Mrs. Burnett,* 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 look- ing 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 po^ch, elbows on knees and chin on hands, staring upward, sometimes lying on the grass. Heaven was so high 1 The One I Know the Best of All. A Memory of the Mind of a Child. By Frances Hodgson Burnett. Scribner's Sons, New York, 1893.
BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH and yet she was a part of it and was something even among the stars. It was a weird, updrawn, overwhelming feeUng 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 passed. 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^ 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 com- manded 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 realized 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 in- cessantly 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 passed through a long period of abject superstition, largely through the influence of a serv- ant. 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 ingeni- ously 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 appetite and sleep, had heartache to think of her friends burning in hell, and tried to save them.
1 The Beth Book, by Sarah Grand. D. Appleton and Co., New YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 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 buttermilk, used a parasol, tortured her natural appetite 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 mag- nolia, buried her face in the big flowers one after another and bathed it in the dew of the petals, visited every forbidden place, was par- ticularly 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 appetite, 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, roll- ing over, walking 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 pass 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 com- panion and an object, she met a boy of seventeen, whose face, like her BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH 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." Rehgion 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 criti- cized 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 passion was nipped in the bud by the boy's removal from his school.
In preparing for her first communion, an anonymous writer ^ be- came sober and studious, proposing to model her Hfe on that of each fresh saint and to spend a week in retreat examining her conscience with a vengeance. She wanted to revive the custom of public con- fession 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 wdth spiritual joy, but she was only twelve and her old nature often reasserted 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 un- derstand the meaning of the word '' love " in its season.- 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 1 Autobiography of a Child. Hannah Lynch, W. Blackwood and 2 The Story of My Life. By Helen Keller. Doubleday, Page YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE spirit and the spirit of others." This period seems to have come 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 passion- ately, or felt more keenly the charm of nature or of beautiful senti- ments. 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, spontane- ous, 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 ob- stacle 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 Baslikirtseft'/ who may be taken as one of the best types of exaggerated adolescent confessionalists, was rich and of noble birth, and began in 1873, at the age of twelve, to write a journal that should be ab- solutely 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 document 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 passionately in love with a duke, whom she some- times saw pass, but who had no knowledge of her existence, and builds 1 Journal of a Young Artist. Cassell and Co., New York, 1889, BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH many air castles about his throwing himself at her feet and of their life together. She prays passionately 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 glass 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 passionate prayer to God to grant all her wishes; is op- pressed with despair; gay and melancholy by turn; believes in God 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 God 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 im- proves 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 her- self 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 God with outstretched hands as if He were in her room; almost vows to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem one- YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 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 snatching 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 passion 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 tormented 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 God takes intentions into ac- count; 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 hell 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 BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH thinks might be as reverent as religion and who never profaned the purity of his hfe by a thought, but finally drops him because the possi- ble disappointment would be unbearable; finds that the more un- happy 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 God's help, yet in the next line prays Him to let her die as everything is against her, her thoughts are inco- herent, 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, jet 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 wear- ing 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 any- body 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 shining 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 dis- couraged. 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 YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE much of some things, and far too Httle of others in her nature; sees defects in her mother's character, whose pertinacity is Uke a disease; reahzes that one of her chief passions 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 thinks a million thoughts for every word that she writes; is disgusted with and some- times absolutely hates herself. At one time she coquets with Kant, and wonders if he is right that all things exist only in the imagina- tion; has a passion 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 God, 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 God, feels exhausted; is almost stunned when she hears that the young French prince about whom she has spun romances was killed by the Kafhrs; feels herself growing serious and sensible; despises death; realizes that God 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 friendship 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 gray 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 con- sumption 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 re- turns to belief in miracles and prayer to Jesus and the Virgin; dis- tributes one thousand francs to the poor; records the dreamy delusions that flow through her brain at aight and the strange sensa- tions by day. Her eye symptoms cause her to fear blindness again; BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH she grows superstitious, believing in signs and fortune-tellers; is strongly impelled to embrace and make up with her mother; at times defies God and death; sees a Spanish bull-fight and gets from it a general impression of human cowardice, but has a strange intoxica- tion 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, some- times more fevered; she is almost racked to find some end in hfe; 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 precipi- tated by a cold incurred while making an open-air sketch.
The confessional outpourings of Mary INIacLane ^ constitute a unique and valuable adolescent document, despite the fact that it seems throughout affected and written for effect; however, it well illustrates a real type, although perhaps hardly possible save in this coun- try, 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 damned v/eariness." She is a female Napoleon passionately 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 constitutes 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 1 The Story of Mary MacLane. By herself. Herbert S. Stone YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE the world, an older ''anemone" lady, once her teacher. She can 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, damn! damn! damn! damn! every living thing in the world! — the universe be damned! " 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, shine, 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, in conventional clothes, whom she periodically falls in love with and would marry, and would love to be tortured by him. She holds im- aginary conversations with him. If happiness does not come soon she will commit suicide, and she finds rapture in the thought of death. In Butte, 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 tooth- brushes 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-