his day-dream period; and his rather prolonged habit of lying, the latter because he had no other vent for invention. He describes with great regret his leaving school at so early an age; his volcanic passion of anger; his self-distrust; his periods of abandon; his passion to make a success of art though he did not of life; his spells of self-despair and cynicism; his periods of desolation in his single life; his habit of story- 1 Gesammelte Werke. Vierter Band. Wilhehn Hertz, Berlin, 1897.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE telling; his wrestling with the problem of theology and God; the con- flict between his philosophy and his love of the girls, etc.
From a private school in Leipzig, where he had shown all a boy's tact in finding what his masters thought the value of each subject they taught; where he had joined in the vandalism of using a battering- ram to break a way to the hated science apparatus and to destroy it; feeling that the classical writers were overpraised; and where at the age of sixteen he had appeared several times in public as a reciter of his own poems. Max Miiller returned to Leipzig and entered upon the freedom of university life there at the age of seventeen. For years his chief enjoyment was music. 1 He played the piano well, heard everything he could in concert or opera, was an oratorio tenor, and grew more and more absorbed in music, so that he planned to devote himself altogether to it and also to enter a musical school at Dessau, but nothing came of it. At the university he saw little of society, was once incarcerated for wearing a club ribbon, and confesses that with his boon companions he was guilty of practises which would now bring culprits into collision with authorities. He fought three duels, participated in many pranks and freakish escapades, but never- theless attended fifty-three different courses of lectures in three years.
When Hegelism was the state philosophy, he tried hard to under- stand it, but dismissed it with the sentiments expressed by a French officer to his tailor, who refused to take the trousers he had ordered to be made very tight because they did not fit so closely that he could not get into them. Darwin attracted him, yet the wildness of his followers repelled. He says, "I confess I felt quite bewildered for a time and began to despair altogether of my reasoning powers." He wonders how young minds in German universities survive the storms and fogs through which they pass. With bated breath he heard his elders talk of philosophy and tried to lay hold of a word here and there, but it all floated before his mind like mist. Later he had an Hegelian period, but found in Herbart a corrective, and at last decided upon Sanskrit and other ancient languages, because he felt that he must know something that no other knew, and also that the Germans had then heard only the after-chime and not the real striking of the bells of Indian philosophy. From twenty his struggles and his queries grew more definite, and at last, at the age of twenty- two, he was fully launched upon his career in Paris, and later went to Oxford.
* My Autobiography, p. 106. Chas. Scribner's Sons, New York, BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH At thirteen Wagner^ translated about half the "Odyssey" vol- untarily; at fourteen began the tragedy which was to combine the grandeur of two of Shakespeare's dramas; at sixteen he tried "his new-fledged musical wings by soaring at once to the highest peaks of orchestral achievement without wasting any time on the humble foot-hills." He sought to make a new departure, and, compared to the grandeur of his own composition, " Beethoven's Ninth Symphony appeared like a simple Pleyel Sonata." To facilitate the reading of his astounding score, he wrote it in three kinds of ink — red for strings, green for the wood-wind, and black for the brass instruments. He writes that this overture was the climax of his absurdities, and although the audience before which an accommodating orchestra played it were disgusted and the musicians were convulsed with laughter, it made a deep impression upon the author's mind. Even after matriculating at the university he abandoned himself so long to the dissipations common to student life before the reaction came that his relatives feared that he was a good-for-nothing.
In his " Hannele," Hauptmann, the dramatist, describes in a kind of dream poem what he supposed to pass through the mind of a dying girl of thirteen or fourteen, who does not wish to live and is so ab- sorbed by the " Brownies of her brain " that she hardly knows whether she is alive on earth or dead in heaven, and who sees the Lord Jesus in the form of the schoolmaster whom she adores. In her closing vision there is a symbolic representation of her owm resurrection. To the passionate discussions in Germany, England, and France, as to whether this character is true to adolescence, we can only answer with an emphatic affirmative; that her heaven abounds in local color and in fairy-tale items, that it is very material, and that she is troubled by fears of sin against the Holy Ghost, is answer enough in an ill-used, starving child with a fevered brain, whose dead mother taught her these things.
