At twelve Huxley[20] became an omnivorous reader, and two or three years later devoured Hamilton's Logic and became deeply interested in metaphysics. At fourteen he saw and participated in his first post-mortem examination, was left in a strange state of apathy by it, and dates his life-long dyspepsia to this experience. His training was irregular; he taught himself German with a book in one hand while he made hay with the other; speculated about the basis of matter, soul, and their relations, on radicalism and conservatism; and reproached himself that he did not work and get on enough. At seventeen he attempted a comprehensive classification of human knowledge, and having finished his survey, resolved to master the topics one after another, striking them out from his table with ink as soon us they were done. "May the list soon get black, although at present I shall hardly be able, I am afraid, to spot the paper." Beneath the top skimmings of these years he afterward conceived seething depths working beneath the froth, but could give hardly any account of it. He undertook the practise of pharmacy, etc.
Women with literary gifts perhaps surpass men in their power to reproduce and describe the great but so often evanescent ebullitions of this age; perhaps because their later lives, on account of their more generic nature, depart less from this totalizing period, or because, although it is psychologically shorter than in men, the necessities of earning a livelihood less frequently arrest its full development, and again because they are more emotional, and feeling constitutes the chief psychic ingredient of this stage of life, or they dwell more on subjective states.
Manon Philipon (Madame Roland) was born in 1754. Her father was an engraver in comfortable circumstances. Her earliest enthusiasm was for the Bible and Lives of the Saints, and she had almost a mania for reading books of any kind. In the corner of her father's workshop she would read Plutarch for hours, dream of the past glories of antiquity, and exclaim, weeping, "Why was I not born a Greek?" She desired to emulate the brave men of old.
Books and flowers aroused her to dreams of enthusiasm, romantic sentiment, and lofty aspiration. Finding that the French society afforded no opportunity for heroic living, in her visionary fervor she fell back upon a life of religious mysticism, and Xavier, Loyola, St. Elizabeth, and St. Theresa became her new idols. She longed to follow even to the stake those devout men and women who had borne obloquy, poverty, hunger, thirst, wretchedness, and the agony of a martyr's death for the sake of Jesus. Her capacities for self-sacrifice became perhaps her leading trait, always longing after a grand life like George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke. She was allowed at the age of eleven to enter a convent, where, shunning her companions, she courted solitude apart, under the trees, reading and thinking. Artificial as the atmosphere was here, it no doubt inspired her life with permanent tenderness of feeling and loftiness of purpose, and gave a mystic quality to her imagination. Later she experienced to the full revulsion of thought and experience which comes when doubt reacts upon youthful credulity. It was the age of the encyclopedia, and now she came to doubt her creed and even God and the soul, but clung to the Gospels as the best possible code of morals, and later realized that while her intellect had wandered her heart had remained constant. At seventeen she was, if not the moat beautiful, perhaps the noblest woman in all France, and here the curtain moat drop upon her girlhood. All her traits were, of course, set off by the great life she lived and the yet greater death she died.
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 passions, 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 bête.
When her aunt sent her to a convent, she passed 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 God 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 passed, but left her changed.[21]
When she passed 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 pass. 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 Corambé, pure as Jesus, beautiful as Gabriel, as graceful as the nymphs and Orpheus, less austere than the Christian God, and as much woman as man, because she could best understand this sex 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 god; 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 butterflies, 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, "Corambé 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 shells 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 glass 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 apprenticeship 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 grass. 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 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.