from sixteen to forty and cannot bear the thought of losing a moment of her life; criticizes her mother; scorns marriage and child-bearing, which any washerwoman can attain, but pants for glory; now hates, now longs to see new faces; thinks of disguising herself as a poor girl and going out to seek her fortunes; thinks her mad vanity is her devil; that her ambitions are justified by no results; hates moderation in anything, would have intense and constant excitement or absolute repose; at fifteen abandons her idea of the duke but wants an idol, and finally decides to live for fame; studies her shoulders, hips, bust, to gauge her success in life; tries target-shooting, hits every time and feels it to be fateful; at times despises her mother because she is so easily influenced by her; meets another man whose affection for her she thinks might be as reverent as religion and who never profaned the purity of his life by a thought, but finally drops him because the possible disappointment would be unbearable; finds that the more unhappy any one is for love of us the happier we are; wonders why she has weeping spells; wonders what love that people talk so much about really is, and whether she is ever to know. One night, at the age of seventeen, she has a fit of despair which vents itself in moans until arising, she seizes the dining-room clock, rushes out and throws it into the sea, when she becomes happy. "Poor clock!"

At another time she fears she has used the word love lightly and resolves to no longer invoke G.o.d's help, yet in the next line prays Him to let her die as everything is against her, her thoughts are incoherent, she hates herself and everything is contemptible; but she wishes to die peacefully while some one is singing a beautiful air of Verdi. Again she thinks of shaving her head to save the trouble of arranging her hair; is crazed to think that every moment brings her nearer death; to waste a moment of life is infamous, yet she can trust no one; all the freshness of life is gone; few things affect her now; she wonders how in the past she could have acted so foolishly and reasoned so wisely; is proud that no advice in the world could ever keep her from doing anything she wished. She thinks the journal of her former years exaggerated and resolves to be moderate; wants to make others feel as she feels; finds that the only cure for disenchantment with life is devotion to work; fears her face is wearing an anxious look instead of the confident expression which was its chief charm. "Impossible" is a hideous, maddening word; to think of dying like a dog as most people do and leaving nothing behind is a granite wall against which she every instant dashes her head. If she loved a man, every expression of admiration for anything, or anybody else in her presence would be a profanation. Now she thinks the man she loves must never know what it is to be in want of money and must purchase everything he wishes; must weep to see a woman want for anything, and find the door of no palace or club barred to him. Art becomes a great s.h.i.+ning light in her life of few pleasures and many griefs, yet she dares hope for nothing.

At eighteen all her caprices are exhausted; she vows and prays in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost for her wishes. She would like to be a millionaire, get back her voice, obtain the prix de Rome under the guise of a man and marry Napoleon IV. On winning a medal for her pictures she does nothing but laugh, cry, and dream of greatness, but the next day is scolded and grows discouraged. She has an immense sense of growth and transformation, so that not a trace of her old nature remains; feels that she has far too much of some things, and far too little of others in her nature; sees defects in her mother's character, whose pertinacity is like a disease; realizes that one of her chief pa.s.sions is to inspire rather than to feel love; that her temper is profoundly affected by her dress; deplores that her family expect her to achieve greatness rather than give her the stimulus of expecting nothing; declares that she thanks a million thoughts for every word that she writes; is disgusted with and sometimes absolutely hates herself. At one time she coquets with Kant, and wonders if he is right that all things exist only in the imagination; has a pa.s.sion for such "abracadabrante follies" that seem so learned and logical, but is grieved to feel them to be false; longs to penetrate the intellectual world, to see, learn, and know everything; admires Balzac because he describes so frankly all that he has felt; loves Fleury, who has shown her a wider horizon; still has spells of admiring her dazzling complexion and deploring that she can not go out alone; feels that she is losing her grip on art and also on G.o.d, who no longer hears her prayers, and resolves to kill herself if she is not famous at thirty.

