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 lustful 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 God, 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; anticipates 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 space. 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 space and light, and let her soar away in ecstasy and glory. Nothing less than infinite space 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 pæan 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 prone 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 unanalytic, passionate outbursts of sentiment; the esthetic ritualism of Symonds, and the progressive religious emancipation of Fielding Hall; the moral and religious supersensitiveness of Oliphant, who was a reincarnation of medieval monkhood, and the riotous storminess of Müller 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 enfranchisement from it is more intellectually belabored. Yet, despite all these differences, the analogies between the sexes 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 constitutional 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 retarded 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 relationship 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 friendship; he longed again to meet the "noble-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 gratitude, 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 fag, 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, fishing 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 classical 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 associated 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 constitution. 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 associationism. From the age of fifteen he had an object in life, viz., to reform the world. This gave him happiness, deep, permanent, and assured 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 institutions 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 pass 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, unimpassioned 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 nobleness and greatness from which I had always hitherto 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 assistance. 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."