Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene

by G. Stanley Hall

"First came the love of emotion and lurid romance reading. My mind was full of adventure, dreams of underground passages, and imprisoned beauties whom I rescued. I wrote a story in red ink, which I never read, but a girl friend did, and called it magnificent. The girl fever, too, made me idealize first one five years older than I, later another three years older, and still later one of my own age. I would have eaten dirt for each of them for a year or two; was extremely gallant and the hero of many romances for two, but all the time so bashful that I scarcely dared speak to one of them, and no schoolmate ever suspected it all. Music also became a craze at fourteen. Before, I had hated lessons, now I was thrilled and would be a musician, despite my parents' protests. I practised the piano furiously; wrote music and copied stacks of it; made a list of several hundred pieces and tunes, including everything musical I knew; would imagine a crowded hall, where I played and swayed with fine airs. The vast assembly applauded and would not let me go, but all the time it was a simple piece and I was a very ordinary player. At fifty years, this is still a relic. I now in hours of fatigue pound the piano and dreamily imagine dazed and enchanted audiences. Then came oratory, and I glowed and thrilled in declaiming Webster's "Reply to Hayne," "Thanatopsis," Byron's "Darkness," Patrick Henry, and best of all "The Maniac," which I spouted in a fervid way wearing a flaming red necktie. I remember a fervid scene with myself on a high solitary hill with a bald summit two miles from home, where I once went because I had been blamed. I tried to sum myself up, inventory my good and bad points. It was Sunday, and I was keyed up to a frenzy of resolve, prayer, idealization of life; all grew all in a jumble. My resolve to go to college was clinched then and there, and that hill will always remain my Pisgah and Moriah, Horeb and Sinai all in one. I paced back and forth in the wind and shouted, 'I will make people know and revere me; I will do something'; and called everything to witness my vow that I never again would visit this spot till all was fulfilled." "Alas!" he says, "I have never been there since. Once, to a summer party who went, I made excuse for not keeping this rendezvous. It was too sacramental. Certainly it was a very deep and never-to-be-forgotten experience there all alone, when something of great moment to me certainly took place in my soul."

In the biography of Frederick Douglas[45] we are told that when he was about thirteen he began to feel deeply the moral yoke of slavery and to seek means of escaping it. He became interested in religion, was converted, and dreamed of and prayed for liberty. With great ingenuity he extracted knowledge of the alphabet and reading from white boys of his acquaintance. At sixteen, under a brutal master he revolted and was beaten until he was faint from loss of blood, and at seventeen he fought and whipped the brutal overseer Covey, who would have invoked the law, which made death the punishment for such an offense, but for shame of having been worsted by a negro boy and from the reflection that there was no profit from a dead slave. Only at twenty did he escape into the new world of freedom.

Jacob Riis[46] "fell head over heels in love with sweet Elizabeth" when he was fifteen and she thirteen. His "courtship proceeded at a tumultuous pace, which first made the town laugh, then put it out of patience and made some staid matrons express the desire to box my ears soundly." She played among the lumber where he worked, and he watched her so intently that he scarred his shinbone with an adze he should have been minding. He cut off his forefinger with an ax when she was dancing on a beam near by, and once fell off a roof when craning his neck to see her go round a corner. At another time he ordered her father off the dance-floor, because he tried to take his daughter home a few minutes before the appointed hour of midnight. Young as he was, he was large and tried to run away to join the army, but finally went to Copenhagen to serve his apprenticeship with a builder, and here had an interview with Hans Christian Andersen.

Ellery Sedgwick tells as that at thirteen the mind of Thomas Paine ran on stories of the sea which his teacher had told him, and that he attempted to enlist on the privateer Terrible. He was restless at home for years, and shipped on a trading vessel at nineteen.

Indeed, modern literature in our tongue abounds in this element, from "Childe Harold" to the second and third long chapters in Mrs. Ward's "David Grieve," ending with his engagement to Lucy Purcell; Thackeray's Arthur Pendennis and his characteristic love of the far older and scheming Fanny Fotheringay; David in James Lane Allen's "Reign of Law," who read Darwin, was expelled from the Bible College and the church, and finally was engaged to Gabriella; and scores more might be enumerated. There is even Sonny,[47] who, rude as he was and poorly as he did in all his studies, at the same age when he began to keep company, "tallered" his hair, tied a bow of ribbon to the buggy whip, and grew interested in manners, passing things, putting on his coat and taking off his hat at table, began to study his menagerie of pet snakes, toads, lizards, wrote John Burroughs, helped him and got help in return, took to observing, and finally wrote a book about the forest and its occupants, all of which is very bien trouvé if not historic truth.

Two singular reflections always rearise in reading Goethe's autobiographical writings: first, that both the age and the place, with its ceremonies, festivals, great pomp and stirring events in close quarters in the little province where he lived, were especially adapted to educate children and absorb them in externals; and, second, that this wonderful boy had an extreme propensity for moralizing and drawing lessons of practical service from all about him. This is no less manifest in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Travels, which supplements the autobiography. Both together present a very unique type of adolescence, the elaborate story of which defies epitome. From the puppet craze well on into his precocious university life it was his passion to explore the widest ranges of experience and then to reflect, moralize, or poetize upon them. Perhaps no one ever studied the nascent stages of his own life and elaborated their every incident with such careful observation and analysis. His peculiar diathesis enabled him to conserve their freshness on to full maturity, when he gave them literary form. Most lack power to fully utilize their own experience even for practical self-knowledge and guidance, but with Goethe nothing was wasted from which self-culture could be extracted.