At nineteen, and even before, she has spells of feeling inefficient cries, calls on G.o.d, feels exhausted; is almost stunned when she hears that the young French prince about whom she has spun romances was killed by the Kaffirs; feels herself growing serious and sensible; despises death; realizes that G.o.d is not what she thought, but is perhaps Nature and Life or is perhaps Chance; she thinks out possible pictures she might paint; develops a Platonic friends.h.i.+p for her professor; might marry an old man with twenty-seven millions, but spurns the thought; finds herself growing deaf gradually, and at nineteen finds three grey hairs; has awful remorse for days, when she cannot work and so loses herself in novels and cigarettes; makes many good resolutions and then commits some folly as if in a dream; has spells of reviewing the past. When the doctor finds a serious lung trouble and commands iodine, cod-liver oil, hot milk, and flannel, she at first scorns death and refuses all, and is delighted at the terror of her friends, but gradually does all that is necessary; feels herself too precocious and doomed; deplores especially that consumption will cost her her good looks; has fits of intense anger alternating with tears; concludes that death is annihilation; realizes the horrible thought that she has a skeleton within her that some time or other will come out; reads the New Testament again and returns to belief in miracle, and prayer to Jesus and the Virgin; distributes one thousand francs to the poor; records the dreamy delusions that flow through her brain at night and the strange sensations by day. Her eye symptoms cause her to fear blindness again; she grows superst.i.tious, believing in signs and fortune-tellers; is strongly impelled to embrace and make up with her mother; at times defies G.o.d and death; sees a Spanish bull-fight and gets from it a general impression of human cowardice, but has a strange intoxication with blood and would like to thrust a lance into the neck of every one she meets; coquets a great deal with the thought of marriage; takes up her art and paints a few very successful pictures; tries to grapple with the terrible question, "What is my unbiased opinion concerning myself?" pants chiefly for fame. When the other lung is found diseased the diary becomes sometimes more serious, sometimes more fevered; she is almost racked to find some end in life; shall she marry, or paint? and at last finds much consolation in the visits of Bastien-Lepage, who comes to see her often while he is dying of some gastric trouble. She keeps up occasional and often daily entries in her journal until eleven days before her death, occurring in October, 1884, at the age of twenty-three, and precipitated by a cold incurred while making an open-air sketch.

The confessional outpourings of Mary MacLane[28] const.i.tute a unique and valuable adolescent doc.u.ment, despite the fact that it seems throughout affected and written for effect; however, it well ill.u.s.trates a real type, although perhaps hardly possible save in this country, and was inspired very likely by the preceding.

She announces at the outset that she is odd, a genius, an extreme egotist; has no conscience; despises her father, "Jim MacLane of selfish memory"; loves scrubbing the floor because it gives her strength and grace of body, although her daily life is an "empty d.a.m.ned weariness." She is a female Napoleon pa.s.sionately desiring fame; is both a philosopher and a coward; her heart is wooden; although but nineteen, she feels forty; desires happiness even more than fame, for an hour of which she would give up at once fame, money, power, virtue, honor, truth, and genius to the devil, whose coming she awaits. She discusses her portrait, which const.i.tutes the frontispiece; is glad of her good strong body, and still awaits in a wild, frenzied impatience the coming of the devil to take her sacrifice, and to whom she would dedicate her life. She loves but one in all the world, an older "anemone" lady, once her teacher. She ran not distinguish between right and wrong; love is the only thing real which will some day bring joy, but it is agony to wait. "Oh, dame! d.a.m.n! d.a.m.n! d.a.m.n! every living thing in the world!-the universe be d.a.m.ned!" herself included. She is "marvelously deep," but thanks the good devil who has made her without conscience and virtue so that she may take her happiness when it comes. Her soul seeks but blindly, for nothing answers. How her happiness will seethe, quiver, writhe, s.h.i.+ne, dance, rush, surge, rage, blare, and wreak with love and light when it comes!