Saint-Pierre's " Paul and Virginia " is an attempt to describe budding adolescence in a boy and girl born on a remote island and reared in a state of natural sim- plicity. The descriptions are sentimental after the fash- ion of the age in France, and the pathos, which to us smacks of affectation and artificiality, nevertheless has a vein of truth in it. The story really begins when the 1 Wagner and His Works. By Henry T. Finck. Chas. Scribner's Sons, New York, 1893.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE two children were twelve; and the description of the dawn of love and melancholy in Virginia's heart, for some time concealed from Paul, of her disquiet and piety, of the final frank avowal of eternal love by each, set off by the pathetic separation, and of the undying love, and finally the tragic death and burial of each — all this owes its charm, for its many generations of readers, to its merits as an essentially true picture of the human heart at this critical age. This work and Eousseau ^ have contributed to give French literature its peculiar cast in its description of this age.
" The first explosions of a combustible constitution" in Rous- seau's precocious nature were troublesome, and he felt premature sensations of erotic voluptuousness, but without any sin. He longed "to fall at the feet of an imperious mistress, obey her mandates or implore pardon." He only wanted a lady, to become a knight errant. At ten he was passionately devoted to a Mile. Vulson, whom he publicly and tyrannically claimed as his own and would allow no other to approach. He had very different sensuous feelings toward Mile. Goton, with whom his relations were very passionate, though pure. Absolutely under the power of both these mistresses, the effects they produced upon him were in no wise related to each other. The former was a brother's affection with the jealousy of a lover added, but the latter a furious, tigerish, Turkish rage. When told of the former's marriage, in his indignation and heroic fury he swore never more to see a perfidious girl. A slightly neurotic vein of pro- longed ephebeitis pervades much of his life.
Pierre Loti's " Story of a Child "^ was written when the author was forty-two, and contains hardly a fact, but it is one of the best of inner autobiographies, and is nowhere richer than in the last chapters, which bring the author do^\Ti to the age of fourteen and a half. He vividly describes the new joy at waking, which he began to feel at twelve or thirteen; the clear vision into the bottomless pit of death; the new, marvelous susceptibility to nature as comradeship with boys of his 1 Les Confessions. CEuvres Completes, vols. 8 and 9. Hachette et Cie., Paris, 1903.
2 Translated from the French b}- C. F. Smith. C. C. Birchard and Co., Boston, 1901.
BIOGRAPHIES OF YOUTH ovm age was lacking; the sudden desires from pure bravado and perversity to do something unseemly, e. g., making a fly omelet and carrying it in a procession with song; the melting of pewter plates and pouring them into water and salting a wild tract of land with them; organizing a band of miners, whom he led as if with keen scent to the right spot and rediscovered his nuggets, everything being done mysteriously and as a tribal secret. Loti had a new feeling for the haunting music of Chopin, which he had been taught to play but had not been interested in; his mind was inflamed, by a home visit of an elder brother, with the idea of going to the South Sea Islands, and this became a long obsession which finally led him to enlist in the navy, dropping, with a beating heart, the momentous letter into the post-ofRce after long misgivings and delays. He had a superficial and a hidden self, the latter somewhat whimsical and perhaps ridic- ulous, shared only with a few intimate friends for whom he would have let himself be cut into bits. He believes his transition period lasted longer than with the majority of men, and during it he was carried from one extreme to another; had rather eccentric and absurd manners, and touched most of the perilous rocks on the voyage of life. He had an early love for an older girl whose name he wrote in cipher on his books, although he felt it a little artificial, but believed it might have developed into a great and true hereditary- friendship, continuing that which their ancestors had felt for many generations. The birth of love in his heart was in a dream after having read the forbidden poet, Alfred de Musset. He was fourteen, and in his dream it was a soft, odorous twilight. He walked amid flowers seeking a nameless some one whom he ardently desired, and felt that something strange and wonderful, intoxicating as it ad- vanced, was going to happen. The twilight grew deeper, and behind a rose-bush he saw a young girl with a languorous and mysterious smile, although her forehead and eyes were hidden. As it darkened rather suddenly, her eyes came out, and they were very personal and seemed to belong to some one already much beloved, who had been found with '' transports of infinite joy and tenderness." He woke with a start and sought to retain the phantom, which faded. He could not conceive that she was a mere illusion, and as he realized that she had vanished he felt overwhelmed with hopelessness. It was the first stirring "of true love with all its great melancholy and deep mystery, with its overwhelming but sad enchantment — love which Uke a perfume endows with a fragrance all it touches."