Goethe's first impression of female loveliness was of a girl named Gretchen, who served wine one evening, and whose face and form followed him for a long time. Their meetings always gave him a thrill of pleasure, and though his love was like many first loves, very spiritual and awakened by goodness and beauty, it gave a new brightness to the whole world, and to be near her seemed to him an indispensable condition of his being. Her fiancé was generally with her, and Goethe experienced a shock in finding that she had become a milliner's assistant for although, like all natural boys of aristocratic families, he loved common people, this interest was not favored by his parents. The night following the coronation day several were compelled to spend in chairs, and he and his Gretchen, with others, slept, she with her head upon his shoulder, until all the others had awakened in the morning. At last they parted at her door, and for the first and last time they kissed but never met again, although he often wept in thinking of her. He was terribly affronted to fully realize that, although only two years older than himself, she should have regarded him as a child. He tried to strip her of all loving qualities and think her odious, but her image hovered over him. The sanity of instinct innate in youth prompted him to lay aside as childish the foolish habit of weeping and railing, and his mortification that she regarded him somewhat as a nurse might, gradually helped to work his cure.

He was very fond of his own name, and, like young and uneducated people, wrote or carved it anywhere; later placed near it that of a new love, Annette, and afterward on finding the tree he shed tears, melted toward her, and made an idyl. He was also seized with a passion of teasing her and dominating over her devotedness with wanton and tyrannical caprice, venting upon her the ill humor of his disappointments, and grew absurdly jealous and lost her after she had borne with him with incredible patience and after terrible scenes with her by which he gained nothing. Frenzied by his loss, he began to abuse his physical nature and was only saved from illness by the healing power of his poetic talent; the "Lover's Caprice" was written with the impetus of a boiling passion. In the midst of many serious events, a reckless humor, which was due to the excess of life, developed which made him feel himself superior to the moment, and even to court danger. He played tricks, although rarely with premeditation. Later he mused much upon the transient nature of love and the mutability of character; the extent to which the senses could be indulged within the bounds of morality; he sought to rid himself of all that troubled him by writing song or epigram about it, which made him seem frivolous and prompted one friend to seek to subdue him by means of church forms, which he had severed on coming to Leipzig. By degrees he felt an epoch approaching when all respect for authority was to vanish, and he became suspicious and even despairing with regard to the best individuals he had known before and grew chummy with a young tutor whose jokes and fooleries were incessant. His disposition fluctuated between gaiety and melancholy, and Rousseau attracted him. Meanwhile his health declined until a long illness, which began with a hemorrhage, caused him to oscillate for days between life and death; and convalescence, generally so delightful, was marred by a serious tumor. His father's disposition was stern, and he could become passionate and bitter, and his mother's domesticity made her turn to religion, so that on coming home he formed the acquaintance of a religious circle. Again Goethe was told by a hostile child that he was not the true son of his father. This inoculated him with a disease that long lurked in his system and prompted various indirect investigations to get at the truth, during which he compared all distinguished guests with his own physiognomy to detect his own likeness.

Up to the Leipzig period he had great joy in wandering unknown, unconscious of self; but he soon began to torment himself with an almost hypertrophied fancy that he was attracting much attention, that others' eyes were turned on his person to fix it in their memories, that he was scanned and found fault with; and hence he developed a love of the country, of the woods and solitary places, where he could be hedged in and separated from all the world. Here he began to throw off his former habit of looking at things from the art standpoint and to take pleasure in natural objects for their own sake. His mother had almost grownup to consciousness in her two oldest children, and his first disappointment in love turned his thought all the more affectionately toward her and his sister, a year younger. He was long consumed with amazement over the newly awakening sense impulse that took intellectual forms and the mental needs that clothed themselves in sense images. He fell to building air castles of opposition lecture courses and gave himself up to many dreams of ideal university conditions. He first attended lectures diligently, but suffered much harm from being too advanced; learned a great deal that he could not regulate, and was thereby made uncomfortable; grew interested in the fit of his clothes, of which hitherto he had been careless. He was in despair at the uncertainty of his own taste and judgment, and almost feared he must make a complete change of mind, renouncing what he had hitherto learned, and so one day in great contempt for his past burned up his poetry, sketches, etc.

He had learned to value and love the Bible, and owed his moral culture to it. Its events and symbols were deeply stamped upon him, so without being a pietist he was greatly moved at the scoffing spirit toward it which he met at the university. From youth he had stood on good terms with God, and at times he had felt that he had some things to forgive God for not having given better assistance to his infinite good-will. Under all this influence he turned to cabalism and became interested in crystals and the microcosm and macrocosm, and fell into the habit of despair over what he had been and believed just before. He conceived a kind of hermetical or neoplatonic godhead creating in more and more eccentric circles, until the last, which rose in contradiction, was Lucifer to whom creation was committed. He first of all imagined in detail an angelic host, and finally a whole theology was wrought out in petto. He used a gilt ornamented music-stand as a kind of altar with fumigating pastils for incense, where each morning God was approached by offerings until one day a conflagration put a sudden end to these celebrations.