Thor had no moral code; the Greeks were unmoral. Jehovah at first asked only fear, reverence, and worship. 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 the same in praising not wealth, greatness, or power, but purity, renunciation of the world, as if one fitted one's self for one by being unfitted for the other world.
Is heaven a bribe? Its ideals are those of children, of girl angels, white wings, floating dresses, no sheep, but lambs. "Surely there is nothing in all the world so babyish." One can hardly imagine a man with a deep voice, with the storm of life beating his soul, amid those baby faces. If happiness in any act or attitude is perfect, it will last forever. Where is due the weariness or satiety? But if happiness be perfect, this is impossible; so life would be monotony akin to annihilation. But life is change, and change is misery. There is effort here; but there will be none in the great peace that passes understanding; no defeat, therefore no victory; no friends, because no enemies; no joyous meetings, because no farewells. It is the shadows and the dark mysteries that sound the depths of our hearts. No man that ever lived, if told that he could be young again or go to any heaven, would choose the latter. Men die for many things, but all fear the beyond. Thus no religion gives us an intelligible First Cause, a code or a heaven that we want. The most religious man is the peasant listening to the angelus, putting out a little ghi for his God; the woman crying in the pagoda. Thus we can only turn to the hearts of men for the truth of religion.
Biographies and autobiographies furnish many photographic glimpses of the struggles and experiences of early adolescent years.
Anthony Trollope's autobiography[33] is pitiful. He was poor and disliked by most of his masters and treated with ignominy by his fellow pupils. He describes himself as always in disgrace. At fifteen he walked three miles each way twice a day to and from school. As a sizar he seemed a wretched farmer's boy, reeking from the dunghill, sitting next the sons of big peers. All were against him, and he was allowed to join no games, and learned, he tells us, absolutely nothing but a little Greek and Latin. Once only, goaded to desperation, he rallied and whipped a bully. The boy was never able to overcome the isolation of his school position, and while he coveted popularity with an eagerness which was almost mean, and longed exceedingly to excel in cricket or with the racquet, was allowed to know nothing of them. He remembers at nineteen never to have had a lesson in writing, arithmetic, French, or German. He knew his masters by their ferules and they him. He believes that he has "been flogged oftener than any human being alive. It was just possible to obtain five scourgings in one day at Winchester, and I have often boasted that I have obtained them all." Prizes were distributed prodigally, but he never got one. For twelve years of tuition, he says, "I do not remember that I ever knew a lesson."
At this age he describes himself as "an idle, desolate, hanger on … without an idea of a career or a profession or a trade," but he was tolerably happy because he could fancy himself in love with pretty girls and had been removed from the real misery of school, but had not a single aspiration regarding his future. Three of his household were dying of consumption, and his mother was day nurse, night nurse, and divided her time between pill-boxes and the ink-bottle, for when she was seventy-six she had written one hundred and forty volumes, the first of which was not written till she was fifty.
Gradually the boy became alive to the blighted ambition of his father's life and the strain his mother was enduring, nursing the dying household and writing novels to provide a decent roof for them to die under. Anthony got a position at the post-office without an examination. He knew no French nor science; was a bad speller and worse writer and could not have sustained an examination on any subject. Still he could not bear idleness, and was always going about with some castle in the air finely built in his mind, carrying on for weeks and years the same continuous story; binding himself down to certain laws, proprieties, and unities; always his own hero, excluding everything violently improbable. To this practise, which he calls dangerous and which began six or seven years before he went to the post-office, he ascribes his power to maintain an interest in a fictitious story and to live in a entirely outside imaginative life. During these seven years he acquired a character of irregularity and grew reckless.