It is, I believe, high time that ephebic literature should be recognized as a class by itself, and have a YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE place of its own in the history of letters and in criti- cism. Much of it should be individually prescribed for the reading of the young, for whom it has a singular zest and is a true stimulus and corrective. This stage of life now has what might almost be called a school of its own. Here the young appeal to and listen to each other as they do not to adults, and in a way the latter have failed to appreciate. Again, no biography, and espe- cially no autobiography, should henceforth be com- plete if it does not describe this period of transforma- tion so all-determining for future life to which it alone can often give the key. Rightly to draw the lessons of this age not only saves us from waste ineffable of this rich but crude area of experience, but makes matu- rity saner and more complete. Lastly, many if not most young people should be encouraged to enough of the confessional private journalism to teach them self- knowledge, for the art of self-expression usually begins now if ever, when it has a wealth of subjective material and needs forms of expression peculiar to itself.
For additional references on the subject of this chapter, see: Alcafarado, Marianna, Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun. Trans- lated by R. H., New York, 1887. Richardson, Abby Sage, Abelard and Heloise, and Letters of Heloise, Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Bos- ton. Smith, Theodote L., Types of Adolescent Affection. Peda- gogical Seminary, June, 1904, vol. 11, pp. 178-203.
CHAPTER IX THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS Change from childish to adult friends — Influence of favorite teachers — What children wish or plan to do or be — Property and the money sense — Social judgments — The only child — First social organizations — Student life — Associations for youth, controlled by adults.
In a few aspects we are already able to trace the normal psychic outgrowing of the home of childhood as its interests irradiate into an ever enlarging environ- ment. Almost the only duty of small children is habitual and prompt obedience. Our very presence enforces one general law — that of keeping our good- will and avoiding our displeasure. They respect all we smile at or even notice, and grow to it like the plant toward the light. Their early lies are often saying what they think will please. At bottom, the most restless child admires and loves those who save him from too great fluctuations by coercion, provided the means be rightly chosen and the ascendency extend over heart and mind. But the time comes when parents are often shocked at the lack of respect suddenly shown by the child. They have ceased to be the highest ideals. The period of habituating morality and making it habitual is ceasing; and the passion to realize freedom, to act on personal experience, and to keep a private conscience is in order. To act occasionally with independence from the highest possible ideal motives develops the impulse and the joy of pure obligation, and thus brings some new and origi- YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE nal force into the world and makes habitual guidance by the highest and best, or by inner as opposed to outer constraint, the practical rule of life. To bring the richest streams of thought to bear in interpreting the ethical instincts, so that the youth shall cease to live in a moral interregnum, is the real goal of self-knowl- edge. This is true education of the will and prepares the way for love of overcoming obstacles of difficulty, perhaps even of conflict. This impulse is often the secret of obstinacy.^ And yet, " at no time in life will a human being respond so heartily if treated by older and wiser people as if he were an equal or even a su- perior. The attempt to treat a child at adolescence as you would treat an inferior is instantly fatal to good discipline. ' ' ^ Parents still think of their offspring as mere children, and tighten the rein when they should loosen it. Many young people feel that they have the best of homes and yet that they will go crazy if they must remain in them. If the training of earlier years has been good, guidance by command may now safely give way to that by ideals, which are sure to be heroic. The one unpardonable thing for the adolescent is dul- ness, stupidity, lack of life, interest, and enthusiasm in school or teachers, and, perhaps above all, too great stringency. Least of all, at this stage, can the curriculum or school be an ossuary. The child must now be taken into the family councils and find the parents interested in all that interests him. Where this is not done, we have the conditions for the interesting cases of so many youth, who now begin to suspect that father, mother, or both, are not their true parents. Not only is there in- 2 The Adolescent at Home and in School. By E. G. Lancaster. Proceedings of the National Educational Association, 1899, p. 1039.
THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS terest in rapidly widening associations with coevals, but a new lust to push on and up to maturity. One marked trait now is to seek friends and companions older than themselves, or, next to this, to seek those younger. This is in marked contrast with previous years, when they seek associates of their own age. Pos- sibly the merciless teasing instinct, which culminates at about the same time, may have some influence, but certain it is that now interest is transpolarized up and down the age scale. One reason is the new hunger for information, not only concerning reproduction, but a vast variety of other matters, so that there is often an attitude of silent begging for knowledge. In answer to Lancaster's^ questions on this subject, some sought older associates because they could learn more from them, found them better or more steadfast friends, craved sympathy and found most of it from older and perhaps married people. Some were more interested in their parents' conversation w^ith other adults than with themselves, and were particularly entertained by the chance of hearing things they had no business to. There is often a feeling that adults do not realize this new need of friendship with them and show want of sym- pathy almost brutal.
Stableton,^ who has made interesting notes on individual boys entering the adolescent period, emphasizes the importance of sympathy, appreciation, and respect in dealing with this age. They must now be talked to as equals, and in this way their habits of industry and even their dangerous love affairs can be controlled.
1 The Psychology and Pedagogy of Adolescence. Pedagogical Semi- 2 Study of Boys Entering the Adolescent Period of Life. North Western Monthly, November, 1897, vol. 8, pp. 248-250, and a series thereafter.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE He says, "There is no more important question before the teaching fraternity to-day than how to deal justly and successfully with boys at this time of life. This is the age when they drop out of school " in far too large numbers, and he thinks that the small percentage of male graduates from our high schools is due to "the inability of the average grammar grade or high-school teacher to deal rightly with boys in this critical period of their school life." Most teachers "know all their bad points, but fail to discover their good ones." The fine disciplinarian, the mechanical movement of whose school is so admirable and who does not realize the new need of liberty or how loose-jointed, mentally and physically, all are at this age, should be supplanted by one who can look into the heart and by a glance make the boy feel that he or she is his friend. "The weakest work in our schools is the handling of boys entering the adolescent period of life, and there is no greater blessing that can come to a boy at this age, when he does not understand himself, than a good strong teacher that understands him, has faith in him, and will day by day lead him till he can walk alone."
Small ^ found the teacher a focus of imitation whence many in- fluences, both physical and mental, irradiated to the pupils. Every accent, gesture, automatism, like and dislike is caught consciously and unconsciously. Every intellectual interest in the teacher permeates the class — liars, if trusted, become honest; those treated as ladies and gentlemen act so; those told by favorite teachers of the good things they are capable of feel a strong impulsion to do them; some older children are almost transformed by being made com- panions to teachers, by having their good traits recognized, and by frank apologies by the teacher when in error.
An interesting and unsuspected illustration of the growth of in- dependence with adolescence was found in 2,411 papers from the second to eighth grades on the characteristics of the best teacher as seen by children.^ In the second and third grades, all, and in ^e fourth, ninety-five per cent specified help in studies. This falls off rapidly in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades to thirty-nine per cent, while at the same time the quality of patience in the upper grades rises from a mention by two to twenty-two per cent.