The devil she thinks fascinating and strong, with a will of steel, conventional clothes, whom she periodically falls in love with and would marry, and would love to be tortured by him. She holds imaginary conversations with him. If happiness does not come soon she will commit suicide, and she finds rapture in the thought of death. In b.u.t.te, Montana, where she lives, she wanders among the box rustlers, the beer jerkers, biscuit shooters, and plunges out into the sand and barrenness, but finds everything dumb. The six toothbrushes in the bathroom make her wild and profane. She flirts with death at the top of a dark, deep pit, and thinks out the stages of decomposition if she yielded herself to Death, who would dearly love to have her. She confesses herself a thief on several occasions, but comforts herself because the stolen money was given to the poor. Sometimes her "very good legs" carry her out into the country, where she has imaginary love confabs with the devil, but the world is so empty, dreary, and cold, and it is all so hard to bear when one is a woman and nineteen. She has a litany from which she prays in recurrent phrases "Kind devil, deliver me"-as, e.g., from musk, boys with curls, feminine men, wobbly hips, red note-paper, codfish-b.a.l.l.s, 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 admiration 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 of badness in me." She describes the fascination of making and eating fudge; devotes a chapter to describing how to eat an olive; discusses her figure. "In the front of my s.h.i.+rt-waist 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 far one dear, bright day free from loneliness. When 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 ineffably dull, heaven has always fooled her, and she is starving for love.

Ada Negri ill.u.s.trates the other extreme of genuineness and is desperately in earnest.[29] 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 gla.s.s but paper, and where she seems to have been, like her mother, a mill head before she was a teacher. She had never seen a theater, but had read of Duse with enthusiasm; had never seen the sea, mountain, 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. 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 l.u.s.tful 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 malediction." 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 felt from a high roof and struck the stone flagging, whose funeral she attends, all inspire 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 beating a red-hot bar, with his bare neck swelled. He is her demon, her G.o.d, 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; antic.i.p.ates 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 s.p.a.ce. She tells us, "Of genius and light I'm a blithe, millionaire," and elsewhere she longs for the everlasting 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, 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 wrong; 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 s.p.a.ce and light, and let her soar away in ecstasy and glory. Nothing less than infinite s.p.a.ce 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 paean to the sun, though amid the infernal glow of furnaces, forges, and the ringing noise of hammers and wheels.

Literary men who record their experiences during this stage seem to differ from women in several important 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 p.r.o.ne to characterize 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. Secondly 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 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 contrasts, as, e.g., between Trollope's pity for, and Goethe's apotheosis of his youth; Mill's loss of feeling, and Jefferies's una.n.a.lytic, pa.s.sionate outbursts of sentiment; the esthetic ritualism of Symonds, and the progressive religious emanc.i.p.ation of Fielding Hall; the moral and religious supersensitiveness of Oliphant, who was a reincarnation of medieval monkhood, and the riotous storminess of Muller 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 enfranchis.e.m.e.nt from it is more intellectually belabored. Yet, despite all these differences, the a.n.a.logies between the s.e.xes 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 nationality which follows gives no yet adequate basis for inference unless it be the above American peculiarity.

In his autobiography from 1785-1803, De Quincey[30] 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 tendencies were const.i.tutional 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 oppression 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 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 r.e.t.a.r.ded 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 relations.h.i.+p with a number of outcast women. In his misery they were to him simply sisters in calamity, but he found in them humanity, disinterested generosity, courage, and fidelity. One night, after he had walked the streets for weeks with one of these friendless girls who had not completed her sixteenth year, as they sat on the steps of a house, he grew 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 friends.h.i.+p; he longed again to meet the "n.o.ble-minded Ann --" with whom he had so often conversed 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 grat.i.tude, 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 running before, at first inclined to reduce his boy brother to a f.a.g, but finally before his death became a great influence in his life. Prominent 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 invented 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 water 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, fis.h.i.+ng herring and selling the product of his fishery for manure, and experiencing 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.