Mark Pattison[34] shows us how his real life began in the middle teens, when his energy was "directed to one end, to improve myself"; "to form my own mind; to sound things thoroughly; to be free from the bondage of unreason and the traditional prejudices which, when I first began to think, constituted the whole of my mental fabric." He entered upon life with a "hide-bound and contracted intellect," and depicts "something of the steps by which I emerged from that frozen condition." He believes that to "remember the dreams and confusions of childhood and never to lose the recollection of the curiosity and simplicity of that age, is one of the great gifts of the poetic character," although this, he tells us, was extraordinarily true of George Sand, but not of himself. From the age of twelve on, a Fellowship at Oriel was the ideal of his life, and although he became a commoner there at seventeen, his chief marvel is that he was so immature and unimpressionable.
William Hale White[35] learned little at school, save Latin and good penmanship, but his very life was divided into halves—Sundays and week days—and he reflects at some length upon the immense dangers of the early teens; the physiological and yet subtler psychic penalties of error; callousness to fine pleasures; hardening of the conscience; and deplores the misery which a little instruction might have saved him. At fourteen he underwent conversion, understood in his sect to be a transforming miracle, releasing higher and imprisoning lower powers. He compares it to the saving of a mind from vice by falling in love with a woman who is adored, or the reclamation of a young woman from idleness and vanity by motherhood. But as a boy he was convinced of many things which were mere phrases, and attended prayer-meetings for the clanship of being marked off from the world and of walking home with certain girls. He learned to say in prayer that there was nothing good in him, that he was rotten and filthy and his soul a mass of putrefying sores; but no one took him at his word and expelled him from society, but thought the better of him. Soon he began to study theology, but found no help in suppressing tempestuous lust, in understanding the Bible, or getting his doubts answered, and all the lectures seemed irrelevant chattering. An infidel was a monster whom he had rarely ever seen. At nineteen he began to preach, but his heart was untouched till he read Wordsworth's lyrical ballads, and this recreated a living God for him, melted his heart to tears, and made him long for companionship; its effect was instantly seen in his preaching, and soon made him slightly suspected as heretical.[36]
John Addington Symonds, in his autobiography, describes his "insect-like" devotion to creed in the green infancy of ritualism. In his early teens at boarding-school he and his mates, with half sincerity, followed a classmate to compline, donned surplices, tossed censers, arranged altars in their studies, bought bits of painted glass for their windows and illuminated crucifixes with gold dust and vermilion. When he was confirmed, this was somewhat of an epoch. Preparation was like a plowshare, although it turned up nothing valuable, and stimulated esthetic and emotional ardor. In a dim way he felt God near, but he did not learn to fling the arms of the soul in faith around the cross of Christ. Later the revelation he found in Plato removed him farther from boyhood. He fell in love with gray Gothic churches, painted glass, organ lofts, etc.
Walter Pater has described phases of ferment, perhaps largely his own, in the character of Florian Deleal; his rapture of the red hawthorn blossoms, "absolutely the reddest of all things"; his times of "seemingly exclusive predominance of interest in beautiful physical things, a kind of tyranny of the senses"; and his later absorbing efforts to estimate the proportion of the sensuous and ideal, assigning most importance to sensible vehicles and occasions; associating all thoughts with touch and sight as a link between himself and things, till he became more and more "unable to care for or think of soul but as in an actual body"; comforted in the contemplation of death by the thought of flesh turning to violets and almost oppressed by the pressure of the sensible world, his longings for beauty intensifying his fear of death. He loved to gaze on dead faces in the Paris Morgue although the haunt of them made the sunshine sickly for days, and his long fancy that they had not really gone nor were quite motionless, but led a secret, half fugitive life, freer by night, and perhaps dodging about in their old haunts with no great good-will toward the living, made him by turns pity and hate the ghosts who came back in the wind, beating at the doors. His religious nature gradually yielded to a mystical belief in Bible personages in some indefinite place as the reflexes and patterns of our nobler self, whose companionship made the world more satisfying. There was "a constant substitution of the typical for the actual," and angels might be met anywhere. "A deep mysticity brooded over real things and partings," marriages and many acts and accidents of life. "The very colors of things became themselves weighty with meanings," or "full of penitence and peace." "For a time he walked through the world in a sustained, not unpleasurable awe generated by the habitual recognition, beside every circumstance and event of life, of its celestial correspondent."