1 The Suggestibility of Children, Pedagogical Seminary, December, 2 Characteristics of the Best Teacher as Recognized by Children. By H. E. Kratz. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1896, vol. 3, pp. 413-418. See also The High School Teacher from the Pupil's Point of View,'TDy W. F. Book. Pedagogical Seminary, September, 1905, vol. 12, pp. 239-288.
THE GROWTH OF SOCIAL IDEALS Sanford BelP collated the answers of 543 males and 488 females as to who of all their past teachers did them most good, and wherein; whom they loved and disliked most, and why. His most striking result is presented in a curve which shows that fourteen in girls and sixteen in boys is the age in which most good was felt to have been done, and that curves culminating at twelve for both sexes but not falling rapidly until fifteen or sixteen re- present the period when the strongest and most indelible dislikes were felt. What seems to be most appreciated in teachers is the giving of purpose, arousing of ideals, kindling of ambition to be something or do something and so giving an object in hfe, encour- agement to overcome circumstances, and, in general, inspiring self- confidence and giving direction. Next come personal sympathy and interest, kindness, confidence, a little praise, being understood; and next, special help in lessons, or timely and kindly advice, while stability and poise of character, purity, the absence of hypocrisy, independence, personal beauty, athleticism and vigor are prominent. It is singular that those of each sex have been most helped by their own sex and that this prominence is far greatest in men. Fourfifths of the men and nearly one-half of the women, however, got most help from men. Male teachers, especially near adolescence, seem most helpful for both sexes.
The qualities that inspire most dislike are malevolence, sarcasm, unjust punishment, suspicion, severity, sternness, absence of laugh- ing and smiling, indifference, threats and broken vows, excessive scolding and "roasting," and fondness for inflicting blows. The teacher who does not smile is far more liable to excite animosity. Most boys dislike men most, and girls' dislikes are about divided. The stories of school cruelties and indignities are painful. Often inveterate grudges are established by little causes, and it is singular how permanent and indelible strong dislikes are for the majority of children. In many cases, aversions engendered before ten have lasted with little diminution till maturity, and there is a sad record of children who have lost a term, a year, or dropped school altogether because of ill treatment or partiality.
Nearly two thousand children were asked what they would do in a specific case of conflict between teacher and parents. It was found that, while for young children parental authority was preferred, a marked decline began about eleven and was most rapid after fourteen in girls and fifteen in boys, and that there was a nearly corresponding 1 A Study of the Teacher's Influence. Pedagogical Seminary, Decem- YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE increase in the number of pubescents who preferred the teacher's au- thority. The reasons for their choice were also analyzed, and it was found that whereas for the young, unconditioned authority was gen- erally satisfactory, with pubescents, abstract authority came into marked predominance, "until when the children have reached the age of sixteen almost seventy-five per cent of their reasons belong to this class, and the children show themselves able to extend the idea of authority without violence to their sense of justice."
On a basis of 1,400 papers answering the question whom, of anyone ever heard or read of, they would like to resemble, Barnes ^ found that girls ' ideals were far more often found in the immediate circle of their acquaint- ance than boys, and that those within that circle were more often in their own family, but that the tend- ency to go outside their personal knowledge and choose historical and public characters was greatly augmented at puberty, when also the heroes of philanthropy showed marked gain in prominence. Boys rarely chose women as their ideals; but in America, half the girls at eight and two-thirds at eighteen chose male characters. The range of important women 'ideals among the girls was surprisingly small. Barnes fears that if from the choice of relatives as ideals, the expansion to remote or world heroes is too fast, it may " lead to disintegration of character and reckless living. " ' ' If, on the other hand, it is expanded too slowly we shall have that arrested de- velopment which makes good ground in which to grow stupidity, brutality, and drunkenness — the first fruits of a sluggish and self-contained mind." " No one can consider the regularity with which local ideals die out and are replaced by world ideals without feeling that he is in the presence of law-abiding forces," and this