John Stuart Mill's Autobiography presents one of the most remarkable modifications of the later phases of adolescent experience. No boy ever had more diligent and earnest training than his father gave him or responded better. He can not remember when he began to learn Greek, but was told that it was at the age of three. The list of cla.s.sical 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 a.s.sociated with his father and all his many friends on their own level, but modestly ascribes everything to his environment, insists that in natural gifts he is other below than above par, and declares that everything he did could be done by every boy of average capacity and healthy physical const.i.tution. 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 contempt 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 a.s.sociationism. From the age of fifteen he had an object in life, viz., to reform the world. This gave him happiness, deep, permanent, and a.s.sured 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 felt into "a dull state of nerves," where he could no longer enjoy and what had produced pleasure seemed insipid; "the state, I should think, in which converts to Methodism usually are when smitten by their first 'conviction of sin.' In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself; 'Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in inst.i.tutions 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 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 pa.s.s 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, unimpa.s.sioned grief, Which finds no natural outlet or relief In word, or sigh, or tear.'

"In vain I sought relief from my favorite books, those memorials of past n.o.bleness and greatness from which I had always. .h.i.therto drawn strength and animation. I read them now without feeling, or with the accustomed feeling minus all its charm; and I became persuaded 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 a.s.sistance. 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 convinced 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 event, beyond the power of his remedies. Of other friends, I had at that time none to whom I had 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 a.n.a.lysis tends to wear away the feelings. He felt "stranded at the commencement of my voyage, with a well-equipped s.h.i.+p and a rudder, but no sail; without 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 completely 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 a.s.sociation of pleasure with any objects of human dire. Meanwhile, dejected and melancholy as he was through the winter, he went on mechanically 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 pa.s.sed 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 page 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 came 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 experience left him changed in two respects. He had a new theory of life, having much in common with the anti-consciousness 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 relished 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 relieved 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 standpoint from that of his father, who had up to this time formed his mind and life, and developed on this basis his unique individuality.

Jefferies, when eighteen, began his "Story of My Heart,"[31] which he said was an absolutely true confession 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 gra.s.s, 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 equivalent 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 un.o.btainable 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 gra.s.s; I was wholly prostrated; I lost myself in the wrestle.... I see now that what I labored for was soul life, more soul learning." After gazing upward he would turn his face into the gra.s.s, shutting out everything with hands each side, till he felt down 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 "Lyra" 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 was in eternity already; the supernatural is only the natural misnamed. As he lay face down on the gra.s.s, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 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 G.o.d, 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 remained 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 day and often half the night; wanted more suns.h.i.+ne; wished the day was sixty hours long; took pleasure in braving the cold so that it should be not life's destroyer but its renewer. Yet he abhorred asceticism. He wrestled with the problem of the origin of his soul and destiny, but could find no solution; revolted at the a.s.sertion that all is designed for the best; "a man of intellect and humanity could cause everything to happen in an infinitely 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 doc.u.ment, it is impossible to avoid the suspicion that the seventeen years which intervened between the beginning of these experiences and their final record, coupled with the perhaps unconscious tendency toward literary effect, detract more or less from their value as doc.u.ments of adolescent nature.

Mr. H. Fielding Hall, author of "The Soul of a People," has since written a book[32] in which, beginning with many definitions of Christianity, weighing the opinion 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 Testament; in the Sermon on the Mount, which he supposed all accepted and lived 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, pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d's storms, stirring stagnant natures to new life; wealth was wors.h.i.+ped; 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 forgotten. 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 childish, 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 three demands: a reasonable theory of the universe, a workable and working code of conduct, and a promise of something desirable hereafter. 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. G.o.d as an abstract spirit is unthinkable, but Buddhism offers us no G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, clanking round the heavenly mansions wearing a German Pickelhaube and swearing German oaths," is not satisfactory. Man's G.o.d 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 att.i.tude. 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 wors.h.i.+p. 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